The College Fix

Back on July 28, The College Fix’s Stephen Edwards reported on Mark J. Perry’s dissection of the “1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted while at college” statistic.

Now that Ohio State University has released its Annual Campus Security Report for 2014, Dr. Perry has updated his analysis.

From Dr. Perry’s blog Carpe Diem:

Here’s an updated analysis of sexual assaults at the Ohio State University, summarized in the top table above. Over the most recent four-year period from 2010 to 2013, there were 104 reports of “forcible sexual offenses” to the OSU’s Department of Public Safety, which included incidents that allegedly took place on campus, in university residence halls, on non-campus properties including fraternity and sorority houses, and on public property adjacent to or accessible from the campus. Using the White House claim that only 12% of campus sexual assaults get reported, there would have been 763 unreported forcible sexual offenses at OSU during that period, bringing the total number of sexual assaults (reported + unreported) to 867 …

The Columbus campus of OSU has a total female student population of about 28,000. Dividing the 867 estimated sexual assaults over a four-year period into the 28,000 OSU female students would mean that only 3.1% of OSU women, or about 1 in 32.3, would be sexually assaulted while in college. Certainly that’s still too high, but not even close to the White House claim that one in five (and 20% of) female students are sexually assaulted while in college.

Perry concludes that the “1 in 5” claim is merely a political construct, and that for the claim to be true, it requires a ridiculously implausible sexual assault reporting rate of less than two percent.

Does anyone believe that for every “53 actual sexual offenses” only one gets reported?

That, Perry says, “is an under-reporting rate so low that it must be insulting to women.”

Read the full article.

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