Lock your windows! Lock your
doors! You don’t dare go to class alone!
After reading the material published
by Women’s Resources & Services, it’s amazing women would
feel comfortable even venturing out. In Sexual Assault on Campus WRS claims
that “1 in 6 college women is the victim of rape or attempted rape
every year.” In another brochure, Helping someone who’s been
sexually assaulted, WRS claims “… one out of 4 college women has
been the victim of a rape or attempted rape …”
Those figures are incredibly
high. If true, then about 2,500 women currently attending Western Michigan
University have been the victim of rape or attempted rape, and this year
more than 1,650 female students will be victims of rape or attempted rape.
There are only two conclusions
to be made for such enormously high figures. Either rape is endemic —
at that rate, rape would probably rival theft as the number one crime
on campus — or there’s something fishy about the numbers. Scratch
the surface of the study WRS cites and you find entire schools of fish
swimming about.
The source for the 1 in 4
and the 1 in 6 claims is a study by Mary Koss, et al, of rape prevalence
among college students. Koss achieves her high numbers by a employing
a bizarre methodology.
An obvious way to find out
what the prevalence of rape is would be to simply ask a representative
sample of women if they’ve ever been raped and from there find a
statistical range of rape prevalence. The National Crime Victimization
Survey, for example, annually interviews close to 100,000 individuals
in 49,000 households and asks women directly about rape and sexual assault.
The latest available data indicate the rape/attempted, rape/sexual assault
rate is 2 per 1,000 people over 12.
Koss’ method instead
relies on asking specific questions of women about past behaviors and
then deducing from that whether a woman was raped. So Koss asked college
women questions like, “Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t
want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?” Women who answered
yes to that particular question were considered to be victims of sexual
assault.
Here’s the problem —
when asked directly if they had been victims of rape or attempted rape,
73% of the women Koss counted as rape and attempted rape victims told
her they had not been raped.
In an age where groups like
WRS repeat “believe the women” like a mantra (even though unfounded
claims of rape are filed more often than for any other crime according
to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports), Koss simply ignored those statements
and coined the term “unacknowledged victim” to characterize
women who she thinks were raped but were apparently too dumb to realize
it. The reader can imagine the outcry if a similar study done by a male
researcher counted women who said they had been raped as never having
been raped based on answer to behavioral questions and contended they
merely refused to acknowledge they had never been raped.
Compounding the methodology
is the fact that Koss’ questions were highly ambiguous. Forty-four
percent of Koss’ rape/attempted rape victims, for example, were classified
that way because they answered yes to the question above about alcohol
and drugs. The only problem is that since nowhere does the question mention
consent the question is ambiguous.
Given the easy access to both
drugs and alcohol on campus, it is hardly surprising that significant
numbers of women have had sex with men who provided them with alcohol
and/or drugs prior to intercourse. After trying to maintain that an affirmative
answer to the drug/alcohol question met the legal definition of rape in
some states (it doesn’t), even Koss now admits the question was poorly
worded and ambiguous. That news has apparently yet to reach WRS.
Once the women who answered
yes to the ambiguous questions along with those who said they had never
been victims of rape or attempted rape, the numbers change dramatically.
The attempted rape/rape rate falls closer to 1 in 20; still a significant
number of young women, but nothing as endemic as the 1 in 4 and 1 in 6
figures lead one to believe.
But what does it matter? Does
it make a difference if the risk of being raped is 1 in 100 or 1 in 10
or 1 in 4 or 1 in 2?
Yes it does, because the reason
the Koss statistics are used is they serve political purposes that have
nothing to do with educating women about rape.
Linda Lumley, WRS director,
told an audience at last winter’s Take Back the Night march she believes
we live in a “rape culture.” The rape culture hypothesis claims
that rape is not aberrant criminal behavior but in fact is merely an extreme
expression of a general hatred and contempt for women in society.
According to this view rape
is a byproduct of cultural values such as the persistence of sexist jokes
(Lumley specifically mentioned “dumb blond” jokes), a tendency
to view sex as a competition (“scoring”), and even otherwise
non-intimidating behaviors are suspect. Even getting someone to “cooperate
due to pressure” is rape — the man or woman who persuades an otherwise
reluctant lover to engage in sex is recast as a rapist (I confess, by
this criteria I’m a rapist — someone turn me in before I do it again).
Oddly, Lumley even complained
that “1 out of every 8 movies depicts a violent rape,” but this
is a result not of insensitivity toward women, but of Hollywood’s
blind acceptance of the sort of numbers advanced by Koss and WRS. If rape
is really as endemic as Lumley, Koss and others claim movies probably
don’t depict enough rapes to accurately portray women’s experiences.
But the essential flaw in the
rape culture theory was inadvertently provided by Lumley who noted that
rape rates in the U.S. are far higher than say in Japan (or Greece or
any number of countries). Yet Japan is far more “patriarchal”
than the United States and women there tend to have far less opportunities.
In fact some of the places in the world most inimical to women have some
of the lowest levels of rape prevalence in the world.
Rather than give women accurate
information about rape, the Women’s Resource Center prefers to play
political games and in the process unnecessarily frighten women about
the risks of being raped.