Monday, September 28, 2015

Is The Latest Big Sexual Assault Survey More Hype Than Science?

Stuart Taylor at the Washington Post.
This is pretty damning:
Then, to resolve any doubt that the respondents were far from representative of the nation’s college students, consider the facts buried in Tables 3-2 and 6-1 of the AAU survey.
These tables indicate that about 2.2 percent of female respondents said they had reported to their schools that they had been penetrated without consent (including rape) since entering college. If extrapolated to the roughly 10 million female college student population nationwide, this would come to about 220,000 student reports to universities alleging forced sex over (to be conservative) five years, or about 44,000 reports per year. But this would be almost nine times the total number of students (just over 5,000) who reported sexual assaults of any kind to their universities in 2013, the most recent data available, according to the reports that universities must submit to the federal government under the Clery Act.
[Feminist Philosophers, of course, is not happy with Taylor's piece, though I don't see that the criticisms are very good. Quibbling about Clery Act reporting is not going to explain away the problem described above.]

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