HYPE
The media have been claiming that 1 in 5 women are raped as college freshmen or sophomores. The number comes from a 2007 small-scale study done by the National Institute of Justice, a division of the Justice Department. The study was based on an online questionnaire at two schools. The questions asked about things like if they’d been subjected to “forced kissing.” If the answer was, “Yes,” the researchers – not the women themselves – qualified that as a sexual assault.
The real number appears to be 1 in a 1000. The authors of a bigger and more careful study also from the Justice Department told Slate:
‘We don’t think one in five is a nationally representative statistic.’” It couldn’t be, he said, because his team sampled only two schools. “‘In no way does that make our results nationally representative,’” .
The newly released report by the Department of Justice over a much longer time period,1995-2013 shows a downward trend of rape on college campuses since 1997. The study also found that female college students fare better then their non collegiate peers. “The rate of rape and sexual assault was 1.2 times higher for nonstudents than for students,” according to the study.