2015-02-08

The Misleading '1 In 5' Rape Meme

President Obama and Vice-President often repeat the '1 in 5' women are raped on campuses in North America. The President even repeated it addressing the crowd at the Grammy's via video.

Alas, as we've seen with gun control and how murder statistics are actually on the decline, the same scenario is at work with rape.

At this point, it's probably best to ignore politicians whenever they use stats to push-pimp an agenda.

As the FBI reported in 2013, violent crime has steadily been decreasing.

And what of rape?

"...The most recent study, conducted by U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, represents a longitudinal study of US women from 1995 to 2013. For the year 2013, the study found that college aged women (regardless of enrollment status) were more likely to be sexually assaulted at 4.3 per 1,000 (0.4%) and than other women at 1.4 per 1,000 (0.1%). The study also found that the rate of sexual assault has been falling steadily since 1995, from a peak of 0.9% in 1997 to the current 0.4%. Rape, a subset of all sexual assault, had an incidence of 3.1 per 1,000 female students (0.3%) in 2013."


A similar trend has taken place in Canada (where rape incidences have been higher than in the USA) according to Statistics Canada (we don't have an FBI or CIA fact book). You can view the tables here.


The Washington Post chimed in with its own investigation:

"...Notice that the percentage of sexual assaults –13.7 percent—was lower than the one-in-five figure cited by administration officials. (It is more like one in seven.) That’s because the president and vice president used careful phrasing that covered a student’s entire time in college. The overall survey interviewed students that included freshmen, sophomores and juniors.

On its Web site, the National Institute of Justice notes that rapes and other forms of sexual assault are among the most underreported crimes, but that “researchers have been unable to determine the precise incidence of sexual assault on American campuses because the incidence found depends on how the questions are worded and the context of the survey.” 

"...In December, 2014, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released a study titled “Rape and Sexual Assault Victimization Among College-Age Females, 1995–2013,” which suggested much lower levels of sexual assault than indicated in the Campus Assault Study. But questions have been raised whether the survey used for the report, the  National Crime Victimization Survey, offers an adequate measure of the incidence of rape; a National Research Council report released in 2014 offered recommendations on how to improve it...." (as noted above).


'...Still, the report did indicate interesting trends over time, including the fact that sexual assault on campus had been declining in recent years–and that the incidence of sexual assault was higher for women who were not in college. The report also offered a useful guide to the differences between various studies of sexual assault on campus, including this caveat about using the Campus Sexual Assault Study:  “Because of the limited population included in the CSA, it should not be assumed that findings from the survey are representative of the population of persons ages 18 to 24 or even to college students specifically.”

"...But the BJS warning about the use of CSA data demonstrates the president and the vice president went too far in suggesting the “one in five” statistic applied to all college students. Instead, this oft-cited statistic comes from a Web-based survey of two large universities, making it misleading to suggest that it is representative of the experience of all college women."
Then again, we knew this, right?

Right?

Just repeat the same exercise whenever they make claims on the economy.

Especially the economy where numbers can easily be bent to fit an agenda or narrative.


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