As I said last week, the United States is not a rape culture; but it is a gender
propaganda culture. We are overwhelmed by false information about men and women, and
nowhere is this more true than in the area of sexual violence. So let’s do some fact
checking. That’s next on the Factual Feminist.
We often hear that “female students are at greater risk of rape than their non-college
peers." But this is just not true. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, females
enrolled in college experience lower rates of rape and sexual assault than their non-college
piers. Senator Gillibrand, and others who repeat this canard, they have to stop.
“If you are a young woman who attends college today, you are more likely to be sexually
assaulted than those who don’t.”
Now where does the claim come from? The original source appears to be a 2000 study by Bonnie
Fischer and her associates. Well a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education recently
contacted Fisher to ask what data she used to justify her claim that female college students
are most at risk. Well according to the reporter, Fisher could not answer. She was confused.
Later, she responded: "That was probably the current state of knowledge or belief at that
time, given the research available.” But the data were no different in 2000, and they
were available. In a recent New York Times op-ed, University of Colorado Denver researcher
Callie Marie Rennison pointed out that our fixation on relatively privileged college
women has distracted us from the far greater vulnerability of poor and less educated women.
Rennison found, for example, that “Women without a high school diploma are sexually
victimized at a rate 53 percent greater than women with a high school diploma or some college.”
Poor women are at greater risk but they have been lost in the current panic over sexual
assault at places like Yale, or Swarthmore, or the University of Wisconsin.
Let’s consider another damaging myth. Almost every college employee who receives training
about campus rapes will learn that campus rapes are committed by 6 percent of males
on campus. And these men tend to be ruthless and incorrigible repeat offenders. This is
known as the predator theory of college assault and it’s is taken very seriously by university
officials, and they use it to justify cutting back on due process and expelling anyone implicated
in a campus date rape. Now this is understandable: deans and college presidents don’t want
to keep sociopaths around. Now the theory was developed by a researcher, David Lisak,
retired from the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 2002 he and a colleague published
a study on campus sex offenders, and for the study they analyzed questionnaires distributed
to male passersby in a busy pedestrian area at UMass-Boston. According to Lisak, of the
nearly nineteen hundred men who returned the survey, one hundred and twenty respondents
- about 1 in 16 - admitted to committing acts that met the legal definition of rape or attempted
rape. And more than half of this group admitted to raping more than once and they also confessed
to a range of other heinous violent crimes. Well in her excellent critique of Lisak’s
study, Slate’s Emily Yoffe points out that the participants were hardly typical. I mean
most college students are age 18-24. Lisak’s subjects were 18-71. Now UMass Boston is an
urban commuter school with no campus housing and a four-year graduation rate of 15 percent.
I taught there in the early 1980s. Things may be different today, but at that time most
of my students were adults with full-time jobs and more than a few had been in jail.
Now Lisak admitted to Yoffe that his study probably needed to be replicated on a more
traditional campus, and I would say that because the sample was self-selected, it’s not even
clear it gives a good picture of UMass Boston. Now researchers like Bonnie Fisher and David
Lisak paint a false picture of campus life. Non-college women and college men are paying
the price. The non-college women are at far greater risk, but they are neglected. As for
men, Lisak’s research has made it easy to demonize every 19- and 20-year old who’s
caught up in a campus accusation, and they want to see him as a ruthless serial rapist.
Well what do you think? What can we do about this avalanche of misinformation? And are
there any other studies or facts you’ve heard that I should examine? Well let us know
what you think. Tell me on Twitter or in the comments section here on YouTube. Please subscribe
to the series if you find these videos valuable. Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook—that’s
very helpful. Thank you for watching the Factual Feminist.