Assuming that only 12% of campus sexual assaults at OSU are reported.
Assuming that 1 in 5 women at OSU are assaulted over 4 years.
In May, I wrote a CD post titled “Using White House claim of under-reporting, only 1 in 34 women at Ohio State are sexually assaulted, not 1 in 5.” The analysis in that post was used by syndicated columnist George Will in an op-ed (“Colleges become the victims of progressivism“) that appeared in several hundred papers around the country, including the Washington Post on June 6. Here’s George Will’s reference to my May 9 blog post:
The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent — too high but nowhere near 20 percent.
George Will’s column generated a lot of controversy, especially from women’s rights activist groups and a group of US senators, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of the largest newspapers in the Midwest, dropped Will’s syndicated column following the outburst of criticism. None of the other approximately 449 papers nationwide that subscribe to Will’s bi-weekly columns announced that they were dropping him. Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt defended George Will and his column, saying it “was well within the bounds of legitimate debate.”
My original post and George Will’s column were both based on OSU’s campus crime data from 2009-2012. Now that Ohio State University has just released its Annual Campus Security Report for 2014, updated data for the years 2010-2013 are displayed in the top table above. From my previous post in May:
In a January 2014 report titled “Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action” (which led to the creation of the “Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault” headed by Biden), the White House made the following two statements:
White House Statement 1. Sexual assault is a particular problem on college campuses:1 in 5 women has been sexually assaulted while in college.
White House Statement 2. Reporting rates for campus sexual assault are also very low: on average only 12% of student victims report the assault to law enforcement.
There’s a huge, irreconcilable statistical problem here. Using actual reported crime statistics on sexual offenses at almost any US college and applying the White House claim that only 12% of campus sexual assaults actually get reported, we have to conclude that nowhere near 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted while in college. Alternatively, if the “1 in 5 women” claim is true, the percentage of sexual assaults that get reported to the campus police would have to be much, much lower than 12%. In other words, the claims that the White House uses don’t work together and they therefore both can’t be simultaneously correct.
Here’s an updated analysis of sexual assaults at the Ohio State University, summarized in the top table above. Over the most recent four-year period from 2010 to 2013, there were 104 reports of “forcible sexual offenses” to the OSU’s Department of Public Safety, which included incidents that allegedly took place on campus, in university residence halls, on non-campus properties including fraternity and sorority houses, and on public property adjacent to or accessible from the campus. Using the White House claim that only 12% of campus sexual assaults get reported, there would have been 763 unreported forcible sexual offenses at OSU during that period, bringing the total number of sexual assaults (reported + unreported) to 867 (see top table above).
The Columbus campus of OSU has a total female student population of about 28,000. Dividing the 867 estimated sexual assaults over a four-year period into the 28,000 OSU female students would mean that only 3.1% of OSU women, or about 1 in 32.3, would be sexually assaulted while in college. Certainly that’s still too high, but not even close to the White House claim that one in five (and 20% of) female students are sexually assaulted while in college.
Further, these calculations make the assumptions that: a) 100% of the 104 forcible sexual offenses at OSU from 2009-2012 were male on female incidents (and none were female on male, male on male, or female on female), b) none of the 104 reported offenses were filed falsely or later retracted (see recent example here of a campus sexual assault that was falsely reported and later retracted), c) all of the 104 reported cases involved OSU students and none were reported by OSU faculty or staff. If any of those three assumptions don’t hold perfectly, the 3.1% figure above would be even lower, and the 1-in-32.3 ratio would be even greater.
Alternatively, we could ask the question: For the “1 in 5 women” claim to be true at OSU, what level of under-reporting would support that claim based on the actual reported assaults over the last four years? If one of every five of OSU’s 28,000 female students had been sexually assaulted from 2010 to 2013, there would have been 5,600 sexual assaults during those four years – or 1,400 sexual assaults every year and almost 4 every single day of the year. For that to be true, fewer than 2% of the actual sexual assaults would have been reported, and more than 98% would have to go unreported.
Bottom Line: From a political standpoint, using the totally implausible statistic that “1 in 5 women” are sexually assaulted while in college certainly gets a lot of attention. The “1 in 32 women” statistic found at Ohio State University over the most recent four years, though not as attention-grabbing as “1 in 5,” are probably pretty representative of college campuses around the country and much closer to the truth than what the White House is claiming. And for the “1 in 5 women” claim to be true, it would imply an unbelievably low reporting rate of less than 2% for campus sexual assaults. That would be almost 53 actual sexual offenses that take place on campus for every one that gets reported), which is an under-reporting rate so low that it must be insulting to women. Women and men attending college today, their parents, their college administrators and professors, and society in general, are all much better served by the truth about college sexual assault than by Team Obama’s misleading, exaggerated, and false claims about “1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted while in college.”