May 30, 2003
RALEIGH — A news article in The Daily Tar Heel April 24 contained a shocking lead: “A woman is raped every two minutes. Almost one in every four women between the ages of 18 and 24 is a survivor of sexual assault.”
No sources for this information are given — which is mildly surprising since it is published in the campus newspaper for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a UNC flagship university with a well-known school of journalism. It is not, however, unusual for any campus discussion of that particular subject. Here are a few examples just from the current academic year:
• “There are probably 200 to 250 undergraduate men on this campus who are rapists (one out of 15), based on a 15-year old survey. Fifteen percent of undergraduate men say they would commit rape if there was no chance of punishment.” Jillian Johnson, “Stop Rape at Duke,” Duke University Chronicle, Feb. 27, 2003
• “1 in 4 college women,” sign seen at UNC-Chapel Hill protest of violence against women, as reported in the DTH, Nov. 5, 2002
• “Anytime a woman is drunk and has sex, she has then been raped.” Andrew A. Farr, N.C. State Technician, Sept. 24, 2002
• “Every three hours and 52 minutes, a rape is committed in North Carolina. Most of the victims are women. One in four college women report surviving rape.” Dana Henderson, Technician, Sept. 10, 2002
• “I am 100 percent sure that at least one rape has occurred on campus since school has started ... anywhere from one in three to one in eight women will be assaulted in her lifetime.” Bryan Proffit, Technician, Aug. 27, 2002 (one week after school started)
What is going on? Are our universities undergoing an epidemic of curiously unreported rape? Or is something else at work? As Katie Rophie wrote in the New York Times Magazine of June 13, 1993, in response to the one-in-four statistic: “If 25 percent of my women friends were really being raped, wouldn’t I know it?”
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Politics intrude
The problem of the faulty statistics owes to “the intrusion of politics into the field of inquiry,” Sommers said. “There are many researchers who study rape victimization, but their relatively low figures generate no headlines.” Among them: a 1993 Louis Harris and Associates telephone poll that found only 2 percent of women were victims of rape or sexual assault; Professor Mary Gordon of the University of Washington’s 1981 study that found only one in 50 women raped; and Duke researcher Dr. Linda George, who found, using “questions very close to Kilpatrick’s” one in 17.
Another problem Sommers cites is “the morally indefensible way that public funds for combating rape are being allocated.” Specifically, “college women are getting the lion’s share of public resources for combating rape” despite studies (which she cites) showing that rape rates are far higher in poor areas than wealthy areas and far lower for women on a college or university campus than for women off campus.
