Whether rape happens on U.S. college campuses at
rates similar to elsewhere in America or to rates in Tanzania and
South Africa has been a major subject of dispute recently. Folks
from President Obama to
swearing 5-year-olds princesses have been citing a statistic
that 20 percent of women on college campuses, or one in five, will
be sexually assaulted while there—a stat that has also
been routinely debunked. However, a new sexual assault
survey from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT)—one of the first schools to release broad data on campus sex
crimes—seems to corroborate everyone’s favorite sketchy
stat.
Or does it? Media are reporting that
one in six female undergraduates at MIT have been
sexually assaulted (with this translating in some headlines and
social media shares to “one in six have been raped“). But
the MIT survey suffers from the same issues that plague previous
studies on campus sexual assault.
First, the survey’s methodology: In April, MIT emailed its
sexual assault survey to all 10,831 undergraduates and graduate
students. Students could then opt to take the survey or not.
Ultimately, 35 percent of MIT students did. But whenever you have
an opt-in survey, those who self-select to take it are not
necessarily representative of a given population. Or, as MIT
researchers put it, “response bias is expected in virtually any
voluntary survey, particularly one focused on a narrow topic. …
the rates based on those who responded to the survey cannot be
extrapolated to the MIT student population as a whole.”
It’s also worth noting that the definition of sexual assault—in
both the MIT survey and previous campus sexual assault studies—is a
broad one, including forced sexual penetration, forced oral sex,
and unwanted “sexual touching” or kissing. Of course there are all
sorts of levels of sexual assault, and just because something
doesn’t approach the level of forced intercourse (i.e., rape)
doesn’t mean it’s not a serious violation. But let’s be clear that
MIT’s “1 in 6” stat is decidely not about the
number of students who are rape victims, nor is the much
bandied-about “1 in 5” college women stat.
So!, now that we’ve cleared up what the MIT study did not find,
let’s look at
what it did, starting with intriguing student
attitudes toward sexual assault. Contra the affirmative
consent crowd, it doesn’t seem that a lack of respect or enthusiasm
for obtaining sexual content is a big problem: 98 percent of
females and 96 percent of males agreed or strongly agreed that it’s
important to get consent before sexual activity.
But students are confused about how alcohol
and intoxication affect consent, which perhaps speaks to increasing
progressive activism around the idea that drunk people can’t give
consent. Only about three-quarters of respondents said they feel
confident in their own ability to judge whether someone is too
intoxicated to consent to sex. And more than half agreed that “rape
and sexual assault can happen unintentionally, especially if
alcohol is involved.”
I just want to repeat that one more time: Half of
MIT students think it’s possible to “accidently” rape
someone. When you consider undergraduates
alone, this rises to 67 percent.
This is what we get when people push an idea that rape is really
often a matter of consent confusion or a drunken misunderstanding
and not something that one person (the rapist) intentionally does
to another. This is exactly what those of us opposed
to affirmative consent standards mean when we worry about it
muddying the waters of consent and confusing
the definition of rape. About a fifth of female undergraduates
and a quarter of male undergraduates surveyed agreed that “when
someone is raped or sexually assaulted, it’s often because the way
they said ‘no’ was unclear or there was some
miscommunication.”
When it comes to experiences of sexual assault since starting at
MIT:
- 1 in 20 female undergraduates, 1 in 100 female graduate
students, and zero male students reported being the victim of
forced sexual penetration - 3 percent of female undergraduates, 1 percent of male
undergraduates, and 1 percent of female grad students reported
being forced to perform oral sex - 15 percent of female undergraduates, 4 percent of male
undergraduates, 4 percent of female graduate students, and 1
percent of male graduate students reported having experienced
“unwanted sexual touching or kissing”
All of these experiences are lumped together under the school’s
definition of sexual assault.
When students were asked to define their own experiences, 10
percent of female undergraduates, 2 percent of male undergraduates,
three percent of female graduate students, and 1 percent of male
graduate students said they had been sexually assaulted since
coming to MIT. One percent of female graduate students, one percent
of male undergraduates, and 5 percent of female undergraduates said
they had been raped.
For undergraduates, most of these “unwanted sexual experiences”
(the umbrella term MIT uses) occured while on campus, while
graduate students were more likely to report incidents that took
place away from MIT. A little under three-quarters (72 percent) of
respondents said the perpetrator was a fellow MIT student. For
women, all but 2 percent of perpetrators were males; for male
victims, 35 percent of the perpetrators had been male and 67
percent had been female.
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