Adherents of Junk Campus Rape Science Are Retaliating Against Critics: New at Reason

What happened when new research undercut the prevailing justification for the public panic about serial rapists on college campuses? Psychologists deeply invested in their discredited theory launched a crusade of retaliation against the people who proved them wrong.

“There’s been a scientific misconduct case filed against us,” Mary Koss, a professor of public health at the University of Arizona and a critic of the serial predator assumption, told Reason. “It’s frustrating.”

Last year, a team of social scientists including Koss, Georgia State University’s Kevin Swartout, and four other researchers made a startling discovery about the assumption that most campus rapists are serial perpetrators. The ubiquitous theory—constantly cited by activists, policymakers, and even the Obama White House—was false. New data just didn’t support it.

“If colleges and policymakers continue to focus on a serial rapist conceptualization, they are going to miss more than three-quarters of the rapes that happen on campus,” Koss told Reason.

Koss might have expected the originators of the serial predator theory—Dr. David Lisak and his cohorts—to accept the new research and adjust accordingly. After all, that’s how scientific progress works. Old assumptions are constantly tested against new data, and abandoned when they prove faulty.

But it’s not what happened.

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