No matter how many times the claim that an exorbitant number of college women will be sexually assaulted during their time as an undergraduate is debunked, it still gets presented as if it were a fact of life.
The most recent example comes from USA Today, which is attempting to explain the issue of campus sexual assault in a series of videos, but right off the bat, the media outlet is making a bad faith argument. In a tweet sent Monday night, USA Today teased the series by comparing rates of breast cancer to false and misleading statistics about campus sexual assault.
The woman presented in the tweet, Xavier University Title IX officer Kate Lawson, doesn’t discuss these numbers in the audio clip provided, but she does bring up the so-misleading-it-should-be-called-fake statistic in the first part of the series.
“About 1-in-4 to 1-in-5 women will experience rape or attempted rape during college,” Lawson says. This is flat out false. Even the studies where she gets the scary “1-in-4” or “1-in-5” numbers don’t say this. In those incredibly misleading studies, the high numbers are achieved by claiming that many women will be sexually assaulted (which includes rape but does not necessarily mean rape) or experience attempted sexual assault (which, again, includes attempted rape but does not mean attempted rape).
In order to get those high numbers, the studies include activities that do not fit the legal definition of rape, like “unwanted” sexual activities. “Unwanted” is a broad category open to subjectivity, as I reported earlier today. A person cannot know if something is unwanted until they try it (under this definition, if the initial ask is from someone a person isn’t interested in, the question itself could be considered unwanted). Including such a broad definition of sexual assault not only pumps up the numbers, but convinces non-victims that they have experienced something terrible when they haven’t.
Yet here is an Xavier administrator vastly inflating the issue. It seems to be a theme at that university, as the school’s president, Father Michael Graham, stated that campus sexual assault is “an epidemic” that is “pervasive” and “in the culture,” as if it is a fact. All notions of this alleged epidemic come from those unreliable and faulty statistics.
Xavier University should be more aware of this issue considering they’ve been sued at least once by an accused student, resulting in a settlement after a judge denied the school’s motion to dismiss.
Statements like this from administrators will likely be used against the school if another accused student believes he or she is railroaded by a school that believes the myth of a sexual assault “epidemic.”