In the UNC-Greensboro Carolinian today:
“Every two minutes…in this nation a person is sexually assaulted,” said Jason Robertson, Wellness Coordinator for UNCG’s Wellness Center and a co-sponsor in UNCG’s Sexual Assault Awareness Week.
“So think about that – every 30 minutes that’s 15 people, every hour that’s 30 people. That really brings it home for a lot of people.”
Three years ago I wrote about these statistics and explained the severe methodological flaw behind them that serves to inflate them beyond all believability (honestly ? 30 people per hour being sexually assaulted? That would be a readily observable national epidemic!):
The … statistic[s] hai[l] from a 1985 Ms. magazine report by Mary Koss. Koss interviewed about three thousand randomly selected college women about sexual violation. … Koss considered a woman a victim of sexual assault if she answered “yes” to (and 53.7 “victims” did) “Have you ever given in to sex play (fondling, kissing, or petting, but not intercourse) when you didn’t want to because you were overwhelmed by a man’s continual arguments and pressure?”
Here the researcher plays the game of inflating a social ill by over-defining it ? e.g., the general conception of “sexual assault” doesn’t include an unwanted kiss. The general conception of “sexual assault” is something almost as serious as rape, the way bronchitis is almost as serious as pneumonia. (To stick with that analogy, Koss et al. essentially would consider anyone who’s ever had a cough to have been a “victim of bronchitis.”)
Go here for my not-comprehensive-but-still-discouragingly-long list of recent appearances of the rape-scare stats on N.C. campuses.
