LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND STATISTICS ON RAPE
or, how many ones in how many
fours?
There's a long -- by which I mean loooooooong --
and fascinating and more than occasionally infuriating -- at least if you happen
to value things like truth and fact and reason -- article over at the City
Journal website about the often-Orwellian absurdities of The Campus Rape Myth/Industry/Obsession.
Contributing editor Heather McDonald crafts a far-ranging and effective
piece that picks up where Christina Hoff Sommers left off about a
decade ago and updates both the contradictions and the condemnations of what she
likes to call the campus rape industry, a none-too-loose affiliation of
advocacy and bureaucracy that is as hostile toward men as it is toward
truth.
The early sections of the piece take renewed aim at the oft-repeated, long-discredited claim that one-in-four women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. (In case you missed the discrediting -- and Lord knows many people did -- here's the short version: ambiguous surveys, unscientific methodologies, deeply massaged numbers, and the inconvenient truths that 73% of the women Mary Koss identified as victims of rape didn't think they'd been raped, and that 42% of them had sex with their alleged rapists at least once more after the "assault.") Nara Schoenberg and Sam Roe of the Toledo Blade got there first, and Dr. Hoff Sommers and Berkeley professor Neil Gilbert got there best, but Ms. McDonald sums it up nicely:
If the one-in-four statistic is correct -- it is sometimes modified to “one-in-five to one-in-four" -- campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants—a rate of 2.4 percent. The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience.
But, of course, they don't.
And yet that doesn't stop the claim, nor the one-in-four figure, from being repeated -- even, as you will soon see, in wildly contradictory ways -- over and over and over again, as if it were the indisputable, gospel truth. As if it were handed down from a righteous and angry (female) God whose only commandment, short of Thou shalt fear all men, were to Go forth and multiply both the use and abuse of it.
Before I cite a few examples of my own, here's McDonald again:
None of the obvious weaknesses in the research has had the slightest drag on the campus rape movement, because the movement is political, not empirical... You don’t need evidence for the rape culture; you simply know that it exists. But if you do need evidence, the underreporting of rape is the best proof there is...
...Federal law requires colleges to publish reported crimes affecting their students. The numbers of reported sexual assaults -- the law does not require their confirmation -- usually run under half a dozen a year on private campuses and maybe two to three times that at large public universities. You might think that having so few reports of sexual assault a year would be a point of pride; in fact, it’s a source of gall for students and administrators alike. Yale’s associate general counsel and vice president were clearly on the defensive when asked by the Yale alumni magazine in 2004 about Harvard’s higher numbers of reported assaults; the reporter might as well have been needling them about a Harvard-Yale football rout. “Harvard must have double-counted or included incidents not required by federal law,” groused the officials. The University of Virginia does not publish the number of its sexual-assault hearings because it is so low. “We’re reticent to publicize it when we have such a small ‘n’ number,” says Nicole Eramu, Virginia’s associate dean of students.
Just let the last sentence sink in for a moment. University of Virginia administrators are reticent to publish their extremely low number of sexual assault cases. They are, in essence, afraid to note how safe, how relatively free from sexual assault, their campus really is. Even though colleges and universities across the country do everything they can to bury their crime reports and minimize their crime statistics. Even though these schools want to seem, to prospective students and especially to the parents of current and prospective students, like tremendously safe and happy and crime-free places, UVA's associate dean of students practically apologizes for her campus' low number of sexual assaults. Meanwhile, Yale officials are pissy, and sound almost envious, because Harvard reports more sexual assaults than they do.
Try to imagine, if you will, a mayor reluctant to report his city's incredibly low crime rate. Imagine President Bush upset because he couldn't report more American casualties in Iraq this year. Imagine a mother and father -- in loco parentis, right? -- angry that more of their daughters had not been raped. Imagine... oh, forget it.
Anyone have a headache yet? Anyone not sure whether we're at war with Eurasia or Eastasia? Everyone see what I mean?
I once had a discussion, which turned into a debate, which turned into an argument, on this very subject with an especially passionate -- which is to say, well-intentioned but obviously ill-informed -- undergrad who'd been trained as a sexual assault advisor at Carnegie Mellon. I used the one-in-four figure in class as an example of the shocking statistical grabber: something that makes you sit up and take notice and want to hear more from a presenter. Then I noted that it was, in fact, a bogus statistic that also demonstrated the tremendous powers of rhetorical craft and simple repetition: something that, said over and over and over again, becomes commonplace enough to be accepted as truth even though it is not. The young man, who did nothing but repeat the one-in-four statistic over and over and over again -- without, of course, ever seeing the irony of his performance nor the proof of my point -- refused to accept the studies I quoted or the sources I cited (including, of course, all the names I note above: Schoenberg, Roe, Sommers, and Gilbert). He merely got angrier and angrier until I asked him, "What are you so angry about? Shouldn't you be happy that there are far fewer sexual assaults than you think? Isn't that what you want? Isn't that what we all want? It's almost as if you wish there were more sexual assaults."
He had no idea how to respond to that. And in the several times I've had occasion to ask those same questions of other one-in-four-ites, I've never met anyone who did.
And yet that number -- that damned, damnable, utterly unsubstantiated number -- keeps making the rounds, cropping up here, there, and everywhere, now so ubiquitous that it's even creeping into other, inherently contradictory statistics. One-in-four has become a virus, some X-Files-style black oil that oozes from report to pamphlet to news article, from workshop to seminar to rally, from story to story to story, until it lives and breathes and reproduces on it own, leaving a trail of cold, dead reason in its ever-diseased and disgusting wake.
Think I'm exaggerating? I'm not. (I am amplifying, of course, but that's another matter.)
To prove it, let's follow a simple, serpentine statistical trail that begins, en medias res, at a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette feature profiling three Shaler High School students identified as Jefferson-Award-Winning Community Champions for their work in empowering other young women against sexual assault. And by empowering, of course, we actually mean deceiving. Here's the impetus for their work, repeated (of course) as fact in the Post-Gazette profile:
All three girls couldn't quite believe this shocking statistic: One in four girls will be raped or sexually assaulted by Thanksgiving break of their freshman year in college.
You will notice, of course, that the black oil has mutated already. The figure, as it was originally and most famously presented, is that one-in-four women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. Here, these well-intentioned but obviously ill-informed young women have been told that one-in-four girls will be sexually assaulted by late November of their freshman year of college. (Whether this means that anyone who makes it past Thanksgiving of her freshman year has zero probability of ever being sexually assaulted, or that no woman is ever sexually assaulted after she turns 19, or that the spirit of the upcoming holidays just puts rapists in a better mood and makes them less likely to strike in December, remains a mystery.)
What's not a mystery is that the one-in-four mutation already presents a delightful statistical -- and, of course, actual -- contradiction. But let's hold those thought and move to another passage from the PG story:
Nearly 200 girls attended the program, during which PAAR gave a presentation, and the girls handed out more than 200 hand-painted "m-powering" armbands bearing the rape-prevention message "1:4."
It's unclear whether these young women's armbands were meant to m-power their peers with the lifetime figure or the Thanksgiving figure or both. It is clear, however, that they're working with PAAR (Pittsburgh Action Against Rape). So, assuming that they're re also getting their statistics from PAAR, or at least that the organization knows what they're saying and agrees with it, I scoured the PAAR web site for a source of the claims. The best I could come up with, on PAAR's statistics page, were:
Female freshman are at the highest risk for sexual or physical assault from the day they arrive on campus until Thanksgiving break. (Campus Outreach Services, 2003)
and
An estimated 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men will experience a sexual assault within their lifetime. (Rennison, C., U.S. Dept. of Justice, 2000)
There is, of course, a big difference between saying that female freshman are at the highest risk for sexual assault during their first three months on campus and saying that one-in-four female freshman will be sexually assaulted before Thanksgiving. A tremendous difference, in fact. The difference, for instance, between saying that all 600 of Carnegie Mellon's incoming freshman women should be especially careful about their behaviors and their surroundings as they adjust to their first few months of college life, and saying that, if they have not already been, 150 of them will be sexually assaulted before they go home for turkey and stuffing.
Already, the one-in-four-before Thanksgiving stat -- which, by the way, I could not find, much less verify, in that same form on any site to which I surfed or Googled -- has been exposed as an absurdity. And a hoax. Whether the breakdown occurred with a PAAR representative, with the Shaler High students, or with Gretchen McKay's reporting in the PG, I don't know. And, at least for our purposes here, it doesn't matter. Because the who and the how are not nearly as important as the what: one more example of how the one-in-four black oil can immediately and unfortunately infect almost anything with which it comes in contact.
Now. That first, already diminished claim cites Campus Outreach Services as a source. So I went to the Campus Outreach Services web site, which sells an awful lot of expensive sexual assault resources -- didn't Heather McDonald call this an industry? -- but does not quote, nor cite, nor even mention the pre-Thanksgiving statistic. Which leaves just the one-in-four lifetime figure, yet again. Only this time, it's sourced not to the famously discredited Koss/Ms. report but to an eight-year-old U.S. Department of Justice report. So I decided to check that out. And I discovered one minor problem.
The study doesn't include the one-in-four figure. Anywhere. At all.
So I did a little more digging. And I discovered that many other sites for many other non-profits and education-and-advocacy groups do cite numbers from that Rennison Department of Justice report -- you know, ones that actually appear in it -- but do not cite the one-in-four. Perhaps because it's not included in the report. And perhaps because those groups, at least, still feel beholden to some quaint notion of truth.
Now. I could have just stopped here. After all, I'd already proven my point: after two simple Googlings and a little bit of reading, I'd found no proof for either of the one-in-four claims on the very web sites the claimants named as their sources. But I decided to do a little more digging. And Googling. And reading. Just for fun. And because, by now, I was having flashbacks to grad school and getting pissed all over again.
Yale -- you know, the university that wishes its sexual assault numbers were as high as Harvard's -- does not cite the one-in-four number but does, right here, claim that female freshman are at the highest risk of assault between the first day of school and Thanksgiving break. (What do you think happens at Thanksgiving? Is it something in the turkey? The stuffing? The football? Is it just the chance to be far enough away from all those predatory boys that the self-defense mechanisms finally kick in? Why isn't it Christmas? Or Kwaanza? Or New Year's Eve? Maybe Halloween, when all those scary things oughta fire at least a few synapses of self-defense?) The Yale claim cites FactsOnTap.org as the source of the claim. But that site, even on its stone-cold-sobering college-sex-and-alochol stats page, makes no mention of it. At all.
This is the second time we've come up against a dead-end when looking for a simple source of the broadest and most obviously alarming of these initial claims. You'd think a figure like that would be so well-sourced and so fully documented that you could find dozens, even hundreds of clear, iron-clad references to the factual basis for it. Hell, you'd think you'd at least find one. But you don't. All you get is a whole lot of chasing your own tails. And their tall ones.
But at least along the way you get the joys of discovering a whole new one-in-four mutation, courtesy of the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault:
One in Four college women report surviving rape (15%) or attempted rape (12%) since their fourteenth birthday.
And then another at the Kapi'olani Medical Center Sex Abuse Treatment Center:
One in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually assaulted by age 18.
This claim is sourced to a 1990 study by David Finkelhor, et al., that, available only in abstract, explains how things could be even worse:
Higher rates of abuse were found among men who grew up in unhappy families, lived for some period with only their mothers, who were currently residing in the West and who came from English or Scandinavian heritage. Higher rates of abuse were found among women who grew up in unhappy families, lived for some period without one of their natural parents, received inadequate sex education, were currently residing in the West or who were born after 1925.
(A pretty exhaustive list, I'd say. Though they seem to have missed who went to Harvard and before Thanksgiving.)
The abstract does not detail the methodology for such an exhaustive study. But another Finkelhor abstract does:
Two thousand children aged 10 to 16 were interviewed in a national telephone survey.
Sounds pretty reliable to me.
In another, Finkelhor essentially cites himself:
Considerable evidence exists to show that at least 20% of American women and 5% to 10% of American men experienced some form of sexual abuse as children.
Which is, I think, both fitting end and fitting metaphor for this wild goosing chase: most of these sites and groups and surveys and seminars, while recklessly citing and sourcing each other, and by willfully citing and sourcing numbers that do not have a basis in fact, may as well by citing themselves. Or God. Or the little green womyn on the moon. You know -- the ones who landed at Area 51 and stayed underground for thirty years and surfaced with the black oil just in time to infect Mary Koss and her one-in-four fiction with a virus that would spread and mutate and regurgitate itself until, twenty years after that, the facts are so distorted and misreported that, in the space of a half-hour on the web, you can find, Scully-and-Mulder like, evidence of all sorts of infection:
One-in-Four...
...women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime.
...freshmen women will be sexually assaulted before Thanksgiving.
...girls will have been sexually assaulted by age 18.
...college women will have been sexually assaulted sometime since their fourteenth birthday.
The list goes on. The contagion spreads. The antidote -- the truth -- is out there.
But good luck finding it. Or, the occasional Christina Hoff Sommers and Heather McDonalds of the world aside, ever seeing it reported.
The early sections of the piece take renewed aim at the oft-repeated, long-discredited claim that one-in-four women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. (In case you missed the discrediting -- and Lord knows many people did -- here's the short version: ambiguous surveys, unscientific methodologies, deeply massaged numbers, and the inconvenient truths that 73% of the women Mary Koss identified as victims of rape didn't think they'd been raped, and that 42% of them had sex with their alleged rapists at least once more after the "assault.") Nara Schoenberg and Sam Roe of the Toledo Blade got there first, and Dr. Hoff Sommers and Berkeley professor Neil Gilbert got there best, but Ms. McDonald sums it up nicely:
If the one-in-four statistic is correct -- it is sometimes modified to “one-in-five to one-in-four" -- campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants—a rate of 2.4 percent. The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience.
But, of course, they don't.
And yet that doesn't stop the claim, nor the one-in-four figure, from being repeated -- even, as you will soon see, in wildly contradictory ways -- over and over and over again, as if it were the indisputable, gospel truth. As if it were handed down from a righteous and angry (female) God whose only commandment, short of Thou shalt fear all men, were to Go forth and multiply both the use and abuse of it.
Before I cite a few examples of my own, here's McDonald again:
None of the obvious weaknesses in the research has had the slightest drag on the campus rape movement, because the movement is political, not empirical... You don’t need evidence for the rape culture; you simply know that it exists. But if you do need evidence, the underreporting of rape is the best proof there is...
...Federal law requires colleges to publish reported crimes affecting their students. The numbers of reported sexual assaults -- the law does not require their confirmation -- usually run under half a dozen a year on private campuses and maybe two to three times that at large public universities. You might think that having so few reports of sexual assault a year would be a point of pride; in fact, it’s a source of gall for students and administrators alike. Yale’s associate general counsel and vice president were clearly on the defensive when asked by the Yale alumni magazine in 2004 about Harvard’s higher numbers of reported assaults; the reporter might as well have been needling them about a Harvard-Yale football rout. “Harvard must have double-counted or included incidents not required by federal law,” groused the officials. The University of Virginia does not publish the number of its sexual-assault hearings because it is so low. “We’re reticent to publicize it when we have such a small ‘n’ number,” says Nicole Eramu, Virginia’s associate dean of students.
Just let the last sentence sink in for a moment. University of Virginia administrators are reticent to publish their extremely low number of sexual assault cases. They are, in essence, afraid to note how safe, how relatively free from sexual assault, their campus really is. Even though colleges and universities across the country do everything they can to bury their crime reports and minimize their crime statistics. Even though these schools want to seem, to prospective students and especially to the parents of current and prospective students, like tremendously safe and happy and crime-free places, UVA's associate dean of students practically apologizes for her campus' low number of sexual assaults. Meanwhile, Yale officials are pissy, and sound almost envious, because Harvard reports more sexual assaults than they do.
Try to imagine, if you will, a mayor reluctant to report his city's incredibly low crime rate. Imagine President Bush upset because he couldn't report more American casualties in Iraq this year. Imagine a mother and father -- in loco parentis, right? -- angry that more of their daughters had not been raped. Imagine... oh, forget it.
Anyone have a headache yet? Anyone not sure whether we're at war with Eurasia or Eastasia? Everyone see what I mean?
I once had a discussion, which turned into a debate, which turned into an argument, on this very subject with an especially passionate -- which is to say, well-intentioned but obviously ill-informed -- undergrad who'd been trained as a sexual assault advisor at Carnegie Mellon. I used the one-in-four figure in class as an example of the shocking statistical grabber: something that makes you sit up and take notice and want to hear more from a presenter. Then I noted that it was, in fact, a bogus statistic that also demonstrated the tremendous powers of rhetorical craft and simple repetition: something that, said over and over and over again, becomes commonplace enough to be accepted as truth even though it is not. The young man, who did nothing but repeat the one-in-four statistic over and over and over again -- without, of course, ever seeing the irony of his performance nor the proof of my point -- refused to accept the studies I quoted or the sources I cited (including, of course, all the names I note above: Schoenberg, Roe, Sommers, and Gilbert). He merely got angrier and angrier until I asked him, "What are you so angry about? Shouldn't you be happy that there are far fewer sexual assaults than you think? Isn't that what you want? Isn't that what we all want? It's almost as if you wish there were more sexual assaults."
He had no idea how to respond to that. And in the several times I've had occasion to ask those same questions of other one-in-four-ites, I've never met anyone who did.
And yet that number -- that damned, damnable, utterly unsubstantiated number -- keeps making the rounds, cropping up here, there, and everywhere, now so ubiquitous that it's even creeping into other, inherently contradictory statistics. One-in-four has become a virus, some X-Files-style black oil that oozes from report to pamphlet to news article, from workshop to seminar to rally, from story to story to story, until it lives and breathes and reproduces on it own, leaving a trail of cold, dead reason in its ever-diseased and disgusting wake.
Think I'm exaggerating? I'm not. (I am amplifying, of course, but that's another matter.)
To prove it, let's follow a simple, serpentine statistical trail that begins, en medias res, at a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette feature profiling three Shaler High School students identified as Jefferson-Award-Winning Community Champions for their work in empowering other young women against sexual assault. And by empowering, of course, we actually mean deceiving. Here's the impetus for their work, repeated (of course) as fact in the Post-Gazette profile:
All three girls couldn't quite believe this shocking statistic: One in four girls will be raped or sexually assaulted by Thanksgiving break of their freshman year in college.
You will notice, of course, that the black oil has mutated already. The figure, as it was originally and most famously presented, is that one-in-four women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. Here, these well-intentioned but obviously ill-informed young women have been told that one-in-four girls will be sexually assaulted by late November of their freshman year of college. (Whether this means that anyone who makes it past Thanksgiving of her freshman year has zero probability of ever being sexually assaulted, or that no woman is ever sexually assaulted after she turns 19, or that the spirit of the upcoming holidays just puts rapists in a better mood and makes them less likely to strike in December, remains a mystery.)
What's not a mystery is that the one-in-four mutation already presents a delightful statistical -- and, of course, actual -- contradiction. But let's hold those thought and move to another passage from the PG story:
Nearly 200 girls attended the program, during which PAAR gave a presentation, and the girls handed out more than 200 hand-painted "m-powering" armbands bearing the rape-prevention message "1:4."
It's unclear whether these young women's armbands were meant to m-power their peers with the lifetime figure or the Thanksgiving figure or both. It is clear, however, that they're working with PAAR (Pittsburgh Action Against Rape). So, assuming that they're re also getting their statistics from PAAR, or at least that the organization knows what they're saying and agrees with it, I scoured the PAAR web site for a source of the claims. The best I could come up with, on PAAR's statistics page, were:
Female freshman are at the highest risk for sexual or physical assault from the day they arrive on campus until Thanksgiving break. (Campus Outreach Services, 2003)
and
An estimated 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men will experience a sexual assault within their lifetime. (Rennison, C., U.S. Dept. of Justice, 2000)
There is, of course, a big difference between saying that female freshman are at the highest risk for sexual assault during their first three months on campus and saying that one-in-four female freshman will be sexually assaulted before Thanksgiving. A tremendous difference, in fact. The difference, for instance, between saying that all 600 of Carnegie Mellon's incoming freshman women should be especially careful about their behaviors and their surroundings as they adjust to their first few months of college life, and saying that, if they have not already been, 150 of them will be sexually assaulted before they go home for turkey and stuffing.
Already, the one-in-four-before Thanksgiving stat -- which, by the way, I could not find, much less verify, in that same form on any site to which I surfed or Googled -- has been exposed as an absurdity. And a hoax. Whether the breakdown occurred with a PAAR representative, with the Shaler High students, or with Gretchen McKay's reporting in the PG, I don't know. And, at least for our purposes here, it doesn't matter. Because the who and the how are not nearly as important as the what: one more example of how the one-in-four black oil can immediately and unfortunately infect almost anything with which it comes in contact.
Now. That first, already diminished claim cites Campus Outreach Services as a source. So I went to the Campus Outreach Services web site, which sells an awful lot of expensive sexual assault resources -- didn't Heather McDonald call this an industry? -- but does not quote, nor cite, nor even mention the pre-Thanksgiving statistic. Which leaves just the one-in-four lifetime figure, yet again. Only this time, it's sourced not to the famously discredited Koss/Ms. report but to an eight-year-old U.S. Department of Justice report. So I decided to check that out. And I discovered one minor problem.
The study doesn't include the one-in-four figure. Anywhere. At all.
So I did a little more digging. And I discovered that many other sites for many other non-profits and education-and-advocacy groups do cite numbers from that Rennison Department of Justice report -- you know, ones that actually appear in it -- but do not cite the one-in-four. Perhaps because it's not included in the report. And perhaps because those groups, at least, still feel beholden to some quaint notion of truth.
Now. I could have just stopped here. After all, I'd already proven my point: after two simple Googlings and a little bit of reading, I'd found no proof for either of the one-in-four claims on the very web sites the claimants named as their sources. But I decided to do a little more digging. And Googling. And reading. Just for fun. And because, by now, I was having flashbacks to grad school and getting pissed all over again.
Yale -- you know, the university that wishes its sexual assault numbers were as high as Harvard's -- does not cite the one-in-four number but does, right here, claim that female freshman are at the highest risk of assault between the first day of school and Thanksgiving break. (What do you think happens at Thanksgiving? Is it something in the turkey? The stuffing? The football? Is it just the chance to be far enough away from all those predatory boys that the self-defense mechanisms finally kick in? Why isn't it Christmas? Or Kwaanza? Or New Year's Eve? Maybe Halloween, when all those scary things oughta fire at least a few synapses of self-defense?) The Yale claim cites FactsOnTap.org as the source of the claim. But that site, even on its stone-cold-sobering college-sex-and-alochol stats page, makes no mention of it. At all.
This is the second time we've come up against a dead-end when looking for a simple source of the broadest and most obviously alarming of these initial claims. You'd think a figure like that would be so well-sourced and so fully documented that you could find dozens, even hundreds of clear, iron-clad references to the factual basis for it. Hell, you'd think you'd at least find one. But you don't. All you get is a whole lot of chasing your own tails. And their tall ones.
But at least along the way you get the joys of discovering a whole new one-in-four mutation, courtesy of the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault:
One in Four college women report surviving rape (15%) or attempted rape (12%) since their fourteenth birthday.
And then another at the Kapi'olani Medical Center Sex Abuse Treatment Center:
One in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually assaulted by age 18.
This claim is sourced to a 1990 study by David Finkelhor, et al., that, available only in abstract, explains how things could be even worse:
Higher rates of abuse were found among men who grew up in unhappy families, lived for some period with only their mothers, who were currently residing in the West and who came from English or Scandinavian heritage. Higher rates of abuse were found among women who grew up in unhappy families, lived for some period without one of their natural parents, received inadequate sex education, were currently residing in the West or who were born after 1925.
(A pretty exhaustive list, I'd say. Though they seem to have missed who went to Harvard and before Thanksgiving.)
The abstract does not detail the methodology for such an exhaustive study. But another Finkelhor abstract does:
Two thousand children aged 10 to 16 were interviewed in a national telephone survey.
Sounds pretty reliable to me.
In another, Finkelhor essentially cites himself:
Considerable evidence exists to show that at least 20% of American women and 5% to 10% of American men experienced some form of sexual abuse as children.
Which is, I think, both fitting end and fitting metaphor for this wild goosing chase: most of these sites and groups and surveys and seminars, while recklessly citing and sourcing each other, and by willfully citing and sourcing numbers that do not have a basis in fact, may as well by citing themselves. Or God. Or the little green womyn on the moon. You know -- the ones who landed at Area 51 and stayed underground for thirty years and surfaced with the black oil just in time to infect Mary Koss and her one-in-four fiction with a virus that would spread and mutate and regurgitate itself until, twenty years after that, the facts are so distorted and misreported that, in the space of a half-hour on the web, you can find, Scully-and-Mulder like, evidence of all sorts of infection:
One-in-Four...
...women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime.
...freshmen women will be sexually assaulted before Thanksgiving.
...girls will have been sexually assaulted by age 18.
...college women will have been sexually assaulted sometime since their fourteenth birthday.
The list goes on. The contagion spreads. The antidote -- the truth -- is out there.
But good luck finding it. Or, the occasional Christina Hoff Sommers and Heather McDonalds of the world aside, ever seeing it reported.
Posted: Tue - February 26, 2008 at 10:07 AM
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Published On: Aug 28, 2008 10:23 PM
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Published On: Aug 28, 2008 10:23 PM