15 percent of women are raped while incapacitated during their freshman year at college

[RavenSky]

When you produce actual evidence that a statistically significant number of men are manipulating women into having sex, and those same women are turning around and labeling it as "rape", let me know.

In the meantime, it is a stupid strawman meant to derail the discussion, and now the derail is done. You are welcome.

Herein lies the problem: They know it's not rape, they're not labeling it as rape.

The surveys are setting out to find "rape" that the women themselves don't consider rape. That's why the surveys find a substantially higher "rape" rate than you find either from police reports or the government crime victimization surveys.

Prove it.

You are making claims about what the surveys do or don't do, but you have not ever bothered to substantiate your claims. Until you do, you have posted nothing but a strawman being used to derail.

 

[RavenSky]

Education is the key. It is not perfect, but better education on these issues may help. Certainly couldn't hurt.

^^^ That.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Herein lies the problem: They know it's not rape, they're not labeling it as rape.

The surveys are setting out to find "rape" that the women themselves don't consider rape. That's why the surveys find a substantially higher "rape" rate than you find either from police reports or the government crime victimization surveys.

Well, you can't know that. When the terms are as ill-defined and the investigation as poorly done as they are in the OP study, they may grossly overinflate the problem, they may significantly understate it or they may get things totally right. They give no information about the subject matter they're studying. It's as illegitimate to say that it finds a substantially higher rate than they should as it is to say that it draws an accurate picture of the issue. It does not "find" anything.

We've seen some on here before who admit the point of the questions is to find such cases.

- - - Updated - - -

Herein lies the problem: They know it's not rape, they're not labeling it as rape.

The surveys are setting out to find "rape" that the women themselves don't consider rape. That's why the surveys find a substantially higher "rape" rate than you find either from police reports or the government crime victimization surveys.

You keep repeating this even its relevance requires the absurd assumption that all rapes are reported to the police.

But why would they admit it on the surveys looking for high rape numbers and not admit it on the crime victimization survey??

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Well, you can't know that. When the terms are as ill-defined and the investigation as poorly done as they are in the OP study, they may grossly overinflate the problem, they may significantly understate it or they may get things totally right. They give no information about the subject matter they're studying. It's as illegitimate to say that it finds a substantially higher rate than they should as it is to say that it draws an accurate picture of the issue. It does not "find" anything.

We've seen some on here before who admit the point of the questions is to find such cases.

Unless those people are the ones who did this study, that doesn't make the point any less valid. They didn't provide enough information about the subject they were studying to make any conclusions from it worthwhile. Saying that it shows inflated numbers is as invalid as saying it shows accurate numbers.

You can't use this study to draw any conclusions other than that it is a way to not publish a study.

 

[bigfield]

I don't see a practical way of policing that behaviour. Much of the awareness training held at universities puts students in the role of policing each other's behaviour. but they largely aren't capable of doing that because they are immature and because peer pressure normalises the dangerous behaviour of not only the rapists, but other dangerous behaviours as well.

Education is the key. It is not perfect, but better education on these issues may help. Certainly couldn't hurt.

Schools should avoid treating boys like potential rapists just as they don't treat students as potential criminals in other respects. As long as the teachers avoid that, education couldn't hurt.

This education (about consent and alcohol) would be better given in high school as part of sexual education, before most teens are sexually active. Freshman orientation is too late. Yet that may be an administrative nightmare without standardised curricula and oversight at state level.

 

[laughing dog]

But why would they admit it on the surveys looking for high rape numbers and not admit it on the crime victimization survey??

Are you under the impression that 1) the same people are surveyed, and 2) the surveys of these same people are done at the same time?

 

[laughing dog]

You can't use this study to draw any conclusions other than that it is a way to not publish a study.

Perhaps you should suggest that to the organization that has been publishing peer-reviewed academic articles for over 70 years. I am sure they would welcome your expertise in this matter.

 

[laughing dog]

Education is the key. It is not perfect, but better education on these issues may help. Certainly couldn't hurt.

Schools should avoid treating boys like potential rapists just as they don't treat students as potential criminals in other respects. As long as the teachers avoid that, education couldn't hurt.

This education (about consent and alcohol) would be better given in high school as part of sexual education, before most teens are sexually active. Freshman orientation is too late. Yet that may be an administrative nightmare without standardised curricula and oversight at state level.

One of the results from this study is that a significant proportion of women who met the criteria of incapacitated rape as freshman also had alcohol-correlated incidents before their freshmen year. I think an education program aimed at such an audience about the potential effects of alcohol consumption on the ability and advisability of consent towards sex could be helpful.

 

[Metaphor]

But why would they admit it on the surveys looking for high rape numbers and not admit it on the crime victimization survey??

Are you under the impression that 1) the same people are surveyed, and 2) the surveys of these same people are done at the same time?

"The same people" do not need to be surveyed in order to compare results on two different surveys, if each of them has sampled the same population without bias. This is how we're able to get time series data without using longitudinal surveys.

If the population you want to make conclusions about is 'all women in America', say, crime victimisation surveys with a stratified national sample are far better than college surveys with convenience samples. Even if your population of interest were 'college age women', then I'd still trust a crime victimisation survey more. Even if your sample was 'college age women enrolled in college' I would still trust the crime victimisation survey more (if, of course, it had the necessary demographic information collected).

Convenience samples are not necessarily useless; any correlation you find between two variables is still likely to be correlated in the wider population, but they are dreadful for any kind of 'overall prevalence' statistic.

 

[laughing dog]

Are you under the impression that 1) the same people are surveyed, and 2) the surveys of these same people are done at the same time?

"The same people" do not need to be surveyed in order to compare results on two different surveys, if each of them has sampled the same population without bias. This is how we're able to get time series data without using longitudinal surveys.

If the population you want to make conclusions about is 'all women in America', say, crime victimisation surveys with a stratified national sample are far better than college surveys with convenience samples. Even if your population of interest were 'college age women', then I'd still trust a crime victimisation survey more. Even if your sample was 'college age women enrolled in college' I would still trust the crime victimisation survey more (if, of course, it had the necessary demographic information collected).

Convenience samples are not necessarily useless; any correlation you find between two variables is still likely to be correlated in the wider population, but they are dreadful for any kind of 'overall prevalence' statistic.

Perhaps you could explain how this relates to the question "But why would they admit it on the surveys looking for high rape numbers and not admit it on the crime victimization survey??"

 

[Toni]

Education is the key. It is not perfect, but better education on these issues may help. Certainly couldn't hurt.

Schools should avoid treating boys like potential rapists just as they don't treat students as potential criminals in other respects. As long as the teachers avoid that, education couldn't hurt.

This education (about consent and alcohol) would be better given in high school as part of sexual education, before most teens are sexually active. Freshman orientation is too late. Yet that may be an administrative nightmare without standardised curricula and oversight at state level.

I don't disagree: there needs to be a great deal of education about consent long before college. I don't think it should be confined to formal lessons in a sex ed class. I think it needs to be much more all encompassing than that. Just as we now teach kids, more explicitly, about stranger danger and good touch/bad touch, we also need to teach kids about the emotional and the social aspects of sex and how those are affected by age, circumstance, context, and so on. It's not like a 3 week unit in a discreet class. BTW, in the US, sex ed is not universally taught at any age or with any universal curriculum. In some places, it's not really taught at all. And sometimes, incorrect information is given out.

In my personal view, there are attitudes about at least two separate issues that need to be addressed: One is alcohol and drug use and how it impairs your judgment and gets in the way of making good decisions or recognizing threats or danger and how that impairment can be difficult to anticipate and judge for yourself and for others. And that it's not always the same for every person or for every person every time.

The other has to do with a person's absolute right to control their own body. And how that can be affected by various intoxicants, but also by hormones, especially sex hormones, social situations, romantic situations, pressures from within and without, familial situations, and so on.

My perceptios--and it is only my perceptions but ones based upon years of observation and well, life is that there are certain people who don't believe that girls and women have the right to a)control their own bodies b)control access to their bodies c)enjoy sex for the pleasure it brings them and not just the guy d)delay sex because they have other priorities e) might not be ready for sex in a relationship in general or in a particular relationship

For starters. BTW, I think all of the above applies equally to boys but society tends to judge girls very harshly and to punish them very harshly for not conforming to some very narrow roles. Also boys, but in different ways. A boy who is slower to develop sexual feelings or is less aggressive about them is also often harshly judged. Perhaps it is just my kids but it seems to me that there is a pretty broad acceptance of gay and lesbian students, and only slightly less broad acceptance of bisexual or transgender kids, mostly because adolescents tend to feel more comfortable with firm, crisply drawn boundaries (when applied to other people) and it can seem 'weird' to like both girls and boys. But a boy who has many sex partners is celebrated; a girl who has many sex partners---and in high school and college, many can be more than one-- is called bad names and is much more vulnerable to future sexual assaults. It is assumed that boys like sex. It is assumed, too often, that girls probably don't really like sex but they do it to keep boys interested. And that girls need to keep boys interested. So whether a girl is or is not interested in having sex is less about having sex than whether or not she is interested in getting or keeping a boy. There's still an overwhelming assumption that girls are responsible for birth control and for any pregnancy that results. And that sex is something that girls give boys, whether they themselves want to or like it or not.

 

[Metaphor]

"The same people" do not need to be surveyed in order to compare results on two different surveys, if each of them has sampled the same population without bias. This is how we're able to get time series data without using longitudinal surveys.

If the population you want to make conclusions about is 'all women in America', say, crime victimisation surveys with a stratified national sample are far better than college surveys with convenience samples. Even if your population of interest were 'college age women', then I'd still trust a crime victimisation survey more. Even if your sample was 'college age women enrolled in college' I would still trust the crime victimisation survey more (if, of course, it had the necessary demographic information collected).

Convenience samples are not necessarily useless; any correlation you find between two variables is still likely to be correlated in the wider population, but they are dreadful for any kind of 'overall prevalence' statistic.

Perhaps you could explain how this relates to the question "But why would they admit it on the surveys looking for high rape numbers and not admit it on the crime victimization survey??"

I was addressing laughing dog's post, not that specific comment.

But if I understand the comment, it means 'why would someone be more truthful on a college survey than on a crime victimisation survey', or 'why would college surveys, designed to serve an agenda of finding sexual assault rates that are high, be more accurate than crime victimisation surveys'.

Crime victimisation surveys are better than college surveys to measure prevalence of crime for all sorts of reasons, some of which I've already articulated.

 

[Metaphor]

For starters. BTW, I think all of the above applies equally to boys but society tends to judge girls very harshly and to punish them very harshly for not conforming to some very narrow roles.

My experience is quite the opposite. Young girls can be 'tomboys' without any social stigma. They can dress in trousers and eschew traditionally 'feminine' play and parents won't blink an eye. But if your son is a sissy, and wants to wear dresses or play with dolls, many of the same parents would be horrified.

(I suspect this is because there is a perception that feminine-acting boys are more likely to become homosexuals than masculine-acting girls becoming lesbians).

Also boys, but in different ways. A boy who is slower to develop sexual feelings or is less aggressive about them is also often harshly judged. Perhaps it is just my kids but it seems to me that there is a pretty broad acceptance of gay and lesbian students,

Not when I went to high school.

And that sex is something that girls give boys, whether they themselves want to or like it or not.

In heterosexual relationships, women are the gatekeepers of sex. This is partly socialisation and partly biology; it's no mistake that the amount of sex within a relationship correlates positively with the number of men in the relationship (2, 1, or 0).

That doesn't mean women aren't interested in sex, they're just not as interested as men. Otherwise the vast majority of sex workers wouldn't be catering to male clients.

 

[Bar-Jesus]

Here is a Thanksgiving chewtoy for you MRAs out there:

I guess these women should stop being winos then!

 

[bigfield]

Schools should avoid treating boys like potential rapists just as they don't treat students as potential criminals in other respects. As long as the teachers avoid that, education couldn't hurt.

This education (about consent and alcohol) would be better given in high school as part of sexual education, before most teens are sexually active. Freshman orientation is too late. Yet that may be an administrative nightmare without standardised curricula and oversight at state level.

I don't disagree: there needs to be a great deal of education about consent long before college. I don't think it should be confined to formal lessons in a sex ed class. I think it needs to be much more all encompassing than that. Just as we now teach kids, more explicitly, about stranger danger and good touch/bad touch, we also need to teach kids about the emotional and the social aspects of sex and how those are affected by age, circumstance, context, and so on. It's not like a 3 week unit in a discreet class. BTW, in the US, sex ed is not universally taught at any age or with any universal curriculum. In some places, it's not really taught at all. And sometimes, incorrect information is given out.

The objective is to make drunken sex a taboo in the sense that a person's own moral code should prohibit them from having sex with drunk people, and when their personal judgment fails in that regard, there should be negative social consequences (within the peer group) for having sex with a drunk person. In other words, enlighten kids about the consequences of having sex with drunk people, and when that fails, shame the shit out of them.

But a boy who has many sex partners is celebrated; a girl who has many sex partners---and in high school and college, many can be more than one-- is called bad names and is much more vulnerable to future sexual assaults.

Boys/men are threatened by girls/women who have had many sex partners, and multiple misconceptions have been built up around it. An education program would need to shine a light on the causes of this phobia as well as the misconceptions. Take away the reasons for boys to shame girls for having sex.

Men's aversion to promiscuous women may be rooted in a primal fear of being cuckolded, a fear that isn't relevant any more, even if one considers paternity fraud. Boys don't have any particular reason to care that girls are having sex, petty jealousy notwithstanding.

The myth that promiscuous women collect men's fluid or become loose and numb should also be debunked. The myth that virgins are tighter needs to be clarified to point out that virgins are only tighter because they are nervous; it is a sign of lack of arousal and therefore undesirable.

And if boys are no longer threatened by promiscuous women, then girls no longer have a weapon they can use against their rivals.

 

[Toni]

My experience is quite the opposite. Young girls can be 'tomboys' without any social stigma. They can dress in trousers and eschew traditionally 'feminine' play and parents won't blink an eye. But if your son is a sissy, and wants to wear dresses or play with dolls, many of the same parents would be horrified.

(I suspect this is because there is a perception that feminine-acting boys are more likely to become homosexuals than masculine-acting girls becoming lesbians).

I was specifically referring to sexual behavior, not gender stereotypical behavior. Gender roles are typically much more strictly defined for boys than for girls and deviation is more harshly punished, generally speaking.

However, the opposite is true with regards to sexual behavior.

Also boys, but in different ways. A boy who is slower to develop sexual feelings or is less aggressive about them is also often harshly judged. Perhaps it is just my kids but it seems to me that there is a pretty broad acceptance of gay and lesbian students,

Not when I went to high school.

The acceptance of gay and lesbian students at the high school level is relatively new. It was a bad bad bad thing when I was in high school and pretty hidden. For my kids? Not really, although there was a distinct change between when my oldest was in middle school/high school and when the youngest was. For the youngest, bisexuality was confusing--had a hard time understanding how/why someone wasn't sure (kid's way of looking at things, not mine). One friend was obviously transgender and that was uncomfortable but mostly because of some other social/mental health issues going on in the family. The parents were what we in the states call: bat shit (crazy). Unrelated to the kid's gender. The kid and siblings in that family were ok but pretty difficult to be around from time to time due to family issues. Sorry: sad situation all around. My kids are now all adults. All have friends who are gay and lesbian and bi. Doesn't seem to be an issue for any of them, although middle kid was a bit flummoxed a few years back when a high school friend came out--and then realized that a lot of things made sense now. Didn't seem to change the dynamic of the friendship or the group friendship as the friend is part of the social group who regularly hangs out and does stuff together.

Again, this may be specific to my kids and their social group. Among our neighbors and family friends have always been gay and lesbian men and women. In general, my kids' friends tend to be more open, accepting and welcoming of a diverse group of people.

And that sex is something that girls give boys, whether they themselves want to or like it or not.

In heterosexual relationships, women are the gatekeepers of sex. This is partly socialisation and partly biology; it's no mistake that the amount of sex within a relationship correlates positively with the number of men in the relationship (2, 1, or 0).

This may be true in general but it is not universally true. Within a relationship, it is not always the male who is more interested in sex. And either gender can be more interested in control and in manipulating the partner than in sex itself.

I think you would be surprised at how mistaken you are about the number of men in a relationship determining the amount of sex in the relationship. That's pretty individual. It is often an age related issue and related to the number of children in the picture, hours worked, sharing of household duties, length of relationship, etc.

That doesn't mean women aren't interested in sex, they're just not as interested as men. Otherwise the vast majority of sex workers wouldn't be catering to male clients.

I get your point and you may be right but I think there's more to work here than: men want more sex than do women.

Sex is also about power, and money, something that men typically have more of in a society. That's part of it. The other is that men can have sex more free from negative consequences than can women. It's a bit of a chicken/egg thing: which comes first? Do men have fewer negative consequences for having multiple sex partners than do women because having multiple sex partners is more biologically programmed for them while women benefit, from a biological/evolutionary sense from having one (or a limited number) of sex partners? I am sure that is true to an extent across the entire gender but it falls apart on an individual basis. Some men are not naturally monogamous. Some women are not.

 

[Toni]

I don't disagree: there needs to be a great deal of education about consent long before college. I don't think it should be confined to formal lessons in a sex ed class. I think it needs to be much more all encompassing than that. Just as we now teach kids, more explicitly, about stranger danger and good touch/bad touch, we also need to teach kids about the emotional and the social aspects of sex and how those are affected by age, circumstance, context, and so on. It's not like a 3 week unit in a discreet class. BTW, in the US, sex ed is not universally taught at any age or with any universal curriculum. In some places, it's not really taught at all. And sometimes, incorrect information is given out.

The objective is to make drunken sex a taboo in the sense that a person's own moral code should prohibit them from having sex with drunk people, and when their personal judgment fails in that regard, there should be negative social consequences (within the peer group) for having sex with a drunk person. In other words, enlighten kids about the consequences of having sex with drunk people, and when that fails, shame the shit out of them.

But a boy who has many sex partners is celebrated; a girl who has many sex partners---and in high school and college, many can be more than one-- is called bad names and is much more vulnerable to future sexual assaults.

Boys/men are threatened by girls/women who have had many sex partners, and multiple misconceptions have been built up around it. An education program would need to shine a light on the causes of this phobia as well as the misconceptions. Take away the reasons for boys to shame girls for having sex.

Men's aversion to promiscuous women may be rooted in a primal fear of being cuckolded, a fear that isn't relevant any more, even if one considers paternity fraud. Boys don't have any particular reason to care that girls are having sex, petty jealousy notwithstanding.

The myth that promiscuous women collect men's fluid or become loose and numb should also be debunked. The myth that virgins are tighter needs to be clarified to point out that virgins are only tighter because they are nervous; it is a sign of lack of arousal and therefore undesirable.

And if boys are no longer threatened by promiscuous women, then girls no longer have a weapon they can use against their rivals.

Actually, girls and women are strong enforcers of sexual mores in other girls and women. In some ways, stronger than are men. Only part of that has to do with men, just as how women dress has more to do with how other women perceive them than how men perceive them.

 

[laughing dog]

I was addressing laughing dog's post, not that specific comment.

But my comment was a direct reply to the question. That comment did not address survey sampling or statistical techniques.

But if I understand the comment, it means 'why would someone be more truthful on a college survey than on a crime victimisation survey', or 'why would college surveys, designed to serve an agenda of finding sexual assault rates that are high, be more accurate than crime victimisation surveys'.

Crime victimisation surveys are better than college surveys to measure prevalence of crime for all sorts of reasons, some of which I've already articulated.

Except, you did not. A survey designed to address the experiences of first year college students is much more likely to give better results than a general survey under the assumption that both surveys are done in an appropriate manner.

 

[Terrell]

Men's aversion to promiscuous women may be rooted in a primal fear of being cuckolded, a fear that isn't relevant any more, even if one considers paternity fraud. Boys don't have any particular reason to care that girls are having sex, petty jealousy notwithstanding.

Why is paternity fraud not relevant? Men can still be forced to pay child support for kids that are proven to not be biologically theirs. Now when the law allows a challenge to paternity, at any time, requires DNA tests when requested, and their ruling is bound by the results of said tests, then it becomes irrelevant. As long as it's possible for a man to be forced to pay for a kid that isn't his, when he didn't knowingly agree to take care of another man's child, it's at the very least a reasonable concern for men to have.

For the underlined I mean legal adoption, where it's a process that stands alone, and must be specifically requested through legal channels.

 

[Malintent]

I don't get this definition. I don't see how "Have sex with me or I'll dump you" counts as rape anymore than "Buy me a car or I'll dump you" counts as theft. If somebody feels that maintaining the relationship is more important than abtstaining from sex or avoiding a large purchase, that is a choice they're free to make. It may make their partner a dick for giving them a difficult choice, but it doesn't make their partner a criminal.

It's the same pattern we see over and over--the idea that choices shouldn't have bad consequences. If the world is a good place a person should never have to choose between two evils. Thus if faced with such a choice the other guy must be in the wrong.

You either believe that your point of view is reasonable and likely shared by others or you believe you are crazy and no one shares your view.
If you don't think that you are uniquely crazy, then this point of view you are describing that is shared by others is exactly the problem with the study. The study did not seem to query about rape, but about if the world is that "good place" you wish it to be.