College campus rape rate 10 times higher than Detroit’s? Don’t believe everything the Justice Department tells you

Apart from the hair-raising 25 percent figure, the SVCW study reports that when those categorized as rape victims were asked if what they described was rape, nearly 50 percent said “no.” Further, 80 percent of the subjects researchers labeled as rape victims stated that the incident resulted in neither physical or emotional injuries. Only 5 percent of those identified as victims of rape actually reported the incident. “If an attorney defending a rapist were to use this, they’d say ‘Well, what’s the big deal? 80 percent of women who are raped don’t have any adverse affects,’” Gilbert said.

“It expands the definition in a way that it includes a lot of events — you know sexual activity at that age can be confusing, there is regret after, there are break ups, all kinds of things that go on,” Gilbert said.

But, according to Sampson many women do not actually realized they have been raped. “It often doesn’t register as rape to women because it does not look like the image they have in their mind. It turns out that image is not the most common type of rape and that is why so many people are able to get away with it,” she said.

Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald put Sampson’s rape report numbers up against Detroit’s, a city with one of the highest violent crime rates of any city in the country. In that city, at the time of the report’s release, the violent crime rate was 2.4 percent, which includes crimes of rape, murder, assault and robbery.

“If 25 percent of all college women were experiencing a violent crime rate that was 10 times higher than anything experienced in the most violent areas, colleges would be transformed. They would be shut down,” Mac Donald told TheDC. “Parents would not be clamoring to get their daughters into Harvard and Yale and Brown and Wesleyan and every other college. You would have a massive revamping of admissions processes because what this statistic says is that colleges are letting in tens of thousands of violent criminals.”

While reports such as Nightline’s scream about an epidemic, Mac Donald says college rape hotlines are silent. “I mean they are so desperate to find rape that at Yale, for instance, they have thrown out the rule that the accuser has the right to confront his victim, which is a cornerstone of our Anglo-Saxon common law heritage. This is at Yale.”

Gilbert said that the desire to inflate the numbers comes down to funding. “These studies have been used to get funding for women’s centers on college campuses,” Gilbert said. “I call it advocacy research, these people mean well and have legitimate concerns. But at some point they exaggerate so much that it is no longer a problem but the norm and with studies like this they risk doing just that.”

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