[Trigger Warning! This post includes a sample question from a study which asked graphic questions about rape.]

(I know that some “Alas” readers looked at the title of this blog post and said “well, no kidding: isn’t that obvious?” But I still think it’s valuable to be able to point to proof. Perhaps this research will lead to the NCVS improving its design in the future.)

I just read an interesting new report about the design of surveys measuring rape prevalence.¹

The author, Bonnie Fisher, conducted two almost identical surveys of women in college. (Both surveys were conducted in 1997). In the first survey, respondents were asked a series of 12 behaviorally specific sexual victimization screening questions, such as “Since school began in the Fall 1996, has anyone made you have oral sex by force or threat of harm? By oral sex, I mean did someone’s mouth or tongue make contact with your vagina or anus or did your mouth or tongue make contact with someone else’s genitals or anus.” These screening questions are built on the approach developed by Mary Koss in her influential rape prevalence studies in the 1980s, which have been oft-criticized by conservatives.

In the second survey, respondents were asked the sexual violence screening questions from the governments National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS, along with the FBI’s compilations of police data, is the Federal government’s primary way of measuring crime in the US.

A bit of history: The NCVS used to be called the NCS (National Crime Survey), and didn’t ask about rape or sexual victimization at all; rapes were only counted if respondents brought up their rapes after being asked if they had been “attacked.” In the 1980s and 1990s, in response to feminist criticism, the government redesigned the NCS into the NCVS. Now, along with dozens of other crime-related questions, respondents are asked if they’ve experienced “Any rape, attempted rape, or other type of sexual attack.” They’re also asked:

Incidents involving forced or unwanted sexual acts are often difficult to talk about. Have you been forced or coerced to engage in unwanted sexual activity by—(a) Someone you didn’t know before—(b) A casual acquaintance—OR (c) Someone you know well?

This is a big improvement from not asking about rape or sexual violence at all — but it’s still pretty vague, compared to the behaviorally-specific questions.

In both surveys, each screening question “the respondent reports (answers “yes” to) is then followed up with a detailed incident report that contains multiple questions about what occurred during the incident. The responses to these questions are then used to classify the type of victimization that occurred.”²

But even though the two studies were mostly identical, apart from the questions used,³ the results were very different. Using the behaviorally specific screening questions, Fisher found that 19 out of 1000 female students had been raped since the beginning of the Fall term of school.⁴ In contrast, using the Federal government’s screening questions from the National Crime Victimization Survey, two out of 1000 female students had been raped since the beginning of the Fall term.

This makes it seem likely that the National Crime Victimization Survey, the USA’s primary method of measuring crime, severely underestimates how often rape occurs.

1. Bonnie S. Fisher, “The Effects of Survey Question Wording on Rape Estimates: Evidence From a Quasi-Experimental Design,” in Violence Against Women Volume 15 Number 2 February 2009 pages 133-147. Link. (back)
2. Quoted from “Measuring the Sexual Victimization of Women: Evolution, Current Controversies, and Future Research”, by Bonnie S. Fisher and Francis T. Cullen. Link. (back)
3. There were two more significant differences between the two surveys. The first survey was described to respondents as a study of “unwanted sexual experiences that women may experience during college.” The second survey, like the National Crime Victimization Survey, was given a crime context, and described as a study of “criminal victimization that women many experience during college.”

   The last difference is that the second survey, modeled after the NCVS, actually used a slightly broader definition of rape, including incidents of “psychological coercion as well as physical force.” (back)

4. The surveys were conducted in February through May 1997. (back)

In a speech, self-described “conservative feminist” Christina Hoff Sommers said:

Let me turn to my second major objection to contemporary feminism: its reckless disregard for the truth. In doing research for my books, I looked carefully at some standard feminist claims about women and violence, depression, eating disorders, pay equity and education. What I found is that most –- not all —- but most of the victim statistics are, at best, misleading –- at worst, completely inaccurate. [...]

I partly agree with Sommers: Too many feminists — including those we rely on to get facts right (such as academics and published writers) — have been careless about fact-checking their claims. Critiquing a textbook on domestic violence, Sommers writes:

Zorza also informs readers that “Between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency room in America are there because of domestic violence.” This claim is ubiquitous in the feminist canon. But is it false. There are two legitimate studies on emergency room admissions: one by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and another by the Centers for Disease Control. The results of both indicate that domestic violence is a serious problem, but that it is far down on the list of reasons women go to emergency rooms. Approximately one half of one percent of women in emergency rooms are there seeking treatment for injuries from domestic violence.

Sommers cites a second recent textbook, The Penguin Atlas Of Women In The World, which repeats the same error. And she’s right — it is an error. (Although, as I’ll show in a future post, Sommers’ counter-claims are just as false.)

I think this is the strongest of Sommers’ claims. Sommers is right to say that “false assertions, hyperbole and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism in general.” And many errors could easily be avoided if authors just checked primary sources — something that professional writers and academics should do routinely.

Within feminism, there’s sometimes too little skepticism regarding statistics and news stories which emphasize harms against women. We’ve created a culture which does a rotten job of self-correction.

But although she has a point, Sommers is still substantially wrong, for two reasons. First, Sommers conflates unambiguous errors of fact — which will inevitably happen sometimes, especially in a movement the size of modern-day feminism — with well-reasoned disagreements. And secondly, Sommers’ own work is full of errors, and at times actually deceptive.

In her lecture, Sommers writes:

Some of you are probably thinking –- the literature on feminism is vast and complex –- there are bound to be some mistakes. So what? But I and other investigators have not found “some mistakes.” What we have found is a large body of blatantly false information. The Domestic Violence Law textbook and the Penguin Atlas of Women in the World are not the exception. They are the rule.

So here’s Sommers’ argument:

1) Feminist writers sometimes repeat “blatantly false information.”

2) This errors are the rule, not the exception. This is documented in the works of Christina Hoff Sommers and “other investigators.”

3) Therefore, feminism, as a rule, consists of “a large body of blatantly false information.”

The trick here is in point 2. Sommers wants us to believe that her critiques of feminism, as well as those by “other investigators,” are filled with examples of feminists making unambiguous factual errors. But that’s not true. In Sommer’s book Who Stole Feminism?, Sommers does catch feminists making some unambiguous errors, but most of the book is taken up by subjective political disagreements, not by fact-checking.

In order to accept that Sommers’ work demonstrates that a “reckless disregard for truth” is the “rule,” “not the exception,” we’d have to accept that anytime a feminist disagrees with Christina Hoff Sommers — because such disagreements take up most of Sommers’ work — that is evidence of a reckless disregard for the truth. But of course, it’s no such thing.

So what do I mean when I say subjective political disagreements? By “subjective political disagreements,” I mean questions that reasonable, honest people, basing their opinion on well-founded evidence, can disagree with Christina Hoff Sommers on.

I will focus on one example: the rape prevalence research of Mary Koss. Koss’ research is probably the single example that “conservative feminists” and their allies have used most often to “prove” feminist dishonesty, ¹ starting in the early 1990s in books like Sommers’ own Who Stole Feminism?, and continuing to this day (Heather MacDonald published an attack on Koss’ research just last year). According to the Independent Woman’s Forum,² Koss’ research is the “number one feminist myth” in America.

So what was Koss’ rape research? In the 1980s, Koss pioneered a new approach to surveying populations about their past experiences with rape. Where previous surveys measured rape prevalence by asking respondents a single, sometimes hilariously vague question (”Has anybody ever attacked you in any other way?”), Koss asked a series of comparatively specific questions (”Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man threatened or used some degree of a physical force (twisting your arm, holding you down, etc.) to make you?”) about respondents’ experiences.

Koss’ study of “hidden rape” proved three important facts, which feminists and criminologists had long suspected: that rape happened much more frequently than official numbers indicated; that most rapes aren’t committed by strangers; and that most rapes are never reported to police or other authorities.

Koss’ study, in the decades since, has led two parallel lives. In one life — a life lived in books funded by right-wing foundations, anti-feminist websites, and the like — Koss’ work is an enduring symbol of feminist dishonesty and deception, and is considered a discredited joke, trotted out for rehashed debunkings every couple of years.

In another life, however — a life lived among academic experts — Koss’ work has been amazingly successful. Decades later, her work is respectfully cited in peer-reviewed studies — a few years ago I found that just two of Koss’ articles had been cited over six hundred times.³

Although subsequent research has arguably improved on Koss’ 1980s work, her insight — that rape victims are more likely to recount their experiences in response to a series of behaviorally-specific questions — is accepted by virtually all published rape prevalence researchers. And Koss’ central findings (described above) have been replicated in study after study, including two major studies conducted by the Federal government.

By ordinary academic standards, a frequently-cited study which has been replicated multiple times is solid work. That’s not to say that Koss’ study was perfect — no study ever is — but citations plus replication is the gold standard.

Of course, reasonable people can sometimes disagree with professional researchers, and Sommers and other “investigators” are entitled to their opinions.⁴ But Sommers’ position on Koss’ research isn’t that reasonable people can disagree. Instead, she and other “investigators” have repeatedly used Koss’ research as their major example of feminist lying, even though Koss’ results are widely accepted by experts and have been replicated over and over.

This is the central dishonesty of Sommers’ thesis: She claims her work shows that feminists “as a rule” have “reckless disregard for the truth,” but most of her book concerns matters that an honest person could easily disagree with Christina Hoff Sommers about.⁵

Sommers has to frame all her disagreements with mainstream feminism as feminist lying, because that is the basis of her case against feminism. If she admits that reasonable, honest feminists can disagree with Christina Hoff Sommers, she loses her claim that modern feminism consists of “a large body of blatantly false information… at best, misleading –- at worst, completely inaccurate.”

* * *

Earlier this post, I said that “Sommers’ own work is full of errors, and at times actually deceptive.” In my next post in this series, I’ll back that statement up, using her discussion of emergency room admissions as my example.

This post appears both at “Alas, a Blog” and at “Blog By Barry.” To facilitate intra-feminist dialog, the comments at “Alas” are only open to feminists, while the comments at “Blog By Barry” are open to all.

1. Think I’m exaggerating? Here is an incomplete list of books which rehash the “conservative feminist” arguments against Koss’ research: The Morning After by Katie Roiphe; The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism by Carrie Lukas; Dead End Feminism by Elisabeth Badinter; Lip Service by Kate Fillion; Tax-funded Politics by James T. Bennett; A Nation of Victims by Charles J. Sykes; Moral Panic: Biopolitics Rising by John Feteke; The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order‎ by Rene Denfeld; The Myth of Male Power by Warren Farrell; Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? by Warren Farrell, Steven Svoboda, & James P. Sterba. It’s likely there are additional books I’m unaware of, not to mention dozens of articles and hundreds of website. (back)
2. A Sommers-influenced “conservative feminist” think tank. (back)
3. In Who Stole Feminism, Sommers claims that Koss’s work is frequently cited by activists but “not so much by established scholars in the field of rape research.” It would in fact be hard to name a scholar of rape prevalence who has been cited more often in the professional literature. (back)
4. To delve into the details of the debate, including detailed responses to the arguments most often brought up by Sommers and other “investigators,” see my past posts about the Koss controversy. (back)
5. It’s not just rape prevalence research; I could make similar arguments for how Who Stole Feminism? treats topics like domestic violence, education, the wage gap, etc…. (back)

In the National Review Online, and also on the IWF blog, IWF vice-prez Carrie Lukas critiques of Mary Koss’ groundbreaking study of rape prevalence. Lukas’ target is Koss’ finding that 1 in 4 college women has experienced either rape or attempted rape since age 14.

The one-in-four statistic… was derived from a survey of 3,000 college women in 1982. Researchers used three questions to determine if respondents had been raped: Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs? Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man threatened or used some degree of physical force… to make you? And, have you had sexual acts…when you didn’t want to because a man threatened to use some degree of physical force… to make you?

Based on women’s responses, researchers concluded that 15 percent of women surveyed had been raped and 12 percent had experienced an attempted rape. Therefore, 27 percent of women … more than one in four … were either the victims of rape or attempted rape. This is the origin of the one-in-four statistic.

Yet other data from that same survey undercut its conclusion. While alcohol surely plays a part in many rape cases, the survey’s wording invites the label of rape victim to be applied to anyone who has ever drank too much, had a sexual encounter, and then regretted it later.

Yes, that’s a concern - out of context, I’ve always found Koss’ question about alcohol distressingly ambiguous.

However, it’s not enough to express concern. We should also ask, what does evidence say? Anti-feminists have been repeating this criticism of Koss’ survey for at least 15 years, but I’ve never seen one provide a speck of evidence that the question, in the context of a survey about rape and sexual coercion, is actually misunderstood by respondents to mean “have you ever had sex while drunk and regretted it in the morning?”

In fact, evidence shows that Lukas is wrong. Researchers Martin Schwartz and Molly Leggett tested the disputed question empirically back in 1999.¹ They surveyed students with a modified version of Koss’ survey, which substituted this question for Koss’ original alcohol and drugs question:

Have you engaged in sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to but were so intoxicated under the influence of alcohol or drugs that you could not stop it or object?

If Lukas and other critics are correct to believe that Koss’ question creates a significant “false yes” problem, leading Koss to overestimate rape prevalence, then a significantly larger proportion of students would have answered “yes” to Koss’ original question than to Schwartz and Leggett’s rewritten version. So what actually happened? Rewriting the question made no difference at all - 17% percent of students surveyed by Schwartz and Leggett were found to have been raped, a number basically identical to Koss’ 15%. This proves that Lukas is wrong - Koss’ results are not caused by students saying “yes” because of morning-after regrets.

This result is unsurprising, because Koss and her co-researchers did extensive validity testing of the questions to make sure that they weren’t misunderstood. If a lot of students had misunderstood the question as referring to next-morning regrets, the question would have been rewritten early in the process. (So why didn’t Lukas mention the validity testing? For that matter, why didn’t she mention Schwartz and Leggett’s 1999 research?)

Lukas continues:

In addition, only 25 percent of the women whom researchers counted as being raped described the incident as rape themselves.

This misstates, in a subtle but very important way, what Koss’ study asked. 73% answered no to the question, “it was definitely rape” (emphasis added).

We have to consider context: we’re talking about young women, most of whom were raped by someone they knew (usually someone they were dating and had already been sexually fooling around with), who were in high school over 20 years ago, when discussions of date rape were extremely rare. It is any surprise that most of them weren’t positive that their experience was “definitely” rape?

In the real world, women who are raped - even in situations which anyone would call rape - are frequently, for whatever reason, not prepared to name what happened to them “rape,” let alone “definitely” rape. As Schwartz and Leggett noted, even among women who were physically forced or drugged into absolute helplessness - experiences that even the most determined anti-feminists will ruefully admit are rape - many or most refuse to label their experience “rape.”

What are the implications of deciding, as Lukas does, that if the victim doesn’t say it was ‘definitely’ rape, it’s not? Consider these statistics from Koss’ survey: 70% of the alleged rape victims in Koss’ study resisted by physically struggling with the man, and 84% tried to reason with him to no avail. The large majority reported having sex when they didn’t want to due to force or threat of force.

Lukas’ argument is that it doesn’t matter if the woman resisted physically, tried to reason with the man, and felt they had unwanted sex due to force or threat of force; rape isn’t defined by non-consent, it’s defined by whether or not the victim checks “yes” by the words “it was definitely rape.” Should anyone be comfortable with that logic? Should the law really be that even if someone physically holds down an unwilling woman and shoves his penis into her vagina by force, it can’t be rape if the victim, for any reason, doesn’t say it’s “definitely” rape? That must be what Lukas thinks, if she applies her logic consistently, but does it make any sense?

Lukas goes on:

The survey found that four in ten of the survey’s rape victims, and one in three victims of attempted rape, chose to have intercourse with their so-called attacker again.

This critique of Koss just restates the old “a woman who stays must not really have been abused” myth. It’s bullshit when said regarding battered women, and it’s bullshit when said regarding raped girls and women, too.

In Lukas’ fantasy world, of course a subsequent encounter - which may or may not be voluntary - proves that the earlier encounter wasn’t rape. The real world isn’t that tidy. It’s extremely common for victims of abuse to stay with their abuser for a while - certainly long enough for another sexual encounter.

Marcella at Abyss2Hope (before she started guest blogging here) addressed this, writing:

From personal experience I can speak to this paradox. My boyfriend didn’t fit the profile of a rapist as I’d been taught (a monster who snatches girls off the street) so even though what happened to me was rape, I couldn’t accept that he meant to treat me that way. I couldn’t accept that the guy who had been in my life nearly my whole life and who was one of my brothers’ best friends could be a rapist.

Looked at without understanding, people could think I decided to have intercourse with my boyfriend again. I did no such thing. It took a second rape (when I was still in shock from the first rape) before it began to sink in that the first time hadn’t been a fluke. He hadn’t mistaken the signals of non-consent.

Two rapes by the same person don’t cancel each other out or imply consent.

If you still don’t understand, think of it this way:

On the positive side of the scale I had 10 plus years of fun when this guy was around.
On the negative side of the scale I had less than 1 day of unimaginable pain and betrayal.

(I really recommend reading Marcella’s entire post).

Finally, Lukas concedes that “Another study…. found that one in eight American women … about 12 percent … had been victimized.” She makes it sound like this study stands alone. In fact, study after study after study - including major studies by the federal government - have found that between 10% and 18% of American women are raped at some point in their lives. These studies have used a variety of methods, worded the questions in various ways, and in some cases used extensive interviews to confirm that the questions were not misunderstood. There is no longer any legitimate argument over this matter; Koss was right to say that there is a great deal of “hidden rape” unmeasured by FBI and official statistics, and her anti-feminist critics were wrong to accuse her of deceit and exaggeration.

In social science, replication is considered the strongest evidence; if a finding is replicated by independent studies using various methods, it is considered strong. Koss’ findings, by this standard, are strong. This is a settled question. Rather than continuing to slandar Koss and distort her findings, the IWF should throw its political weight behind rape-prevention measures, such as anti-rape education aimed at middle schoolers.

In Marissa’s comments, Just Another Disenfranchised Father wrote:

However, I think that the point of Lukas’s article was not to suggest that going back to the purported rapist means that a rape has not taken place. I think she, and Christina Hoff Sommers, are pointing out the intrinsic inconsistencies of the survey which resulted in the 1 in 4 statistic and this makes that statistic suspect.

This makes no sense. If Lukas doesn’t believe that future sex encounters establish that all prior sex encounters were consensual, then where is the “intrinsic inconsistency”? The two things are inconsistant only if you believe that in a large majority of abusive relationships, the abused party leaves the abuser immediately after any case of serious abuse; but we know that’s not the case.

PLEASE NOTE
Comments for this post are open only to feminist and pro-feminist posters. Non-feminists may respond to the identical post at Creative Destruction.

1. Schwartz, Martin D. and Molly S. Leggett (1999), “Bad Dates or Emotional Trauma? The Aftermath of Campus Sexual Assault,” Violence Against Women 5(3): 251-271. (back)

The Happy Feminist, Feministe, and The Debate Link have been discussing (seemingly) clear-cut rape cases in which the victim herself doesn’t agree she was raped. Here’s one of the examples from The Happy Feminist’s time as a prosecutor:

In another of Happy Feminist’s examples, a woman is forced to have sex by her boyfriend, but doesn’t believe it’s rape because she’s had consensual sex with him on other occasions.

Why do some women not believe it’s rape unless she resisted - or not believe it’s rape when their husbands or boyfriends force them to have sex? There are lots of possible reasons, but let’s not forget the simple fact that women are part of our society. There are a lot of myths about rape which have currency in our society - all of society, not men exclusively. Neither being a woman nor being a rape victim will automatically prevent belief in those rape myths. As Happy writes:

Does saying that women can be raped, without labeling the event as “rape,” contradict the feminist belief that women must be believed, in all circumstances? Well, insofar as such a belief exists, it contradicts it. But I doubt that belief exists among many feminists today. I doubt any feminists believe that women are incapable of being mistaken about what the law says rape is, for example.

The idea of privileging women’s view is called “standpoint theory.” But as Elisabeth Anderson points out, standpoint theory has virtually always been contested within feminism:

It’s also important to understand that when feminists have spoken of “believing women” regarding rape, that’s said in the context of how society has habitually refused to believe women. On another thread, Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff wrote something that is extremely applicable to this question (although Cheryl was writing in a different context).

The point is, when feminists say women who have been raped must be believed, that’s in a specific context of counteracting the traditional belief that women habitually falsely accuse men of rape (in the words of Sir Matthew Hale, rape “is an accusation easy to be made, hard to be proved, but harder to be defended by the party accused, though innocent”). But nothing in that context applies to women who - due to loyalty to the rapist, or acceptance of rape myths, or ignorance of the law, or any other reason - don’t recognize their own rapes as rapes. It’s ridiculous to believe, as some anti-feminists have suggested, that “believing women” means feminists are obligated to give men who have in fact committed rape a pass whenever the victim isn’t sure it’s rape.

* * *

David at The Debate Link points to State v Rusk, a case discussed in one of his law school classes. From the victim’s testimony in that case:

In David’s class, all of the male students agreed this was unambiguously rape.

First of all, I think we need to be careful about assuming a pattern exists based on a single anecdote. As David acknowledges, this may have more to do with the environment of law school than with how men in general view rape.

Secondly, I think David’s argument about what “most recent feminist scholarship” says is a misunderstanding on David’s part. For example, feminist researcher Mary Koss has published a study which found that many women who are raped, do not identify what happened to them as rape (or at least, not as “definitely” rape). Koss’ findings were popularized in the book I Never Called It Rape; the title of the book is a reference to women who do not identify their own rape experiences as rape.

Among feminist researchers who study rape, Koss’s research is widely accepted. It is primarily anti-feminists, such as Christina Hoff Sommers and Katie Roiphe, who have argued that Koss’ findings in this regard contradict feminist beliefs. The anti-feminist arguments radically oversimplify what feminist standpoint theory says, and also ignore the ways that standpoint theory itself is contested within feminism.

David - who certainly isn’t an anti-feminist - acknowledges that standpoint theory has been heavily contested within feminism (although I think he’s mistaken when he says criticism of standpoint theory is mainly a third-wave thing). But David still sees harms in the privileging of women’s views over men’s within feminism. I do think there’s a serious discussion to be had there (David could certainly find some support for his view in the writings of bell hooks); many feminists believe that a feminist transformation of society will have to include a feminist transformation of how men think and act, and it’s hard to see how that can happen if men’s views are unwelcome in feminism.

But although that may be a legitimate discussion, it’s also a different discussion. The strongest case for including male views within feminism comes not from looking at how women have absorbed rape myths, but from issues relating to how the “cult of masculinity” harms and warps men (which leads in turn to some men harming women). I don’t think that framing the discussion of men’s place in feminism within a discussion of rape, as David has, is likely to be productive, or to reassure women who are skeptical of what, if anything, men can offer feminism.

* * *

There is one piece of news from the research on rape which I think is worth pointing out. In Mary Koss’ study of college women’s experiences, about three-fourths of the women who had been raped, did not identify their experience as “definitely” rape. That study took place in the mid-eighties, about two decades ago. A more recent study of college women’s experiences, conducted by the Federal government, found that about half of the women who had been raped, identified their experience as rape. If these results are comparable, that suggests that rape myths - such as “it’s not rape if I didn’t resist enough” or “it’s not rape if it’s my boyfriend” - may be less likely to be believed by women today, compared to 20 years ago. Let’s hope that trend continues.

[Edited to add the quote from Cheryl.]

On a right-wing website, Joe Kovacs writes:

Kovacs goes on to list about 60 cases drawn from the U.S., Britain and Australia. Skimming through the list, he includes at least one case in which the teacher was acquitted, and other cases that seem like a stretch, but let’s put that aside.

I’m struck by his use of the word “epidemic.”

When Mary Koss’ study of rape prevalence was first published, some feminists said the study (which found that about 12% of women in college had been raped at some point in their lives) showed that there was an “epidemic” of rape in the US. Influential critics of feminism, such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Katie Roiphe, and Neil Gilbert, argued that to use the word “epidemic” was a vast exaggeration.

Let’s suppose that Koss was wrong by a hundred times (although she wasn’t), and that only 0.12% of women are raped in their lifetimes. Even so, that would still be thousands and thousands and thousands more girls and women raped, than the number of boys who have been raped or molested by female teachers. I’m not in any way excusing what was done to those boys, of course. But I think it’s curious how flexible the standard for “epidemic” status is.

In the comments to an earlier thread, Mousehounde wrote:

As to the topic: I do not understand the fixation on trying to discredit Koss’ study. What difference does it make if the rate is not 1 in 4? So what if the numbers are different? Is there some magical cut off point in the numbers when it becomes something that doesn’t need fixing or attention? If the incidence of rape is 1 in 4, then there is a problem. But if the numbers are lower, 1 in 8, 1 in 20, then rape really isn’t a problem and women just need to stop whining about it I guess.

There’s a bit of a history there. The attack on Koss’ work was made popular among anti-feminists by Katie Roiphe and Christina Hoff Sommers. (Roiphe, in particular, was very convincing - I remember reading her 1993 New York Times Sunday Magazine attack on Koss and feeling livid at those lying feminists.)

Roiphe and Sommers, in turn, both cribbed their arguments from Neil Gilbert (not in a dishonest way; they both credit Gilbert in their books. By the way, Roiphe’s endnotes don’t cite a single piece of writing by Koss; her sources were all secondhand.) But Gilbert wasn’t arguing about the difference between “1 in 8″ and “1 in 20″ or whatever it is anti-feminists argue nowadays. From the conclusion to Gilbert’s seminal Koss-attacking essay (published in the magazine Public Interest in 1991):

The difference between a sexual-assault rate of 25 or 50 percent and one of 0.1 percent is more than a matter of degree. It is the difference between the view that male-female relations are normally enjoyable for most people and the view that they are inherently antagonistic and dangerous. To argue for the higher rate is to try to shift our understanding of the battle between the sexes; the model suggested by Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn is to be replaced by one in which Conan the Barbarian violently thrashes his cavemate.

There’s a lot to unpack there (Conan wasn’t a caveman!), but note the statistical point: He thought he was arguing between 1 in 2 (a number he got, I suspect, from Diana Russell’s studies), 1 in 4 (Koss’ number, if you include attempted rapes) and 1 in 1000. That’s a real difference. That’s a difference that matters. Arguing about that difference makes sense.

Where did Gilbert get 1 in 1000 from? From the Bureau of Justice Statistic’s (aka BJS) estimate of how many rapes occur annually. It’s appropriate, considering how much the anti-feminist movement has mangled statistics to attack Koss over the years, that the trend was begun by a scholar so careless with statistics that he’d directly compare a lifetime statistic to an annual statistic and think he was saying something meaningful. (Of course, he’s not the only anti-feminist to make that particular error.)

What’s happened since? Well, a lot of studies - including three major nationwide studies - have replicated three of Koss’ major findings (that something in the range of 10% to 15% of American women are raped at some point in their lifetime; that the typical rapist is not a stranger to the victim; and that the vast majority of rapes are never reported to the police). All three of the studies were influenced by Koss’ earlier work, in my opinion. The BJS admitted that the survey instrument they used to measure rape back in 1991 was badly designed, and have revised their methods somewhat, although some problems remain. Koss’ work continues to be frequently cited in the peer-reviewed literature.

In short, Koss’ findings are widely accepted within the mainstream research community. Yet you’d never guess that from reading right-wing and anti-feminist literature; most anti-feminists who follow the issue believe that Koss has been entirely discredited. Why haven’t they given up already?

Furthermore, it’s now been nearly two decades since Koss’ study was published. As groundbreaking as Koss’ study was, other, more recent research is probably more significant at this point. So why is Koss still the target, rather than (say) the Centers for Disease Control, which ran a major, recent study replicating many of Koss’ findings?

Well, because for most anti-feminists the critique of Koss’ work was never really about how common rape is. Instead, Koss’ work was exhibit A in the prosecutor’s case against feminism for Malicious Anti Male Lying. Criticizing the CDC, which is not a feminist organization, doesn’t suit that purpose. The target must be a feminist, like Koss. And to admit they were wrong about Koss would imply that they might be wrong about their caricature of feminists as a bunch of vicious man-hating evil Feminazis - and to most anti-feminists, that’s simply unthinkable.

And that, as well, is the reason I keep on posting about Koss. Not because I think there’s an important difference between 1 in 8 and 1 in 15 or whatever - there isn’t. Nor is it only because I think Mary Koss is, if anything, a hero, and the constant attacks on her character deserve rebuttal.

Rather, I continue arguing with the anti-feminists because their implied view that “all feminists are liars” needs to be opposed. The more they succeed in getting policy-makers or the general public to accept their view of feminists are manhating liars, the harder it will be for feminists to succeed in their policy goals. Trying to disprove the anti-feminists regarding their chosen Exhibit A is, I think, worthwhile.

(This post is a copy of an email I just sent to Glenn Sacks. Glenn Sacks is the host of “His Side,” a men’s rights radio show. Tonight’s guest was Hugo Schwyzer. I thought Hugo did a terrific job, but I won’t comment further on that here - I figure that Hugo will probably post about it on his own blog, so if I’ve got anything to say about that I can wait and post it in Hugo’s comments.)

(More “Alas” posts on the Mary Koss “controversy.”)

Glenn -

Thanks for letting me speak on your show tonight! It was fun. If I ever call again, I’ll try to be more eloquent.

After I hung up, you described Mary Koss’ study - and, specifically, her finding in the 80s that 1 in 4 women had been victims of rape or attempted rape - as “discredited.” I have to wonder - what does the word “discredited” mean to you?

Usually, when talking about an academic study, a “discredited” study is one whose findings have been disproven by later studies, and which is no longer cited in peer-reviewed journals.

In contrast, Koss’ major findings have, as I imagine you know, been supported by many recent studies, including two nationwide studies conducted by the Federal government. As for citations, this past May I looked up Koss’ two Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology reports on the “ISI Web of Science Citation Index.” At that time, 611 articles came up that cited one or both articles since 1992; the most recent citation was less than a week old. I skimmed the first few pages, and as far as I could tell the citations were respectful, not cautionary or dismissive.

Of course, Koss has published facets of her study in many places besides those two articles. My guess is that a complete search for citations of all Koss’ publications based on this study, would find well over a thousand citations.

I realize, of course, that Koss’ work has been widely criticized in non-peer-reviewed publications by anti-feminists and men’s rights advocates. However, surely that alone doesn’t make it fair to call an academic study “discredited”! Koss’ major findings have been replicated, and her work continues to be frequently cited in peer-reviewed journals. By any reasonable standard for judging academic work, that’s just the opposite of being discredited.

Barry

[Update: Edited to correct the spelling of Glenn's name. Sorry 'bout that, Glenn!]

A while ago, I was on some anti-feminist website debating rape prevalence statistics, and of course the “1 in 4″ figure came up. If you’re a feminist, you may not be familiar with the figure; but among anti-feminists, the “1 in 4″ figure is considered the ultimate proof of feminist mendacity or something like that.

Here’s the short version: In the 1980s, an academic named Mary Koss created a groundbreaking study of unreported rape, which surveyed college women about their lifetime experiences with coerced sex. Koss found that roughly 1 in 4 women in college had experienced rape or attempted rape at some point in their lives. Many people (both feminist and otherwise) have misstated this statistic as “1 in 4 women are raped.” In fact, if you exclude attempted rapes, the number is closer to 1 in 8. (I consider this a distinction without much difference; in either case, rape is terrifyingly common.)

Much controversy ensued, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

Anyhow, on that anti-feminist discussion board, one of the resident anti’s asked me:

Here’s my reply:

Did I ever claim that most campus feminists are relying directly on the Koss study? I don’t think they are.

Where did it come from? Let me answer that with a question: did you ever play “telephone” when you were a kid?

Other sources have frequently reported the figure as “1 in 4 women surveyed on campus has been a victim of rape or attempted rape.” There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s a correct way of reporting the stat. However, it quickly evolves into “1 in 4 women are raped!” when it gets spread from person to person along informal, non-peer-reviewed lines. The shorter, punchier (albeit false) version of the statistic is easier for people to remember, easier to paint on a signboard for a “Take Back the Night” march, and easier for anti-feminists to remember when they want to make feminist scholars like Dr. Koss sound like extremists.

It is, in fact, the exact same system that has led to the widespread belief among anti-feminists on internet boards like this one that Koss’ study said that “1 in 4 women have been raped.” Some people on these boards have read about Koss’ study in Sommers or Roiphe (etc, etc); those books typically state the correct “1 in 4 experience rape or attempted rape” Koss citation once or twice (and then go on to misstate it over and over). But when the people who have read these books are in online discussions, they end up playing a virtual game of “telephone,” and only the shorter, punchier, inaccurate form of the statistic gets discussed and passed on to the community as a whole.

Similarly, on campus, some 19-year-old feminist sees the Koss statistic cited correctly somewhere, but writes it down or reports it in conversation incorrectly. And she told two friends, and she told two friends, and so on, and so on…

Of course, in both cases it’s not a completely innocent distorting of the statistic, is it? Campus feminists find it easy to accidentally distort the statistic in a way that exaggerates the statistics about rape. Similarly, antifeminists find it easy to accidentally distort the statistic in a way that paints Dr. Koss as a hysterical, inaccurate extremist. In both cases, the distortion happens not because the people distorting the statistic are purposely dishonest; it’s just that most people find it easier not to question statistics that serve their political agenda.

One more thing: When I was in college a few years ago, I was aware of this controversy, and consequently paid a lot of attention to fliers handed out at the women’s center and the like. Some of them screwed things up (sometimes in the way anti-feminists criticizes, sometimes in just random ways), but some actually reported statistics accurately and with correct citations. Needless to say, those latter fliers well never be discussed in any book published with the help of an Olin grant. There’s another distortion going on here - people who only read (or only take seriously) anti-feminist sources for a guide to what’s happening on campus, are getting an only-the-bad-things-are-reported view of campus feminism.

The IWF has criticized Mary Koss’ study of rape incidence over and over for being “commissioned by Ms. Magazine.” I’ve written about this before.

What I didn’t realize until last week (when I was researching this post) is that the IWF has financed a study conducted by the think tank The Institute for American Values (IAV). (The study is the source of much of the talk about the alleged “hook-up culture” on college campuses today).

So, the IWF commissioned a study - just like Ms. They selected researchers, just like Ms.

Hey, wasn’t the IWF claiming that there was something wrong about doing that?

Of course, there are a few differences:

• Koss’ study design was published and presented at conferences years before Ms’s involvement began - proof that Ms didn’t influence the study’s basic design. The “hook up” study design was not published before the IWF got involved.

• Unlike Koss’ study (supervised and funded by the National Institute for Mental Health), the “hook up” study was not independently supervised by a neutral scientific institution.
• Unlike Koss’ study, the “hook up” study did not pass through an academic peer review process before being published.

So either the IWF doesn’t believe that studies are corrupted by being associated with an ideological group, and they were just pretending to believe that to dis Koss…

Or, they do believe that studies are corrupted by association, and they intentionally set out to make a corrupt study.

I really don’t see a third possibility.

* * *

P.S. Just to be clear, this post is not criticizing the “hook up” study. The study is good or bad on its own merits; that the IWF funded it doesn’t matter to me. I’m just pointing out that, yet again, the IWF has shown all the intellectual integrity of a carnival barker.

I wish I had time to make a post of each of these links, but alas… So here they are. Sorry if this post seems a bit abrupt; it’s not because I think the topics under discussion aren’t important.

• Excellent article in the Columbia Journalism Review about how badly news media covers class issues, and in particular, poor people.

• Daddy, Poppa and Me defends a webpage on “Nazi Anti-Jewish Speech vs. Religioius Right Anti-Gay Speech.” My favorite bit:
  But if the Nazis have become such a caricature of evil that nothing they did or said can ever be compared to anything anyone else does or says now or in the future, then the phrase

  “Never again!”

  becomes a useless and trite historical cliche having no force or power to stop hate before it becomes something violent. Do I believe that the FRC has the possibility to become a ‘regime’ that would slaughter my ‘kind’? No, I would be the last to make such a prediction.

  Do I believe the rhetoric of hate and demonization that the FRC uses has the possibility to increase violence and legislative attacks against my family? Yes, most defininitely.

• An article about “honour killings” in Istanbul, the practice of murdering girls and women for having sex, for being suspected of having sex, or even for being raped. The good news is, there is something of a backlash against the practice.
• In “Ideas which look sensible but aren’t,” Daniel Davies explains why it’s not a good idea to lend aid money only to countries with decent human rights records.
• Jon Stewart’s commencement address at William & Mary College.
• The Fifty Minute Hour has a sickening post about how rape-shield laws are not being enforced in one California case.

  UPDATEAnd Pinko Feminist Hellcat has another post on this case, aptly titled “Just when you think the OC rape defense couldn’t get any worse…”

• Death and Disease in Iraq. At least for now, war has made things even worse.
• Kuwaiti women react with caution to move on political rights.
• A useful Women’s Enews article describes and contrasts the Kerry and Bush health plans.
• In Pakistan, Those Who Cry Rape Face Jail.
  Up to 80 percent of the 2,000 women now in Pakistani jails are facing charges related to the Hudood Ordinances, according to Rizvi. Many of the cases involve women being charged with adultery after they have allegedly been raped. Another case involves a woman seeking a divorce who has then been accused of adultery. While few are ever tried and convicted, the stigma and the ordeal can color the rest of their lives.

  “These laws promote injustice and are un-Islamic, denying women the rights given to them in the Koran, and discriminating against the weakest sections of society; women and minorities,” Rizvi says. “It is a flawed legislation that can’t be fixed. Its drafting is flawed. Its motive is flawed.” [...]

  Under the Hudood, punishment of a man for rape must be preceded by his own confession or the testimony of four males of upstanding character who witnessed the act of penetration. Women and non-Muslim witnesses are considered worthless.

• A good article by rape researcher Mary Koss discusses what existing research has shown us, and suggests directions for future research.

[This is a reprint of a post from 2002, following up on the previous post, which is also a reprint from 2002.]

In the comments for my earlier post discussing rape, Rob Lyman wrote:

I did say, at the start of that post, that I was discussing Mary Koss’ survey of college men. But in retrospect, I should have emphasized that there are problems generalizing from a college population to a general population.

However, I’m leery that “we don’t know for certain, because we lack data” sometimes becomes an excuse to ignore the data we do have. (This is an “in general” comment, not a criticism of Rob). To my knowledge, only three U.S. studies have used behaviorally-specific questions to ask how many men commit rape, and only one - the Koss study I cited, which surveyed college students - had a national sample. (I haven’t read the other two yet, but I’m told they found similar results). In other words, the Koss study is the best information we currently have on this subject. And considering how under-studied this area is, it may be the best information we ever get.

From an academic point of view, that’s not good enough. One cannot say in an academic journal, “from the data we have, the number of rapists among college men is pretty damn terrifying, which makes it seem plausible that the number among the general male population may be terrifying as well.”

That’s a reasonable point of view - for academic journals. Outside the academic world, however, it’s sometimes necessary to draw the best inferences we can from imperfect data. It is not reasonable or possible to postpone drawing conclusions and addressing problems until perfect data exists, because it is likely that perfect data will never exist.

So I think Rob was right. I have to admit, it’s theoretically possible that men who go to college are enormously more likely to have committed rape since turning 14, than those who don’t go to college. But - speaking as a non-academic - it doesn’t seem likely.

Also in the comments, Ardinger asks “if 4.5% of men are rapists, what percentage of the women you meet are rape victims?”

According to Dr. Koss’ study (which was conducted in the early to mid eighties), about 12% of college women have been victims of completed rape at some point since age 14.

This result of Koss’ study has been frequently criticized by anti-feminists. But at least three other nationwide studies of lifetime rape prevalence came to similar conclusions; the National Women’s Study found 13% (not available online, sorry), the Centers for Disease Control study found 14.8%, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics study of college women found 10%.

I don’t think there will ever be a single number that people can point to and say “this is the right answer.” Unreported rape is inherently difficult to measure; there will never be a study that someone can’t find reason to doubt, and every new study will raise new questions. But from the best studies currently available, somewhere between 10% and 15% of American women have been raped in their lifetimes.

My conclusion: Maybe the “real” number is that 2% of men commit rape sometime in their life, and 8% of women are raped. Maybe it’s more like 8% and 20%. We’ll never know for sure. But from the data that’s currently available, we can say this: Rape is a scary, serious, widespread national problem. It is not something committed by a freakishly small minority of men (unlike, say, serial killing); it is not something that happens to a small number of women.

Feminists want a society in which rape is rare (or nonexistent), and rapists are freakishly unusual deviants. But the first step in building that society is realizing we’re not there yet; we’re not even close. We’ll never change if we can’t even admit the scope of the problem.

In the comments to Monday’s post about Mary Koss’ rape prevalence research, Donald Johnson asks:

Donald’s question (and that I’ve been posting so much about Koss lately) makes this seem like a good time to reprint this (slightly edited) post from 2002.

* * *

(I swiped the idea for this post, and many of the stats, from this Tim Wise article on racism. The statistics in this post that didn’t come from Tim Wise’s article, came from either the Statistical Abstract of the US 2001 or from the American Jewish Year Book 2001).

Mary Koss’ much-discussed 1987 study of rape prevalence is famous mostly for its fidning that 1 in 8 college women have been victims of rape at some point in their lives. What’s not as well known is that the same study also surveyed thousands of college men, asking them about if they had ever forced a woman to have sex against her will. About 4.5% reported that they had.

It seems to me that we can draw two conclusions from this number (assuming it’s somewhat accurate - see the next post for more discussion of that). First - as even anti-feminists will agree - we can say that the overwhelming majority of men are not rapists. That’s good. Nonetheless, it’s also true that a terrifyingly high number of men have committed rape.

4.5% of the men in the United States is an incredibly high number - that translates into over six million men.

If you added up every US citizen who was officially unemployed or looking for work in 2001, that would be less than the total number of rapists.

If you added up every US citizen who is Jewish, that would still be less than the total number of rapists.

If you added up every teenage boy who had any sort of job - an afterschool job, a summer job, working full-time after dropping out, including all of those - you’d still have over a million fewer people then the total number of rapists.

There are twice as many rapists in the USA as there are single mothers.

For every drunk driver who is in a fatal accident this year, there are over 500 rapists.

If you take every doctor and nurse in the United States; and you added them to every librarian, every cashier, every cop, every postal clerk, and every bank teller in the whole country; you still wouldn’t have as many people as the number of rapists in the United States.

(Think of that a second - think of how often, in your daily life, you’ve seen cops and cashiers and all those other folks. Odds are, you’ve run into rapists more often than that).

To paraphrase Tim Wise: In short, “only” 4.5% of the male population is a lot of people, so that even by the most optimistic assessment of how many men are rapists, there are literally millions out there who not only would but have raped a woman. When combined with those who are less vicious - those who haven’t raped, but would be willing to in the right circumstances, and those who would make excuses for why other men rape, it becomes clear just how real a widespread a problem rape and rape-supportive attitudes are among men today.

As I understand it, the feminist theory is not that every men, or most men, are rapists. It’s that rape is a commonplace enough thing so that at some level most women are to some degree kept in fear of rape, because the possibility is always there.

When I’ve spoken to men, I’ve tried using this example:

4.5% is not a small number of men.

[edited a bit to reflect nobody.really's criticism in the comments]

An anonymous IWF author, criticizing Mary Koss’ famous study of rape incidence (there’s more info in this post, for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about), wrote:

Although the IWF doesn’t say what the purpose of presenting this statistic is, most readers will take it as an indication of how outrageously high Koss’ numbers are. (Indeed, if that isn’t the point, why on earth include the statistic in a critique of Koss at all?)

Such a comparison is wildly unscientific and irresponsible. No legitimate comparisons can be made between a lifetime prevalence self-report survey and the numbers of such incidents that occur on campus in one year. But for the purpose of rebutting the IWF’s bad methodology, I’m going to pretend they can be compared. And unlike the IWF, I’m going to do the math. How far apart are this stat and the numbers given in Koss’ report?

To start with, we need to ask “how many female undergraduates are on an average college campus?” (Koss’ statistic about rape victims included only female undergrads). According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, in 2000 there were 12,450,587 undergrads in the USA. Of those, 55.9%, or 6,959,878, were women. There are 4,096 colleges and universities in the US, which works out to an average of 1,699 female undergrads per college campus.

So of those 1,699 women on a college campus, how many will be victims of rape in a typical year, according to Koss’ numbers? The famous “1 in 4″ figure is a lifetime figure that includes both rape and attempted rape; the “less than one per campus” figure, on the other hand, is about completed rapes within a single year. So we can’t compare those two numbers directly.

Fortunately, Koss’ report includes a calculation of annual incidence of completed rapes only - out of 3,187 undergraduate women Koss surveyed, 207, or 6%, were victims of rape in the past year. Since the average US campus has 1,699 female undergrads, and 6% of 1,699 is 102, according to Koss’ study we’d expect 102 undergraduate women at an average college to be victims of rape each year.

Look again at the statistic the anonymous IWF author is comparing Koss to: “…campus police reported 1,310 forcible sex offenses on U.S. campuses in one year.” So we’re not talking about all the rapes that happen in a single year; just the rapes that happen “on U.S. campuses.”

Koss’ survey asked rape victims if the rape had taken place on or off campus. 14% reported that it had taken place on campus. So out of 102 rapes happening to undergraduate women in a year, according to Koss’ results, we’d expect 15 to actually take place on campus.

But we can’t assume that all 15 reported the incident to campus police. According to Koss, only 5% of rape victims said they had reported the incident to the cops at all. And 5% of 15 is 0.75.

So according to the statistic the IWF offers - a statistic that, clearly, is meant to discredit Koss’ results - there is “an average of fewer than one rape per campus” per year that campus police know about. And according to my calculations, based on Koss’ numbers we’d expect to see - less than one rape known to the cops per college campus per year.

In other words, Koss’ study found exactly what it should have, according to the statistic the IWF author supplied. So how, exactly, does that disprove Koss?

A recent Wendy McElroy column cited this IWF critique of rape prevalence research by Mary Koss. (For those of you who don’t know it, the IWF - or Independent Women’s Forum - is a right-wing anti-feminist think tank.)

Here’s what the IWF has to say:

Here’s a bit of fun trivia: Shortly after the IWF released this piece, I had a debate with an IWF flunky about it on one of their discussion boards (they’ve since taken the debate offline). At the time, I wrote this:

Sometime since then, some enterprising IWF person has stuck in a few citations to works by Mary Koss (otherwise the piece is unchanged). How funny.

Anyway, let’s get on with the fisking, shall we? The IWF wrote:

“Commissioned” implies that Ms. thought up the idea for the study, found a researcher to implement it, and funded it. None of that is true. Koss thought of the study in the 1970s and presented a preliminary paper in 1980, years before Ms’s involvment began (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, v 50 n3 455-457, 1982). Although Ms donated office suffort to help make the 1987 national version of Koss’ study possible, Koss’ approach and design were set in place and published before Ms’ involvement. The study was funded by a grant from the Natinal Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), not by Ms. (The NIMH had more to do with Koss’ study than Ms - they approved of the design and of which tasks Ms was allowed to participate in).

(Curious that the IWF doesn’t mention that Koss was at the time a professor at Kent State, or that her study design was approved by the NIMH, or that it had gone through the peer-review process at the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.)

Again, Koss was doing her research long before Steinem or Ms had heard of Koss.

This is a mis-statement of what the study actually found.

73% answered no to the question, “it was definitely rape”; it’s not safe to conclude from that they’re sure it was not rape!

We have to consider context: we’re talking about young women, most of whom were raped by someone they knew (usually someone they were dating and had already been sexually fooling around with), who were in high school over 20 years ago, when discussions of date rape were extremely rare. It is any surprise that most of them weren’t positive that their experience was “definitely” rape?

We should also look at the implications of deciding, as the IWF in essence does, that “if the victim doesn’t say it was ‘definitely’ rape, it’s not.” 70% of the alleged rape victims in Koss’ study resisted by physically struggling with the man, and 84% tried to reason with him to no avail. The large majority reported having sex when they didn’t want to due to force or threat of force.

The IWF’s argument is essentially that “it doesn’t matter if the woman resisted physically, tried to reason with the man, and felt they had unwanted sex due to force or threat of force; if they didn’t check ‘yes’ next to the words ‘it was definitely rape,’ then it wasn’t rape.” Should anyone be comfortable with that logic?

Really? The article writer must know this because of her strange mental powers, because nothing in Koss’ study supports this statistic.

All we know from the study is that 43% had intercourse with their rapist (or “rapist”) at some later date. We don’t know anything else; we don’t know how many of those later occasions were voluntary and how many were repeat rapes, for example. We do know, however, that the typical rapist is very often a boyfriend - someone the victim is dating before the rape.

So what does this 43% figure really tell us? IMO, it could show that girls who are violently abused (and rape is a form of violent abuse, no less than battery) by boyfriends don’t always immediately break off the relationship. Is that really a shocker, or anything that we should accept as proof that a girl or women can’t really have been raped? (Over 50% of the rape victims in Koss’ study were raped by someone they were dating - and had gone at least as far as “petting above the waist” with them before the rape.) (Also, keep in mind that we’re hardly talking about a group of experienced, sexually confident woman here; over 40% of the rape victims were virgins at the time of the rape.)

This critique of Koss just restates the old “a woman who stays must not really have been abused” myth. It’s bullshit when said regarding battered women, and it’s bullshit when said regarding raped women, too.

Koss’ study (”Scope of rape: Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Higher Education Students”) can be found in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology v 55 (2) p. 162-170, 1987. The research, while not perfect (no study is flawless), is sober and responsible, and certainly not “hysteria.” Don’t take my word for it - or the IWF’s word for it - read it yourself.

I agree. But if the IWF was interested in “truth,” why not give the full information about the study - both that Ms was involved and that it was supervised by the NIMH and peer-reviewed, the stat about later sexual intercourse and the stat about struggling to get away - and let readers judge the truth for themselves? Why didn’t she mention the other studies - including ones by the U.S. Government - which have found results similar to Koss’?

Of course, I have nothing against advocates giving only one side of the story - by and large, that’s what advocates do. But to self-rightiously mouth pieties about “truth” while giving only one side of the story is a bit much. IF you’re seriously going to search for truth, you have to give readers both sides of the story. The IWF critique doesn’t do that.

* * *

Enough with the fisking. Let me just state what I consider the core issues.

The main findings Dr. Koss made about rape (as opposed to about sexual coercion in general) are: One, that many women - somewhere in the general range of 1 in 8 - have been victims of rape at some point in their lifetime. Two, that rape is very rarely reported to police. Third, that rape is usually committed by someone known to the victim, not by a stranger.

All three of these findings were widely suspected when Koss began her study, but had not been verified with social science research.

These three findings have since been upheld by every nationwide survey designed to measure violence against women. That, in social science research, is usually the gold standard - if a finding can be repeated, then it should be taken seriously.

So which are these other studies?

• The NIJ/CDC “National Violence Against Women Study” found that 14.8% of American women experience a completed rape at some time in their lifetime. A typical rape-defining question was worded like this: “Has a man or boy ever made you have sex by using force or threatening to harm you or someone close to you? Just so there is no mistake, by sex we mean putting a penis in your vagina.”
• The Department of Justice’s Sexual Victimization of College Women study included a sub-study in which college women were asked about lifetime incidence of rape (most of the study asked about rape since the beginning of the school year,which isn’t directly comparable to Koss). 10% of the women interviewed reported having been raped at some point in their lifetime. Rape was defined as “unwanted completed penetration by force or the threat of force.”
• There’s also The National Women’s Study (NWS), a large-scale national study which found that 13% of American women have been raped in their lifetime.

At least a dozen other studies have confirmed Koss’ results, but those three are the biggies.

I don’t expect Wendy McElroy to report anything accurately (she does write for FOX, after all). Still, her discussion of Mary Koss in a recent Foxnews column included two sentences, which were a simply amazing example of McElroy’s inability to get facts straight.

Mary Koss, for those who don’t know, is a professor who has done very influential work on designing surveys measuring the prevalence of rape. Debunking Koss is a favorite activity of anti-feminists: Katie Roiphe, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Warren Farrell are just a few of the anti-feminists who have spent a lot of ink attacking Koss and her work.

Anyhow, here are the two sentences:

So what did McElroy get wrong?

1. The study Ms contributed to was published in 1987, not 1985. (There was a Ms Magazine article reporting on Koss’ research, published in ‘85; but an article reporting on a study is not the same thing as the study itself).

2. So where was the study itself published? In The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, not Ms Magazine.
3. The study found that the 1 in 4 had experienced rape or attempted rape, not just rape. (Nor did the ‘85 Ms Magazine article ever use the 1 in 4 statistic, by the way.)
4. The study used standardized survey forms, not interviews.
5. The women were asked dozens and dozens of questions, not just 10.
6. There was a 10-question subsection related to sexual assault and coercion, which is I suppose what McElroy meant to refer to. However, McElroy is still mistaken, because respondents were NOT “deemed to have been raped if any question elicited a ‘yes’ response.”
7. There were 3,187 women surveyed for the study, not 7,000 women as McElroy claims. (Including men, a total of 6,159 people were in Koss’ sample).

None of that is terribly substantial, I know, but it’s still impressive how many factual mistakes McElroy makes in such a short passage.

Also, I’ve been debating this with “Brad” (who I think may be McElroy’s partner or husband) on the ifeminists discussion board.

McElroy also cited this IWF critique of Koss’ study. I’ll tackle the IWF’s critique on Monday, and I promise that post will be more substantive.

* * *

More on Wendy McElroy

More on Mary Koss

This post has been updated since I originally wrote it, to add in the sample size error, and to put in the information about the 1995 Ms article reporting on the research.

I was reading a transcript of a Donahue show (via Ms Musings) themed around the question “are women getting a free ride?,” an episode devoted mainly to anti-feminists Warren Farrell, Marc Angelucci and Peter Allemano (Farrell is the author of the men’s rights classic The Myth of Male Power, Angelucci and Allemano help run the National Coalition of Free Men). Also present was Gloria Allred, there to provide feminist counterpoints, and several more anti-feminists to speak on specific anti-feminist issues (a pinch of bitter divorced men, a sprinkling of anti-Title-IX jocks). Plus some dude from Stuff magazine for comic relief.

As usual, a lot of factual claims got tossed around. Many of those claims are things I know nothing about, and so can’t comment on; but there’s quite a few I do know about and would like to comment on - I expect there will be a bunch of posts from me on this subject.

For the most part, I think Allred did a great job, speaking well and refusing to fit into the women vs. men mold the anti-feminists were trying to press her into. But while aruging that “women have a long way to go,” she said “one out of three [women] will be raped sometime in her lifetime.”

Quoting myself:

According to Dr. Mary Koss’ study (which was conducted in the early to mid eighties), about 15% of college women have been victims of completed rape at some point since age 14.

This result of Koss’ study has been frequently criticized by anti-feminists. But at least three other nationwide studies of lifetime rape prevalence came to similar conclusions; the National Women’s Study found 13% (not available online, sorry), the Centers for Disease Control study found 15%, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics study of college women found 10%.

I don’t think there will ever be a single number that people can point to and say “this is the right answer.” Unreported rape is inherently difficult to measure; there will never be a study that someone can’t find reason to doubt, and every new study will raise new questions. But from the best studies currently available, somewhere between 10% and 15% of American women will be raped in their lifetimes.

So the 33% figure Ms. Allred suggests is way out of line with current research.

Why does this matter? Normally, this isn’t the sort of fact-checking I’d bother posting, because it’s not important to the argument Allred is making: Whether 10% or 33% of women are raped in their lifetime, either way it’s way too high, and either way Allred’s point - that “women still have a long way to go” - is true. From a debate point of view, Ms. Allred’s error isn’t substantial, because correcting the error doesn’t undermine the point she was making.

But there’s more to life than debating. The real statistics, as far as I can make out, are that somewhere between 10% and 15% of American women are raped sometime in their life. That’s terrifying enough; using numbers that are even higher and scarier, especially on national TV, could needlessly frighten people, especially women. The truth is bad enough without exaggeration.

Instapundit links to this interview with professional “anti-feminist feminists” Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers. (The interview comes from “liberal media” PBS).

I can’t claim to know the truth or fiction of everything the anti-fem mavens say. But, going from what I already know about these issues, here are just some of Camille and Christina’s mistakes in this interview:

• Hoff-Sommers refers to Mary Koss’ study - which found that “one in four” female college students had experienced rape or attempted rape at some point in their lifetime (measuring only completed rapes, the number is 15%) - as a “grotesque exaggeration.” Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that Koss’ results didn’t exaggerate the problem. Aside from Koss’, there have been three other nationwide, representative studies specifically designed to measure rape prevalence, and all three - one by the U.S. Department of Justice (10% for completed rape), one by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (15% for completed rape), and one by the Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center (13% for completed rape) - supported Koss’ findings.

• Paglia claims that a female instructor at the University of Pennsylvania “demanded [a Goya painting of a nude woman] be taken down because she felt sexually harassed by it”; Paglia says the prof was “embarassed and upset” by human nudity. But Professor Nancy Stumhofer never claimed that Goya’s Naked Maja sexually harassed her; this myth was made up by right-wing pundits like Paglia. And far from being upset by nudity, Stumhofer assigned works with human nudity in other contexts. She did have Naked Maja moved to a public area in the student center, not because she felt harassed by Goya, but because her developmental English students seemed distracted by the painting. (Source: Democratic Culture, Spring 1994, pp 18-22).
• Hoff-Sommers cites only one source - Washington Post journalist Ken Ringle - to prove there’s no connection between the Super Bowl and increased domestic violence. The problem is, Ringle’s a known liar. Both the American Journalism Review (5/93) and the Washington Post’s own ombudsman critisized Ringle for his factual errors, bias and “twisted and selective quoting” in reporting this story. As FAIR notes, three of the four experts Ringle cited to “debunk” feminists, actually disagreed with Ringle’s claims. (I don’t claim to know if there’s more domestic violence on superbowl Sunday or not; I don’t think there’s enough evidence to say. But for Sommers to claim that she does know, based on a dishonest source like Ken Ringle, is ridiculous).
• Hoff-Sommers claims only 100 Americans a year die from anorexia - but she doesn’t understand mortality statistics. According to the NIMH, anorexics typically die due to “complications of the disorder, such as cardiac arrest or electrolyte imbalance,” not anorexia itself. Hoff-Sommers might as well have claimed that because so few people have “cigarettes” written on their death certificate, smoking hardly ever causes any deaths.

  So what’s the real number? There are about 19 million American women between ages 15 and 24; of those, somewhere between 190,000 and 380,000 have anorexia (it’s estimated that 1-2% of young women suffer from anorexia). About 0.56% - somewhere between one and two thousand - of those die of anorexia-related causes each year. (This is a conservative estimate, both because some studies have found a much higher long-term mortality rate, and because not everyone with anorexia is a young woman age 15-24).

  Hoff-Sommers uses the false “100 deaths” statistic to refute an also-false number some feminists used in the early 1990s. She was right to correct the feminists - but, unlike Hoff-Sommers, the feminists were willing to retract their mistaken statistic. Hoff-Sommers has never corrected or retracted her false “100 deaths from anorexia” figure.

Remember, these are the same people who built careers claiming that feminists are fact-challenged. Apparently right-wingers don’t have to worry about that whole “glass houses” thing.