One In Four Women Will Be Raped Before Graduating College

ABC News:

As college students gear up once again to taste the sweet freedom of the college campus, there's one thing they're not likely not focusing on: the probability that one out of four female college students will be raped before receiving a diploma.

Read the whole story: ABC News

Comments

[Spokker]

04:15 AM on 09/10/2010

Man, I am sick of all these guys complaining about being accused of rape. Look, if you don't want to be accused of rape and go to jail, don't go to frat parties! Don't have sex with drunk girls!

I am an equal opportunity offender. When women get drunk and regret having sex, I say, "HAH!" When men have sex with drunk women and get accused of rape and go to jail, I say, "HAH!"

All of them can go to Hell. I never partied. I studied.

[Mary Daniel]

11:58 PM on 09/07/2010

Anyone who doesn't believe the statistics should just take a look at the dozens of men in these comments saying, "Maybe they shouldn't be drinking, then" or "Why do they still go to frat parties?" or "If you go to a party and want to make out with someone then you couldn't have been violated."

Hundreds of comments putting the blame squarely on the victim and making no mention of the actual rapist. If this is the common, acceptable viewpoint of so many men, it's not at all surprising that so many of you are guilty of this crime.

[Mary Daniel]

11:57 PM on 09/07/2010

Anyone who doesn't believe the statistics should just take a look at the dozens of men in these comments saying, "Maybe they shouldn't be drinking, then" or "Why do they still go to frat parties?" or "If you go to a party and want to make out with someone then you couldn't have been raped."

Hundreds of comments putting the blame squarely on the victim and making no mention of the actual rapist. If this is the common, acceptable viewpoint of so many men, it's not at all surprising that so many of you are rapists.

[Mary Daniel]

11:45 PM on 09/07/2010

I'm shocked that some of the men here would suggest that if someone has sex with a woman who is PASSED OUT, that isn't rape.

Question the statistics all you want...those kinds of attitudes clearly prove that rape is acceptable and that many men here have probably raped someone and are in denial.

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

12:10 AM on 09/08/2010

Perhaps you'd like to point those comments out, Mary? Because I don't see anyone suggesting that here.

[Mary Daniel]

12:29 AM on 09/08/2010

"By midnight, she's up in someone's room, where she passes out. Her snog-mate then shags her."

It was argued that this scenario should not be considered rape.

[3x10p8]

05:10 PM on 09/07/2010

Here's a situation that is NOT rape:
A college girl goes to a party, gets bombed, has sex with a guy from the party, and then claims that she did not want it to happen.
That is not rape, it's just 2 drunks having sex and a bad hangover.

[slaxx]

05:19 PM on 09/07/2010

if she didn't want it to happen at the time, then that is rape. but if she did want it to happen at the time but then later regretted it, of course that isn't.

i don't see anyone here saying otherwise.

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

05:30 PM on 09/07/2010

The Megan video shows her drunk but conscious, walking calmly into the room with those guys and then later calmly walking out, both times under her own power.

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

11:14 PM on 09/07/2010

By the way, a timeline of the event can be found here:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/campus_assault/assets/pdf/videotape_timeline.pdf

Megan was in one room on the 4th floor with a bunch of guys, including the accused, until 2:09. She then went down to the room on the second floor. She goes in with a few guys and all but one leaves.

At 2:16, one of the other accused enters the room. At 2:32 he leaves and shows a piece of paper to several guys in the hall (but not, apparently, to the camera, as some stories report). Another guy then goes into the room.

At 2:56-2:58, the two guys leave the room. Three more people enter and at 2:59, everyone, including Megan, leaves the room.

From 3:01-3:16, Megan is seen on the fourth floor. She goes into her room with another girl and changes her shirt. She then leaves the room and chats with some people in the hall before moving off camera at 3:16

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

03:26 PM on 09/07/2010

The studies that have been linked to here in the last 24 hours indicate the following:

14.8% of women will be raped in their lifetime. More than half of this occurs before 18 years of age and (according to the CDC), about 85% of that happens before 9th grade. Of the women in the DoJ study revealed here, only 34 out of 4446 - 6% if we were to extrapolate to a 5 year college career - claimed to have been raped.

Now, some 4-6% of college men admit to attempting to coerce sex from women. 92% of these incidents are attributable to a small minority of men - only 4% - who claim to have done this an average of 6 times.

Furthermore, in 70% of these cases of rape and attempted rape, the method used was to get the woman too intoxicated to either resist OR consent.

This, to my mind, points out one of the possible reasons why the DoJ's interviewees beg to differ with the researchers on the question of whether or not they've been raped. They themselves are unclear as to what they wanted or even what happened or how because they were not sober at the time the attack took place.

It's worth pointing out the obvious: absent an eye witness who claimed that penetration took place without the victim's consent - and absent sobriety from the victim herself - it's going to be very, very hard to make a legal case that what

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

03:46 PM on 09/07/2010

To me, all this indicates that the BEST strategy for parents to adopt is to understand that their daughter is an an adult and will probably have sex and drink. Instead of attempting to treat these two subjects as if they were taboo ("Not my daughter! Only 'bad girls' do that!"), parents should encourage their daughters to drink and have sex in a responsible fashion. Booze, combined with a teenage libido and cultural double standard which insists that women should NEVER engage in sex and drinking, while simultaneously encouraging a campus culture of bacchanalia, lead women who are unprepared for adult life into making very poor decisions.

The person most vulnerable to rape on a college campus, according to these studies, is a blind drunk woman who finds herself alone with one of the 4% of young men who think that "she's passed out" means "she said yes".

[slaxx]

05:24 PM on 09/07/2010

so are college-age women adults or children?

[Lisa Shields]

10:54 PM on 09/07/2010

I have been careful to inform my child about predators.

But what does it say about us? If four percent of our young men consider "unconscious" as consent? If they happen upon someone who was knocked out---is that also then ok? Doesn't this mean all someone has to do is knock you out, and do as they please?

No other victims are held to the same scrutiny. When someone gets mugged, we don't suspect them of setting up their attackers. We don't berate them for being stupid, or somehow "making" a crime happen. But possession of a vagina is all that is needed to turn a victim, into a suspect to many minds.

Shame on us.

[J-Bro]

08:26 PM on 09/07/2010

Missing from your statistics is the fact that 45% of rape claims are later proven false.

When you factor in colleges, it rises to 50%

These false claims destroy lives just as effectively as rape does, and do a grave disservice to women who have actually been victimized

http://www.anandaanswers.com/pages/naaFalse.html

[clevernamehere]

09:58 PM on 09/07/2010

That is one study from one town. The research was done between 1978 and 1987. Women who are in college now were not even alive when that data was collected.

That study also has serious methodological problems. He threatened them with pologygraphs, something that is not reccomended because not only are they unreliable, they can scare off victims who are afraid they would fail despite actually having been raped.

The FBI puts the percentage of false reports at 8%, which is similar to false reports of other crimes.

[David Garrow]

02:54 PM on 09/07/2010

I said that men who are debating whether or not the statistics are accurate or not, need to think about the point of the story. Whether it's 25% or 10%, it's a gross statistic that needs to be 0%. Men much like myself cannot take a defensive stance to this. Women are smart enough to know that not all men are not rapists. Men have as a big as a role as women do, if we as society can decrease the numbers of rapes for the young women who have to live with such a trauma for the rest of their lives. Men simply can't just frown upon this and not committed rapes, we need to raise awareness and do our part. That's what I said with no swear words, or discriminatory remarks and you guys removed my comment? What is the reasoning? I've said some pretty harsh comments on this website, ones that have made it on. Yet, my advocacy for men to take a bigger role in this issue is banned? Is it because I wasn't commenting on Venus Williams dress? Or Heidi Montags plastic surgery?

[UKVisitor]

02:36 PM on 09/07/2010

Can I ask a question? I guess that it's the wealthiest and most assertive women who go to college, so you would hope they'd be best able to look after themselves and be leat afraid to report things to the authorities.

So what about women who don't go to college, wouldn't the percentage be much higher for them? I mean MUCH higher? Does anyone know. I don't recognise this as America.

[alieninvader]

02:57 PM on 09/07/2010

Granted, I don't know a lot about the UK's University system, but from what I do know, only the best and the brightest get that far in school. The US is at least supposed to be more egalitarian, but that's changing, unfortunately.

Regardless, it's not about station in life, it's about the fact that unless they are grabbed at gunpoint, women tend to be blamed when they have sex against their will. It tends to be easier to act like nothing happened than to go to the authorities and put yourself through months of 4eII.

[1Woman4Obama]

03:02 PM on 09/07/2010

First, I think it is important to understand that this "news article" is an advertisement for a television show. I tried to follow the links to the actual study and the information on those websites doesn't match the synopsis -- the Center for Public Integrity conducted a study on college campuses and the results suggested that 1 in 5 would be the victim of rape or attempted rape before she graduates. Not sure where the 25% is coming from except that it is the same stat they've been using for 20 years (same one I heard at "Take Back the Night" events in the early 90s).

Others seem to have concluded that the stats are on college-aged women -- so not just those who attend -- and the assaults could have occurred in high school or before.

But overall, no, I don't think the most assertive women go to college.... The demographic of people going to college is too large to draw any conclusions like that.

[UKVisitor]

02:41 PM on 09/14/2010

Please don't think that I was trivialising or disbelieving what women are saying on here. What I was genuinely wondering was if it wasn't even worse for the 67% of women who don't go to college? I'm sorry but I refuse to believe that the minority of people who don't go to college aren't less well equipped to get justice. But may be I'm wrong,

you make a very good, but also very sad point Alien invader

[slaxx]

02:28 PM on 09/07/2010

what's wrong with these men/boys? can't control yourselves or just heartless or both? how could you do something like this to another human being?

[blinkthink]

12:26 PM on 09/08/2010

We have to change the message to our kids, sadly. Assuming anyone has the same value system, or morality as you is a serious mistake. Our society as a whole has become more narcissitic, driven by the me, me and me. Often times the agenda of the total stranger is what we have to be concerned with. Naivete is dangerous, we have to be guarded against man's inhumanity to man or woman.
People here argue back and forth about what looked like what, but in the end, Megan took her own life. My heart goes out to her family.

[1Woman4Obama]

12:06 PM on 09/07/2010

I know of a number of women, girls at the time, who were raped or sexual abused -- 4 out of 5 that I can think of at this moment occurred before college age by men in their families, close family friends, and a high school coach. The other was gang raped by a group of boys from her high school. A preacher attempted to rape another woman in my family. None were reported to authorities -- accept the preacher was reported to the church elders and the girl and her family were told to stay quiet.

The point is that many sexual assualts aren't by strangers or dates or drunk college kids. They happen when your daughters are still at home by people you know. Pay attention.

[Niasia]

03:48 PM on 09/07/2010

BINGO!! Being a victim of abuse myself I watch all men around little girls...b/c you never ever know! Had an incident in college but I was able to contain it and then never be aorund the guy ever again. But yeah FAMILY/people closest to you are the biggest predators.

[AllanHunkin]

07:52 AM on 09/07/2010

What I see in this thread resulting from the article is both an implicit and explicit attack of men and in my opinion this is ABUSE.

How many women will be honest enough to admit that they have ‘led’ a man into sex sooner than he was actually ready, because at they had a higher level of desire at that moment than the man did? Men will almost never admit that they ‘aren’t there yet’ because they think it affects their attractiveness, which it does actually.

Using the same criteria for measurement I think we would discover a staggering statistic showing sexual assault of men by women.

With this in mind I can see that we are all having entirely the wrong conversation… we need to be talking about accountability and responsibility d of both sides. Only when there is an acknowledgment of mutual abuse will there be any real progress in this area.

Allan Hunkin
Speaker, Writer, Broadcaster

[alieninvader]

08:59 AM on 09/07/2010

Most men do not commit these acts. Neither do most women. However, the vast majority of sexual abuse is committed by men. To say we are not allowed to speak of it without addressing other problems is equivalent to shoving it under the rug.

[AllanHunkin]

02:06 PM on 09/07/2010

I certainly didn't say that we can't talk about it. I very much think we should. I am saying that there needs to be more included in the conversation.
So what if more men commit these kinds of acts. Even one by either male or female is unacceptable.
To say that waking up with a hang over and regretting going to bed with someone is a form of rape automatically includes large numbers of men..;. I would estimate about 50/50 so no gender can claim to be more of a victim than the other.
While I would agree that more men are prone to these acts. I am sure that, given the nature of men, the number of men who would report that they had been sexually abused by a woman is a fraction of what is reported.
Women's power is rising and with it comes Responsibility which now must include the notion that they can no longer claim "he tricked me into it." That is the sexual maturity of a teenager and not congruent with the level of equality that women have achieved in the last 100 years.

[slaxx]

05:07 PM on 09/07/2010

i haven't seen any comments here that are abusive toard men. and the subject here is "rape" - forced intercourse - not leading someone into it.

[Yogesh Cu]

05:56 AM on 09/07/2010

I would like to share this documentary a couple of determined women decided they would try to break the cycle of domestic violence and get kids off the streets. Hummingbird is their story

watch it onlinehttp://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/1568

[stewie1324]

03:26 AM on 09/07/2010

Does this 25% figure include incidents that happened BEFORE the women went to college? Im pretty sure it does since that seems to be the only logical way to reach such a high figure. So why the focus only on colleges here, and not on the teenage years (high school) or even earlier where I would bet its even more likely to not be reported?

[Impaler]

03:52 AM on 09/07/2010

Well stewie perhaps you can do that study.

[alieninvader]

09:00 AM on 09/07/2010

Yes. By the time they graduate college, so ages 0-22, approximately.

[mirabay]

03:22 AM on 09/07/2010

Skip graduation...............

[SuperGeeks]

02:48 AM on 09/07/2010

Wow!