Campus 'rape culture' myth busted: New study blows up claim that 1 in 5 women are victimized

Months before Rolling Stone published its false 2014 article about a gang rape at the University of Virginia that never happened, former President Barack Obama told the nation that "it is estimated that 1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there."

This statistic — an apparent reference to a federally funded 2007 study that was reliant on an online survey of students at two universities that had a low response rate — has been treated as the gospel truth, with the media dutifully repeating the notion of American campus "rape culture" ad nauseam over the past decade.

A new study suggests, however, that the real rate of female sexual victimization on campus might be closer to 1 in 100.

'The campus anti-rape movement has coincided with college-enrolled women's risk of sexual violence victimization now exceeding that for non-enrolled women.'

A pair of researchers at Washington State University's criminal justice and criminology department set out to "estimate the risk of sexual violence against 18-to-24-year-old women with comparisons between college students and non-students, between residential and commuter college students, and between the years before and after the mainstreaming of the campus anti-rape movement in 2014."

According to their peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of American College Health, previous estimates not only suffered from issues of generalizability but failed to account for the "impact upon victimization risk of increasing activism against sexual violence on college campuses."

RELATED: Horror in Ohio home: Male accused of raping, beating pregnant woman over course of 2 days. But that isn't the half of it.

Photo by Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Image

Keen on correcting for such issues and on gaining a clearer idea of the threat of predation on campus, the duo analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau-administered National Crime Victimization Survey regarding 61,869 women ages 18 to 24 years, who were interviewed a total of 112,624 times between 2007 and 2022.

The sexual violence recorded in the NCVS data apparently "includes rapes (any forced/coerced sexual penetration) and sexual assaults (any unwanted sexual contact including fondling or grabbing) whether threatened, attempted, or completed."

The researchers found that the six-month rate of sexual victimization was 0.17% for female students living on and off campus from 2007 through 2014, and 0.46% for female students on and off campus from 2015 to 2022.

The numbers were higher for students living on campus during both periods under review but still nowhere near 20% — 0.34% in the former and 1.05% in the latter.

"The above estimates indicate that the mainstreaming of the campus anti-rape movement has coincided with college-enrolled women's risk of sexual violence victimization now exceeding that for non-enrolled women," the study said.

The researchers expressed uncertainty about why the victimization rate had increased during the "anti-rape movement" and the #MeToo era but suggested that misogyny cultivated online might be to blame or alternatively "college student sexual violence victims' increased acknowledgement of their victimization as rape or sexual assault."

When asked by the College Fix about the significance of their findings — particularly as they cast doubt on previous estimates that the victimization rate was 1 in 5 — Kathryn DuBois, one of the authors and an associate criminology professor at Washington State, said, "Our results cannot speak to earlier estimates of sexual violence occurring over a 4-year college 'career' because NCVS questions only deal with victimizations experienced during a 6-month period."

"As such, we really cannot say if 1-in-5 or 1-in-100 is a more reliable estimate of risk," DuBois added.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!