Study Shows College Women Are Actually Much Less Likely to Be Raped

In recent years, the culture has shifted based on the claim that one-in-five women on American college campuses will be the victim of sexual assault. The claim is bogus, of course. It used an incredibly broad definition of sexual assault that includes behaviors that simply do not fit any legal definition.

Now, a study has concluded that not only was the claim bogus, but that college women are actually far less likely to be raped than other women.

From The College Fix:

“After more than six years’ intense focus on a purported campus rape crisis, Axinn’s study exposes the Obama administration’s Title IX regime for the elitist and politically-motivated overcorrection it was.”

This is Alice Lloyd’s brutal opening to her latest Weekly Standard story on the ubiquitous messaging of Title IX obliterating a bigger issue — women who have either little or no college education are at 2.5 times higher risk of “forced intercourse” by the time they reach 44.

The new study by University of Michigan sociologist William Axinn, which gathered responses from a larger “family growth” survey that targeted women 15 to 44, confirms earlier studies that found less educated women are at far higher risk than their educated counterparts.

Though Axinn’s study has similar definitional problems and potential self-reporting bias as other surveys that purported to find “1 in 5” college women the target of sexual assault, his population “answered the survey according to the same arguably too-broad definition of force,” so at least the surveys are apples-to-apples comparisons in that respect, Lloyd writes.

Axinn says he was actually inspired to do this study by the surplus of studies targeting college women, whose researchers have sometimes disavowed how rape-culture activists portray their findings. (Note the UMich administration’s attempt to bury the lede on the press release: “Sexual assault among college students is bad; for those who don’t attend college, it’s worse.”)

Let’s put the idea that college is a terribly dangerous place for women out of our minds, OK?

As noted, Axinn’s survey contains definitional problems, but offers an apples-to-apples comparison with the notorious one-in-five study. It’s evidence that colleges are not a dangerous breeding ground for rapists; that in fact the opposite appears to be true.

Women have been unnecessarily frightened, and men have been treated like potential predators. The magnitude of damage that activist-fueled study caused is incalculable.