Putting Those Campus Rape Statistics in Context

Brock Turner’s six-month sentence for rape has touched off outrage around the country. New statistics on campus rape have brought attention to these crimes, but they likely under-represent the number of campus rapes. And they don't address a larger problem: Even Brock Turner's remarkably light sentence is more than you'd see in many sex assault cases.

According to the Washington Post analysis of Department of Education figures, some of the country’s most prestigious colleges and universities are the ones with the highest rates of reported rape: Wesleyan, Swarthmore, Williams and Dartmouth are all in the top 10. 

More rape at fancy universities?

Before high school grads toss those Dartmouth acceptance letters in the trash, it may be worth considering that counting reports of rape is a notoriously bad proxy for counting instances of rape.

Libby Nelson, writing at Vox, noted that half the colleges in the Education Department database reported zero rapes in 2014. Among New York University’s nearly 50,000 students, not a single rape was reported. Does that mean not a single person was raped? Not likely.

“It would be wonderful if that were true,” Nelson wrote. “But nearly every study of campus sexual assault (and there have now been many) has come to a similar conclusion: The chance that a woman will be sexually assaulted while enrolled in college is about 1 in 5.”

At least 80 percent of campus rape victims never report the crime. They worry about reprisal, or they don’t want to get the perpetrator in trouble. Sometimes they think the police won’t do anything to help them.

Should Wesleyan and Swarthmore be criticized for somehow allowing so much sexual assault to happen on their campuses? Or cheered for promoting a culture in which victims feel empowered to speak up instead of being shamed into silence? It’s impossible to know.

There are so many questions left by the statistics that they’re practically meaningless, except to know that as shocking as they are, they’re probably way under-counting rape. So if statistics show Stanford University experiences a rape every two weeks, the real numbers must be far more troubling.

Are light sentences like Brock Turner’s the norm?

First, let’s realize how infinitesimally few sexual assault cases end up with any kind of sentence. In their report, “The ‘Justice Gap’ for Sexual Assault Cases: Future Directions for Research and Reform,” researchers Kimberly A. Lonsway and Joanne Archambault find that sexual crimes have a far lower rate of arrest than other violent crimes.

If the cases are prosecuted, most perpetrators get convicted and are incarcerated. But that's a big "if."

Brock Turner’s sentence was unusually light, but what’s even more unusual is that he was convicted at all. Sofie Karasek of the organization End Rape On Campus said there are almost never eyewitnesses to a rape.

“If there hadn’t been witnesses, he probably wouldn’t have been convicted,” she said, “and if he hadn’t been convicted, we wouldn’t even be talking about this.”

Karasek says many campus rapes are adjudicated on campus instead of going through the courts. “In the criminal system, you need to prove beyond reasonable doubt in order to take this person’s liberty away that they committed this crime,” Karasek said.

Many victims worry that a criminal justice proceeding will be a traumatizing, de-humanizing process, Karasek said, and all they want is to make sure they don’t have to sit next to their rapist in class or live on the same dorm floor anymore.

Privilege can play a role in how these proceedings go. As the New York Daily News reported this week, a black college athlete convicted of a similar crime was sentenced to 15-25 years behind bars. Karasek says privilege plays a part in campus proceedings, too.

“Wealthy white perpetrators often have access to resources so that they can, in the campus process, have the proceedings drawn out for a long time, and use every possible loophole that they can to prolong it until after the perpetrator graduates," Karasek said. "That’s one of the most common things that we see with perpetrators that have access to those resources.”

Once the perpetrator graduates, the campus justice system can’t touch them, and it’s just over.

Photo from George Hodan/PublicDomainPictures.net. Graph from the “The ‘Justice Gap’ for Sexual Assault Cases: Future Directions for Research and Reform.” Infographic from RAINN.