College Women Are Far Less Likely To Be Raped Than Their Working Class Counterparts

Women are more likely to have been sexually assaulted by the age of 44 if they didn’t go to college, according to a new study from the University of Michigan. The study, spearheaded by sociology professor and researcher William Axinn, found that the risk of “experiencing forced intercourse” is more than 2.5 times greater for women who’ve attended little or no college.

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. Axinn and his team analyzed data from the National Survey of Family Growth, which asks Americans between the ages of 15 and 44—among other awkward and sensitive things—whether they’ve experienced forced intercourse. And they found that the women most likely to be forced into unwanted sex are the least likely to set foot on campus.

The study isn’t perfect. The federal survey’s understanding of “forced” may seem flawed by some stricter standards. Of those respondents who report involuntary intercourse at some point, 9 percent say they “had been given a drink or drugs”—a fairly lax definition of a woman’s will. (A 19-percent plurality, meanwhile, recall having been verbally pressured.) Given the age range of women surveyed, Axinn’s findings aren’t directly comparable to most previous studies, which predictably focus on college-age women. But his hallmark finding, that women who never attended college are at a dramatically higher risk, still stands to reason—if only because they answered the survey according to the same arguably too-broad definition of force. This study of the rate of sexual assault for non-college women was first inspired, Axinn says in the press release, by the often-cited rates recorded in surveys of women currently in college.

The first of these, a 2002 paper by David Lisak stipulated that sexual assaults reported on campuses are almost always perpetrated by repeat offenders. But Lisak surveyed graduates of just one school, his own hardly representative commuter college of University of Massachusetts-Boston, and they ranged in age from 18 to 71. Dogged journalists, like Emily Yoffe, have been picking apart his flawed methods for years.

But post-Lisak, another two widely cited studies—one that used only self-selecting survey respondents, another that used a more representative sample of students from nine schools—came up with comparable ratios: 1 in 5 college women would be raped by graduation. Theirs provided the premise for a federally ordained diagnosis that a rape epidemic afflicts college campuses. But, as Dr. Christopher Krebs of RTI International—who led the National Institute for Justice study that surveyed nine schools to find that “1-in-5”—told me earlier this year, the statistic can’t be accurately applied across the board.

“People have taken our work,” Krebs said, “and used 1-in-5 from it. They create statistics that they then want to use as if they’re a national average, or that this is the magnitude of the problem everywhere. We’ve never said that. But that’s how it gets used.”

David Cantor, whose earlier findings were criticized for their use of self-selecting samples, told me, “We did find that there was a lot of variation across the schools.” Overall, he found 1-in-4 were victims of sexual misconduct. But, fully aware of the blindspot, he added, “All of these surveys are just of campuses, they’re not of women of similar age who are going to college or not going to college.”

However many women they excluded, the numbers proved unforgettable: a ratio you could count out on one hand, or on a group of girlfriends walking down the street. The numbers proved politically powerful, too. All of which gave Axinn cause to wonder whether colleges were actually so much more overrun with sexual violence than the rest of American life.

“I was disturbed that we’re paying so much attention to the on-campus issue and not giving enough attention to young people who are not fortunate enough to be enrolled in college,” he said. Those not in college are less supervised throughout their teen years and more likely to commence sexual relationships earlier in life. College students, at schools like mine anyway, may be drunker on average the rest of the population, but intoxication, Axinn found, is a less common contributing factor than verbal coercion.

As the year of that landmark rescission comes to a close, peppered as it’s been in its last quarter by revelations of widespread sexual harassment in media and politics, this new study from the University of Michigan highlights another overlooked problem with the Obama administration’s attempted crackdown on campus sexual misconduct. Namely, that it made already panic-prone and institutionally risk-averse colleges and universities its principle focus—to an, I’d argue, foreseeably counterproductive effect. The previous administration opted to overprotect these women exactly when the president most needed an aging white liberal coalition of college-educated women and panicked parents on his side. Political expediency was the real reason. Because, as we know now, the non-college-goer—that most taken-for-granted of all Obama voters—was always at greater risk.