Comments on Overreporting Sexual Assaults

• Overreporting Campus Violence
• Posted by Keith Johnson on October 2, 2009 at 8:30am EDT

• There is no real surprise that an advocate whose job has become head of a campus violence prevention office will exaggerate the level of campus violence, thus socially constructing the need for her office on the campus. See the many books by Joel Best for many more examples of how advocates create questionable numbers to support perceptions of a considerable social problem in order to appear expert about the same.

  The real problem here is that the university continued to employ an official who apparently did not conduct her office to prevent campus violence, but to create statistics that consistently inflated it. Since when does an official retain employment when doing the exact opposite of what the job requires?

  The consequences of this scandal are breathtaking. Beeman rode this statistical manipulation to become a "recognized authority" on reporting campus violence (perhaps misreporting would be more appropriate) and obtaining grants. From an entire career based on "cooking the books" we have to ask how much of this misconduct pervades the field of reporting campus violence. Since misreporting it proved so beneficial to Beeman, we can suspect that it has also done so for others.

• Under reporting and Mislabeling Clery Act Crimes
• Posted by Paul Roden , Training Manager, Human Resources at La Salle University on October 2, 2009 at 9:30am EDT

• Some universities and colleges in the past have intentionally or unintentionally under reported crimes so as to not frighten perspective new students and their parents. Some were caught and some were not. Some classified crimes incorrectly, ex. burgulary vs robbery, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. Training and better software can help prevent that. Campuses are supposed to collaborate and cooperate with local police departments, so their reported crime and the campus reported crime data, are consistent, accurate and verrifable. The best thing about the Clery Act is getting people to report the crime, (Timely Warning) so that other members of the campus community and their neighbors can be prevented from becoming the next victim(s) and maybe the police might be able to apprehend the person or persons committing these crimes. Crime Log Data and Annual Secuirty Reports can help local law enforcement see patterns of crime and the modus operandi of offenders. Preventing crimes and helping the victims of crime, whether they choose to prosecute their victimizer or not and presenting a clear picture of the safety and crime rate is the goal of the Clery Act. Now, if we only can get more funding or grants to put in more of the high tech communications, text messaging, closed circuit surveilance, electronic remote locks, public address systems and more security staff to patrol. Not all colleges and universities have the endowment or financial resources to do all of the things that they would like to do.

• Talk about 'breathtaking'...
• Posted by Douglas Lewis on October 2, 2009 at 11:00am EDT

• Mr Roden uses an overreporting scandal to plead for _much more money_. A perfect example of what the first poster was commenting on.

• checks and balances
• Posted by P on October 2, 2009 at 11:00am EDT

• It is interesting to hear about these stories where people in positions of authority are "trusted" to carry out their duties appropriately and later we find out that they have been operating without scruples. These people are readily hired, sometimes less qualified than others. But because they fit a particular profile or they have connections, they are hired and then given free reign. These same folks often doctor their resumes to reflect more education and/or experience than they actually have and little or no verification is done. Remember the old adage: You can't judge a book by its cover!

• Is the punctuation correct here?
• Posted by Midwest Prof on October 2, 2009 at 1:00pm EDT

• The article states:

  "'All crime statistics compiled by staff will be checked by a panel of three experts,' a uniformed campus police officer, a Clery Act specialist from its Office of Student Judicial Affairs and a university counsel."

  As written, that means six people. Should the comma after 'experts' perhaps be replaced by a colon?

• Posted by J on October 2, 2009 at 1:00pm EDT

• I'm reminded of when a series of violent sexual assaults on strangers happened at the local university campus. The students organized a large rally to raise awareness. A mentally ill student who had been raped in the past (and who had PTSD from the rape, which played a huge role in her meltdown) called campus security and described her past assault as having just happened during the rally. It quickly became clear that was not what had happened. The media response, and the response of primarily male staff and faculty 'feminist' haters all over the campus: 'See? ALL sexual assaults are 'invented,' the [legitimate] statistics from [crazy feminist left wing organizations like the Department of Justice] are histrionic and invented, and the campus violence prevention programs and sexual assault services are needless.'

  The harm done by one exception (in a context of years and years of accurate reporting and excellent work by response teams all over the campus), and more, by a person suffering from mental illness *caused* in part by really being raped, gave ammunition to deniers of endemic violence against women who'd been just waiting for an opportunity to vent spleen anywhere they could and it took years to undo the public perception they created.

  I have no idea exactly what this woman did, or why she what she did. Overstated in the press, mentally ill, spectacularly incompetent, good-hearted but wildly untrained in reporting protocol and collaboration with police and Deans' Offices etc., stupidity or malice - no one knows from reading this article.

  The only thing I know from reading this article is that people are jumping on it gleefully and using it to cast doubt on all sexual assault reporting.

  I do know there are perfectly sound methods for implementing the Clery Act, and that under-reporting is the much more frequent problem, as Paul Roden said.

  I also know that parking lot surveillance etc., expensive or not, is mostly irrelevant, since the vast majority of sexual assaults happen in the context of established relationships (dorm mates, tutors, friends, former dates, etc.) and not in the famed bushes.

  What's breathtaking is the rapidity with which the '...therefore there is no problem and sexual assault prevention and crisis workers and women are all liars!' have come out firing, gleefully, when *who this episode actually hurts is women who really are raped and will now have an even steeper climb toward being believed.*

• Seriousness of violence levels not diminished
• Posted by Human rights advocate on October 2, 2009 at 1:30pm EDT

• While this is a serious offense on many levels, there is no evidence warranting a conclusion that others who report on campus violence are also over-reporting. If one person's errors in their job--no matter how intentional or self-serving--cast similar suspicions upon all in that field or upon the field in general, then most fields would be under scrutiny most of the time. As for amount of sexual assaults that we as a society consider "acceptable", I would like to point out that if we or someone we cared about were one of those 17 assault victims, even one assault per year would be too many.

• punctuation
• Posted by dot on October 2, 2009 at 1:45pm EDT

• Midwest Prof: I feel your pain. The punctuation should be corrected.

  'All crime statistics compiled by staff will be checked by a panel of three experts': a uniformed campus police officer, a Clery Act specialist from its Office of Student Judicial Affairs and a university counsel.

  Or

  'All crime statistics compiled by staff will be checked by a panel of three experts' -- a uniformed campus police officer, a Clery Act specialist from its Office of Student Judicial Affairs and a university counsel.

• Posted by Max Jerrell on October 2, 2009 at 1:45pm EDT

• Trust but verify.

• Dot Dot Dot
• Posted by PunKuation PunC on October 2, 2009 at 2:45pm EDT

• Sorry, Dot, but the dash is a bit too gimmicky--and doesn't really fit the context when considering audience (though the dash works well in PEOPLE mag or posting to discussion threads). If we are to save any sense of grammatical integrity, the colon is the only option in this case. Save the dash for text messages.

• Unreal statistics
• Posted by Jonathan Cohen , Department of Mathematics at DePaul University on October 2, 2009 at 2:45pm EDT

• The law now requires colleges to make public a yearly report on reported crimes. This year's crime statistics for my school, DePaul University, just came out.

  The list of offenses are divided between campus and public with the public offenses presumably the result of crimes in the areas surrounding the campus. The sexual offenses are listed in three categories; forcible, non-forcible and other sex offenses. The last category is for touching of a sexual nature that is not consented to by both individuals.

  The statistics for the main residential and downtown campuses for the three year period 2006-2008 report 4 campus forcible offenses, zero non-forcible offenses and 9 other sexual offenses. There were slightly more offenses reported occurring at off campus locations.

  In one of those years I stopped by a rally organized to protest violence against women. I stopped by to ask about the statistics and was told that it was a matter of fact that one fourth of the women students at DePaul would be the victim of a sexual assault during her time at DePaul. With a population of more than 4,000 undergraduate women, the one fourth figure would mean 250 rapes a year.

  While I believe that sexual assault is an under-reported crime there is simply no way that such a figure is credible. But on the basis of such claims, demands were being made to hire a special person to work with victims of sexual violence.

  What purpose was served by promoting descriptions of college campuses that make them out to be far more filled with sexual violence than the worst of war zones where rape by soldiers is routine and condoned.

  The Insidehighered.com article desribes one women's seriously inflating the number of reported assaults. But her exaggerations are nothing compared to the made up statistics that are passed on as truth by university based idealogues who want people to believe that college campuses are a living hell of sexual violence.

  I don't get it.

• Violence prevention programs are critical
• Posted by D. Slurry on October 2, 2009 at 2:45pm EDT

• It is important in this situation to not conclude that Clery reporters, violence prevention advocates, or anyone besides Beeman and her line of supervision at UC Davis are responsible for her act. I believe Robert Loessberg-Zahl is correct in reporting that it was a mistake that a second set of eyes needed to be seeing those numbers before they were reported.

  I, as an educator and an advocate, am angered by professionals who perform their job poorly, unethically, and with dubious means of fulfilling an agenda. Kieth Johnson's comment reflects that he is also angered and concludes that this is something that advocates do in the spirit of job security. I vehemently disagree with this point of view. A vast majority of advocates are working very hard with minimal resources to do their job, and in the case of violence prevention specialists, to make their campuses and communities as safe as possible. Most professionals understand that the realities of our society make their job necessary, so there is no need to provide false numbers when the evidence is already on our side.

  We need to know that 17 assaults are too many, and that with the issue of sexual assault, the report rate is shockingly lower than the number of assaults that happen. There is not reason to inflate that number. If you want to reflect that your campus is a safe place that supports people who report assault, then you need to focus your energy on making your campus a safe places that supports survivors.

  I encourage those of you reading this who may agree with Mr. Johnson's point of view to think about Breeman's act as an individual act and do some research to learn what is happening on campus and what violence prevention specialists across the nation are doing to change this reality. The need is great for advocates and allies in formal and informal positions working together in support of a safe, inclusive campus climate. That reality must not be lost because of the irresponsible actions of one person.

• Beeman is not an isolated case
• Posted by Keith Johnson on October 2, 2009 at 5:30pm EDT

• As a social scientist I am concerned about statistical bias in the gathering and reporting of data. Advocacy is biased, for it begins with a conclusion and then looks for data to support it. As a result, advocates consistently cry "underreporting" in official data, but turn aside from evidence of over reporting. That creates the professional climate for advocates to overstate their case and to be believed, no matter how far they may stray from the facts.

  Beeman may have acted alone in creating false reports of sexual assaults on her campus, but she did not become a recognized national authority on campus sexual assaults without a professional climate, shared by her colleagues in the field, to look only for underreporting of such assaults and accept large numbers without question. It was not just her university administration which erred in accepting Beeman's homesty and professionalism, but her colleagues and professional peers. When she reported 700 sexual assaults annually on her campus (actually reported number: 17)and qualified for a half million dollar federal grant, she was not acting alone, but as part of a national campaign by activists to promote sexual assaults as a serious danger to college women.

  The answer to these distortions is neither to promote nor deny the threat of sexual assaults on campus, but to study and collect the data scientifically, far from giving the responsibility to advocates dedicated to exaggerating the problem.

• Posted by College rape victim at Tufts University on October 2, 2009 at 6:45pm EDT

• @Jonathan Cohen, I don't see why the one in four women statistic is so hard to believe. I suppose that as a person it is hard to think that so many women have suffered through sexual violence, but is indeed a very reputable statistic. 250 our of 4000 isn't that high, in my opinion - especially if you think about it still a large majority of the women don't get sexually assaulted. If you have any support besides your own "gut feeling" that 1 in 4 is too high, I would really like to see it. With an estimated 3% report rate, I know it is hard to believe that about 25% is the reality, but as a woman who was raped at college and who easily met other women who had gone through a similar experience.

  The 1 in 4 statistic comes from studies that show that college-aged women (16-24) are at the highest risk of rape.So, rapists assault women aged 16 to 24--years which encompass those most commonly spent in college--at four times the rate of all women.

  In a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease control of 5,000 college students at over 100 colleges, 20% of women answered "yes" to the question "In your lifetime have you been forced to submit to sexual intercourse against your will?"

  So please, don't be so quick to just dismiss the pain and risk of real women because you have had the luxury to not deal with it. One instance of someone overreporting doesn't mean there's an epidemic. If one doctor is charged with rape a patient, does it mean that there's an epidemic of doctors raping their patients?

  If you want to see some statistics and their origins, please check out: http://www.oneinfourusa.org/statistics.php
  A short post about rape on college campuses: http://blogathon.thecurvature.com/?p=16

• Not a credible statistic
• Posted by Jonathan Cohen , Department of Mathematics at DePaul University on October 3, 2009 at 7:00am EDT

• The figure of one in four would mean that 1000 out of 4000 women were raped. The figure of 250 comes from averaging over a four year period. Rape is a brutal crime and often is devastating for the victims. If the numbers were anything like one in four, there would be far more reported.

  Computing the probability of being the victim of a sexual assault over the period of a lifetime and equating that probability with the probability of being a victim in college makes no sense. Many of the rapes that do occur are done by parents, step parents boyfriends, family friends or relatives. And cases such as incest are exactly the situations where rape is likely to go unreported. That means much of the overall statistics are attributable to attacks that do not occur on college campuses.

  When rapes are reported within a few miles of the campus, there is real fear about walking around in the neighborhood. If 250 women were raped each year, most women students would drop out because it would be unsafe to attend.

  I am sympathetic with people who are victims of rape. It is a terrible thing to do to someone and I believe that rapists should be hunted down and punished.

  It is because it is such a devastating crime that it is hard to believe that 99% of the victims would remain silent about it, particularly if they are college students.

  I think that people are reluctant to challenge the one in four statistic because rape is an awful crime and they don't want to seem indifferent to the pain it causes.

  But these claims are not without their own victims because if these statistics are fabrications, as I believe they are, then there is a human cost in terms of a loss of trust between men and women. If the one in four number is to believed, then not only does it mean that as many as one in four men could conceivably be rapists, but that a substantial percent of the rest of men condone rape or even approve it. How could a woman ever trust a man if they were so prone to violence.

  I think these statistics are untrue and I find it sad that so many people believe them.

• Posted by SGT Ted on October 3, 2009 at 11:15am EDT

• Lieing about the number of sexual assaults on campus isn't an "error". It damages the credibility of womans advocates. It also feeds the false motion that more men are sexual predators than is reality, creating a climate of fear of men based on that lie.

  The false reporting was done for money and professional prestige. Until she was caught, allegedly smart and educated people bought into her clap-trap entirely. I'm sure she got awards for her "work". Womens advocates bought into it because they are frankly bigotted towards men and her lies confirmed their bigotry. It is akin to using statistics of crimes committed by blacks to smear blacks as criminals and it is always wrong. The fact is, more men are victims of violent assault than women are in the aggregate, regardless of whether it's sexually related or not. But, there's no "take back the night" rallies for them is there?

  It is time for womens advocates to realise that their advocacy is sexist in nature and to call for better police protection for all, and that should include calling for the prosecution of those who falsely report rape or any other crime as well.

• Sad
• Posted by Knowledge seeker , Manager at Quality Research on October 5, 2009 at 5:15am EDT

• It is indeed sad that false reporting occurs in serious issues and crimes such as rape. The consequences of false reporting are as severe as the crimes committed because every time an actual rape is reported, the memory of a false report will plague people's minds and raise doubts about the validity of the report. Sad - very very sad indeed.

• Theme of this discussion
• Posted by D. Slurry on October 5, 2009 at 7:15pm EDT

• As I look at disagreements in the responses to this article, I am finding that there everyone is agreeing on the most important things and arguing vehemently about what is less critical.

  I'm glad that everyone agrees that sexual violence occurs far too frequently, and that we should be seeking effective ways to change this. I happen to think that funding advocacy and prevention programs is a worthwhile thing to be doing. The data that I've seen compels me to think this way and challenges me to work harder to find a new approach, since the status quo is unacceptable.

  For those of you who disagree with my conclusion, I see that you are struggling with the idea of response. I think it is clear in your arguments that you want sexual violence to be prevented, though you seem to be arguing the costs and techniques that I so easily accept. I disagree with some of your arguments, but I believe that you are making them in good faith, so I am not going to attempt to argue them further.

  Let's all keep in mind that it is a community effort to end sexual violence. We cannot just throw resources and personnel in that direction and expect it to go away. We also just can't turn our back to the issue because we believe that data is inaccurate or advocates aren't who we should trust. We all have to do our part, which looks differently for each person. For me, it means I need to seek to understand the causes of sexual violence and make sure I am reducing the ways I might perpetuate violence (which for me means making sure I am not objectifying women, promoting my communities understanding of choice, challenging my peers who have grown to accept the status quo of sexual assault).

  I encourage you to think of what you can do, because focusing on how we disagree is just taking our attention away from thinking about that.

• Red Herrings Abound
• Posted by T.L. on December 30, 2009 at 4:30pm EST

• Has anyone ever noticed that the second a discussion about violence - especially sexual violence- against women starts, that it devolves into red herrings about a) false reporting or b) false statistics? People get so caught up in the details about whether this statistic from DOJ happens to make sense, that the conversation never progresses further.

  To the person that shared their story, that was very brave.

  It may be hard for some people to believe that 1 in 4 women are raped. As a woman, and a college graduate it is not. Beyond that, there are several issues with the way people are understanding the statistic. There's nothing about 25% of men being rapists in the statistic. On the contrary; many men who rape women, rape multiple women over their lifetimes. On the point about family members committing incest, that does happen; but in terms of college women it is almost always (like several people have pointed out) a boyfriend, friend, study partner, neighbor. And then there are also the assaults that occur off-campus at bars, clubs, etc.

  Are we really surprised that reporting is so low? We don't typically treat victims/survivors with much respect. Women are often blamed or questioned, or they're fearful, or confused. Trauma can do all of that, which just makes reporting that much harder. So no, it's not actually surprising that even college women (whatever that comments was supposed to mean) aren't running around reporting. There's too much shame and distrust to do that.

  And finally, dating is scary because of all of this. Someone mentioned that this paints the world a very scary place for women. Well reading women's stories that theme comes across often. Being approached by men becomes scarier. Having to negotiate sex becomes fraught with issues.

  I understand that people are hesitant to trust the 1 in 4 statistic, but let's not let that become a red herring. There is a real discussion to be had here. Let's have it more often.