 In my previous video, I used an off-sided figure that 1 in 7 women in the U.S. and 1 in 4 college aged women in the U.S. have been victims of rape or attempted rape during their lifetime. I had no idea this would be such a contentious issue, but I had multiple people tell me that this claim had been debunked and it really gave me pause. Having right over the last week at least several dozen papers on the topic, this was not a figure that varied much. 1 in 7 or 1 in 6 in the general U.S. population of women, depending on the year of publication, and 1 in 4 to 1 in 5 in the college aged population. Critics claim these numbers were based on a single 1985 deceptive study by Dr. Mary Koss commissioned by and published in Ms. Magazine. I'm going to take a few minutes to unwind this particular claim. Dr. Mary Koss is a clinical psychologist and regents professor at Arizona Health Sciences Center. She is an editor of multiple academic works on sexual victimization of women. Her resume, or we should say curriculum vitae, is 57 pages long and includes editing chapters in books of clinical psychology, taking the main stage at national psychology conferences, and chairing international committees on public health policy. That's now. Let's go back to pre-1985. After completing a clinical residency at the VA hospital in Minneapolis in a brief assistant professorship at nearby St. Olaf College, Dr. Voss was recruited to Kent State University in Ohio in 1976 where she remained until 1988. In 1982, she published a new research survey instrument, a test called the Sexual Experience Survey, which asks questions about behaviors which conformed to Ohio rape statutes at the time, as well as some non-rape behaviors of interest to research into how people might sexually victimize each other. I'm going to call this survey instrument the SES from here on out. The SES has become a standard instrument in survey research on sexual victimization, and this original paper has been cited over a thousand times. Is the test misleading? Well, that depends on if it's scored correctly and how the results are reported. For example, one question on the current SES, and I'll put a link below to the short form version for victimization. Someone had oral sex with me or made me have oral sex with them without my consent by, a, telling lies, threatening to end the relationship, threatening to spread rumors about me, making promises I knew were untrue, or continually verbally pressuring me after I said I didn't want to, b, showing displeasure, criticizing my sexuality or attractiveness, getting angry but not using physical force after I said I didn't want to, c, taking advantage of me when I was too drunk or out of it to stop what was happening, d, threatening to physically harm me or someone close to me, e, using force, for example, holding me down with their body weight, pinning my arms or having a weapon. Respondents tell how many times in the last year each scenario occurred. Other questions focus on attempted rape, sexual contact including kissing, fondling and removing clothing without consent. There's also a series of questions specifying insertion into vagina, anus, or mouth occurred under any of the above conditions. Now, how are the results scored and tallied? Well, not all affirmative responses to these questions are legally rape. Fondling or kissing without consent is counted as sexual contact, not rape in the survey results. Threatening to end a relationship to coerce sex is also not considered rape. Any answer of a or b gets counted as coercion, not rape. However, c, d, and e, someone who is too drunk to stop someone from taking advantage of them, threatened with physical harm or using force to prevent resistance, those are all legally rape and count in the rape statistics. Attempted rape is also counted in a separate category, but the one enforced that does include cases where someone threatened to use force but failed to complete the rape act. So just to really come out and say it, insertion into an orifice by force, threats of harm, or through drug or alcohol incapacitation are what are counted as rape in the survey results. Attempts at using these behaviors that were unsuccessful, also count in the survey in a separate but included category, which makes sense to me if the purpose is to express risk. A victim is a victim whether the crime was successful in its purpose or not. Having someone hold a knife at your throat makes you a victim of violence, whether your throat was subsequently slashed or not. An area is no safer if only one in a hundred drive-by shootings kill someone. Dr. Koss collected results from 7,000 students at 35 schools, and the results were published in 1983 in a paper called Rape, The Scope of the Problem. The editorial staff of Ms. Magazine did indeed read Dr. Koss's research. They initiated a project called the Ms. Magazine Campus Project on Sexual Assault, directed by editor Ellen Sweet, asking Dr. Koss to oversee the survey arm of the project and using funding supplied by the National Institutes of Mental Health. The results of this broader sampling were published in Ms. Magazine in 1985 as Date Rape, The Story of an Epidemic and Those Who Denied. And later in 1988, the study data were incorporated into a book called I Never Called It Rape by Robin Warshaw. I'm going to set all that aside for now and focus only on the peer-reviewed results published in 1987 in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology titled The Scope of Rape, Incidents and Prevalence of Sexual Aggression. This is the proper scholarly analysis for the scientific community. You can download and read this paper using the links in the description bar. In this survey, 3,187 women and 2,972 men who attended college were of traditional college age were asked to record the number of times since age 14 they had been involved in sexual situations as described in the 1982 SES instrument. Recall that rape, according to the Ohio law, only included penetrating intercourse under the use or threat of violence or force or when the victim's judgment had been intentionally, substantially impaired. As before, separate categories were kept for sexual coercion, sexual contact that didn't include penetration and attempted rapes that were unsuccessful were kept as a distinct subcategory of all rape. The results of that 1987 study are summarized. 9% of women reported forcible penetration by a penis through physical force. 8% of women reported unwanted penetration because someone gave them alcohol or drugs. 6% of women reported being penetrated by something other than the penis through force. If we now include the attempted rapes, 15% of women reported attempted penile penetration by force. 12% of women reported unsuccessful attempts at unwanted penetration because someone gave them alcohol or drugs. These 5 categories have some overlap in single individuals, so it's not as simple as adding them up to obtain the final rape numbers. But these are the figures and the only figures included in the 1 in 4 statistic. And just for contrast, 44% of women reported unwanted sexual contact, fondling, kissing, removing clothing as a result of coercion. Note that this is much higher than the rape number of 1 in 4, as would be expected. It was still a bit shocking. 25% of women reported they had given in to penetrating intercourse because a man continually pressured them. Neither of these was included in the rape category for the record, but they tell a story and are useful facts for looking at sexual dynamics. Now, I can practically hear the ticking of keyboard keys. Too broad, some of you are saying. Okay. Even the most strict definition of rape, something no one can dispute, unwanted and successful penetration by a penis through physical force, includes 9% of college aged women, 1 in 11. That is no matter what your definition, the absolute floor statistically. Penetration by something other than a penis, and my imagination is somewhat limited, so I'm going to assume that this is in most cases a finger, is a matter of subjective definition. But holding someone down and penetrating them with anything is not normal behavior. The victim of such crime has been violated. The alcohol and drugs I will concede could be subjective. Part of that number could fall into a gray area, but as you can see, it's not the largest figure. Let's switch back to the conclusions of the authors. Using only the legal definition in Ohio, 27.5% of women reported experiencing and 7.7% of men reported perpetrating an act that met legal definitions of rape. There are two rates of victimization given. The FBI compliant figure, which specifies penetration by a penis, and the national crime statistics abbreviated NCS, which includes penetration by non-penis objects. The FBI penis only rate is 38 per 1,000 women every six months, and the NCS figure is 83 per 1,000 women per six month period. What about other studies, more recent data? The Centers for Disease Control does a study called the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey about every 10 years. The most recent results are from 2010, and you can read the full report using a link in the description bar. I'll use the study author's own words here. Nearly one in five women in the United States has been raped in her lifetime. This translates to almost 22 million women in the United States. The most common form of rape victimization experienced by women was completed forced penetration, experienced by 12.3% of women in the United States. About 5% of women experienced attempted forced penetration, and 8% experienced alcohol slash drug facilitated, completed forced penetration. Again, if you're going to exclude anything you think could possibly be tainted by subjective definition, the rate would still be one in eight in the general population. I could go on to review a few other nationwide studies conducted by various agencies or researchers, but I hope my point is made clear in this single example. The actual number among researchers in this field is not much in dispute. The incidence of rape or attempted rape among women attending college might be as high as one in four if we allow a fairly liberal interpretation permitted under legal statute. If we restrict the definition to the most stringent level and risk excluding a high percentage of actual rape cases, the number is no less than one in 11. These are only the cases where a woman was held down or threatened with harm and forcibly penetrated against her will by a penis. It may very well be a matter of subjective definition where in this range of numbers, you feel the best description of the scope of the problem of rape falls. Regardless of your position, one in four to one in 11, I don't think you can deny that there are millions of rape victims and this is a problem we should take very seriously. I'm not someone who identifies with the label feminist, though I consider myself an egalitarian, but denying the scope of this problem helps no one. Thanks for watching.