How an Influential Campus Rape Study Skewed the Debate - Hit & Run : Reason.com
The public debate over the extent and causes of the campus sexual assault crisis is fraught with misleading information.
The previously acclaimed work of psychologist David Lisak deserves that distinction as well.
The federal government, universities, and members of Congress have all used Lisak’s theories to justify rape adjudication policies that are biased against accused students.
They should reconsider those policies in light of new discoveries about the inapplicability of Lisak’s work.
Lisak has cultivated a reputation as one of the nation’s foremost authorities on sexual assault, and his thinking undergirds the most vexingly anti-due process policies currently mandated by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
His authority on the subject is so uncontested that even critics of draconian anti-rape policies feel obligated to grapple with his assertions, according to Slate’s Emily Yoffe, who described Lisak’s work as foundational "in the movement to curb campus sexual assault."
...The 2002 Lisak study that supposedly makes that case—"Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists"—is fundamental to the activist campaign to reduce campus rape.
But
despite the study’s prominence, its assertions about the serial nature of campus rapists are dubiously sourced, according to a thorough investigation conducted by Reason contributor Linda LeFauve.
The study pooled data from four separate surveys of interpersonal violence that were conducted at the University of Massachusetts-Boston during the ‘90s, at which time Lisak was employed as an associate professor.
Lisak’s study had a total sample size of 1,882 men, 120 of whom gave responses in the surveys indicating that they were predators.
Of the 120 rapists, 76 were judged to be repeat offenders, leading to the oft-cited claim that the majority of campus sexual assault is the work of serial predators who remain "undetected," i.e., are never convicted for their crimes.
The claim suffers when scrutinized.
For reasons left unclear, the four surveys that contributed data are never actually identified in the study.
In fact,
Lisak struggled to recall which ones he used when asked about them during the course of a telephone interview with LeFauve.
When LeFauve suggested to him that the data in question came from his doctoral students’ dissertations and masters’ theses, he agreed that this was "probably" the case.
...None of which is to say that the campus rape crisis is made up. Women are assaulted on college campuses all the time. But if we want to do anything to stop this, we might look for solutions outside the lens of a study that was never about campus violence in the first place.
Read it all.
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