Female students at UVA “have a 20 percent chance of being sexually assaulted.”
— Richard Saslaw on Monday, November 24th, 2014 in a presentation.
Virginia state Senator Richard Saslaw seethed after reading a Rolling Stone article detailing an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity.
Saslaw, a Democrat from Fairfax, said he will introduce a bill that would require that college officials who are told of a sexual assault to notify law enforcement within 24 hours.
“What parent in their right mind would send a daughter to UVa. when she’s got – are you ready for this? – a 20 percent chance, a 20 percent chance of being sexually assaulted?” Saslaw said in the clip posted by Blue Virginia, a liberal blog.
Saslaw spoke more than a week before Rolling Stone backed off the story. The magazine’s editor said last week there were discrepancies in the accuser’s version of events and that the magazine’s trust in her “had been misplaced.”
Nonetheless, Saslaw’s statement that 20 percent of female students at UVa are sexually assaulted at UVa warrants examination.
Where does the statistic come from?
The Rolling Stone article didn’t cite a source for the one-in-five statistic. It likely originates from a widely cited study on college sexual assaults conducted in December 2007 by the U.S. Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice. Researchers surveyed 5,446 undergraduate women at two unnamed large public universities — one in the Midwest and one in the South.
The study defined sexual assault as unwanted touching, intercourse, oral sex, anal sex or sexual penetration with an object or finger. Researchers wrote in a Journal of American College Health article in 2009 that 19.8 percent of women surveyed during their senior year had experienced a sexual assault since entering college.
But there are some major caveats about the figure. Researchers noted the results were limited to the two unidentified colleges surveyed and may not generalize to the experiences of all college women. They also said the survey had a “modest” 42 percent response rate to their Web-based survey, which the researchers noted is lower than other methods.
James Fox, a professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University, told PolitiFact National in May that the “one-in-five statistic shouldn’t just be taken with a grain of salt, but the entire shaker.” Fox said the issue of sexual assaults on campuses shouldn’t be diminished but faulted politicians for citing national estimates that are “shaky at best.”
In early 1997, the Department of Justice randomly surveyed 4,446 college women and found that 15.5 percent said they had been “sexually victimized” during that school year — a term that included threats and actions ranging from unwanted touching to rape.
Research that tries to quantify sexual assaults is complicated by a couple of factors.
Despite such limitations, the institute adds that “several studies indicate that a substantial proportion of female students — between 18 and 20 percent — experience rape or some other form of sexual assault during their college years.”
Does the national figure apply to UVa.?
There’s no way to know whether the one-in-five figure actually does apply to UVa.
Our ruling
Saslaw says a female student attending UVa. has a 20 percent chance of being sexually assaulted.
Saslaw bases his claim on a Rolling Stone article about an alleged gang rape at UVa that said nationally, “one in five women is sexually assaulted in college.”
Rolling Stone didn’t cite a source, but the statistic is commonly used and is often based on a 2007 federal survey of women at two unnamed colleges. A few other studies have come up with comparable results.
The key fact here is that none of the studies, as far as we know, examined UVa. The university says it plans to start surveying its students next year to quantify incidences of sexual misconduct.
Saslaw applies the 20 percent figure to UVa without any hard information and his comment suggests that the statistic is unique to the university.
We’re not downplaying the issue of sexual assaults at UVa., a problem that’s been repeatedly acknowledged by Teresa Sullivan, president of the university. But there’s a burden on Saslaw to prove his claim and he comes up short.
We rate his statement Mostly False.
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