Researching the "Rape Culture" of America

http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9502/sommers.html

Researching the "Rape Culture" of America

An Investigation of Feminist Claims about Rape
By Christina Hoff Sommers
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Clark University

[...]

A Serious Discrepancy

The more serious worry is that Kilpatrick's findings, and many other
findings on rape, vary wildly unless the respondents are explicitly
asked whether they have been raped. In 1993, Louis Harris and
Associates did a telephone survey and came up with quite different
results. Harris was commissioned by the Commonwealth Fund to do a
study of women's health. As we shall see, their high figures on
women's depression and psychological abuse by men caused a stir.[28]
But their finding on rape went altogether unnoticed. Among the
questions asked of its random sample population of 2,500 women was,
"In the last five years, have you been a victim of a rape or sexual
assault?" Two percent of the respondents said yes; 98 percent said no.
Since attempted rape counts as sexual assault, the combined figures
for rape and attempted rape would be 1.9 million over five years or
380,000 for a single year. Since there are approximately twice as many
attempted rapes as completed rapes, the Commonwealth/ Harris figure
for completed rapes would come to approximately 190,000. That is
dramatically lower than Kilpatrick's finding of 683,000 completed
forcible rapes.

The Harris interviewer also asked a question about acquaintance and
marital rape that is worded very much like Kilpatrick's and Koss's:
"In the past year, did your partner ever try to, or force you to, have
sexual relations by using physical force, such as holding you down, or
hitting you, or threatening to hit you, or not?"[29] Not a single
respondent of the Harris poll's sample answered yes.

How to explain the discrepancy? True, women are often extremely
reluctant to talk about sexual violence that they have experienced.
But the Harris pollsters had asked a lot of other awkward personal
questions to which the women responded with candor: six percent said
they had considered suicide, five percent admitted to using hard
drugs, 10 percent said they had been sexually abused when they were
growing up. I don't have the answer, though it seems obvious to me
that such wide variances should make us appreciate the difficulty of
getting reliable figures on the risk of rape from the research. That
the real risk should be known is obvious. The Blade reporters
interviewed students on their fears and found them anxious and
bewildered. "It makes a big difference if it's one in three or one in
50," said April Groff of the University of Michigan, who says she is
"very scared." "I'd have to say, honestly, I'd think about rape a lot
less if I knew the number was one in 50."[30]

When the Blade reporters asked Kilpatrick why he had not asked women
whether they had been raped, he told them there had been no time in
the thirty-five-minute interview. "That was probably something that
ended up on the cutting-room floor.''[31] But Kilpatrick's exclusion
of such a question resulted in very much higher figures. When pressed
about why he omitted it from a study for which he had received a
million- dollar federal grant, he replied, "If people think that is a
key question, let them get their own grant and do their own
study."[32]

Kilpatrick had done an earlier study in which respondents were
explicitly asked whether they had been raped. That study showed a
relatively low prevalence of five percent-one in twenty-and it got
very little publicity.[33] Kilpatrick subsequently abandoned his
former methodology in favor of the Ms./Koss method, which allows the
surveyor to decide whether a rape occurred. Like Koss, he used an
expanded definition of rape (both include penetration by a finger).
Kilpatrick's new approach yielded him high numbers (one in eight), and
citations in major newspapers around the country. His graphs were
reproduced in Time magazine under the heading, "Unsettling Report on
an Epidemic of Rape."[34] Now he shares with Koss the honor of being a
principal expert cited by media, politicians, and activists.

There are many researchers who study rape victimization, but their
relatively low figures generate no headlines. The reporters from the
Blade interviewed several scholars whose findings on rape were not
sensational but whose research methods were sound and were not based
on controversial definitions. Eugene Kanin, a retired professor of
sociology from Purdue University and a pioneer in the field of
acquaintance rape, is upset by the intrusion of politics into the
field of inquiry: "This is highly convoluted activism rather than
social science research."[35] Professor Margaret Gordon of the
University of Washington did a study in 1981 that came with relatively
low figures for rape (one in fifty). She tells of the negative
reaction to her findings: "There was some pressure-at least I felt
pressure-to have rape be as prevalent as possible . . .. I'm a pretty
strong feminist, but one of the things I was fighting was that the
really avid feminists were trying to get me to say that things were
worse than they really are."[36]

Dr. Linda George of Duke University also found relatively low rates of
rape (one in seventeen), even though she asked questions very close to
Kilpatrick's. She told the Blade she is concerned that many of her
colleagues treat the high numbers as if they are "cast in stone."[37]
Dr. Naomi Breslau, director of research in the psychiatry department
at the Henry Ford Health Science Center in Detroit, who also found low
numbers, feels that it is important to challenge the popular view that
higher numbers are necessarily more accurate. Dr. Breslau sees the
need for a new and more objective program of research: "It's really an
open question. . . . We really don't know a whole lot about it."[38]


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