Comments Elsewhere

Amanda:

I still cannot figure out what they hope to gain by insisting that rape is slightly less common than Koss’s study indicates. Okay, so what if we find one day that only 1 in 5 women has been sexually assaulted. Does this mean anti-rape campaigns are a sham? If 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 people had a car stolen, we sure as hell wouldn’t be quibbling over the numbers, but would be looking for solutions.

I fear that what they think they have to gain is explained by the simple fact that they are not acting in good faith. I try to keep conversations civil with people who repeat the hatchet-jobs on Koss (most of them copied, directly or ultimately, out of Katie Roiphe’s hatchet-job in The Morning After), but a lot of them are more interested in indiscriminately throwing mud on the survey (and therefore not having to discuss how prevalent rape is at all) than they are in finding out what the truth of the matter might be.

The standard-issue attack that Koss includes sex while intoxicated, for example, is completely trivial: Koss went ahead and ran the numbers over again with those cases excluded, and found that 1 in 5 college women had suffered rape or attempted rape if you stuck to a definition based only on direct force or threats of violence. Anyone who was honestly interested in the possible limitation of Koss’s figures or in making sure that feminists base their arguments on careful and accurate use of social science results could have found this out by reading either Koss’s primary articles or reports such as I Never Called It Rape. But they don’t, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that many of the people who do this—and certainly those who do it in print—are just a bit more interested in cooking up an excuse to dismiss feminist analyses of rape than they are in finding out the truth.

A lot of the attacks on the Koss study are, quite frankly, nut much different from the tactics that rapists’ defenders use against individual survivors in the courtroom: discredit the woman who is sitting there telling you what happened to her as crazy, slutty, unscrupulous, hysterical, etc., and you don’t have to deal with the hard question of figuring out what exactly did happen. It’s slime-and-defend without regard for the truth, whether used to dismiss personal testimony or statistical research.