Showing posts with label Penn State. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Penn State. Show all posts

Thursday, July 10, 2014

45% of schools with more than 1,000 students reported zero rape cases for 2012. Shenanigans!



Bullshit, friends, bullshit. The Washington Post put together some scary information. Essentially, they list out schools across the US with more than 1,000 students and the number of rapes that school reported. Fun fact, Penn State is number one with all of 56 reported rapes. Additionally, as the title of this post points out, 45% of schools are claiming no rapes. Yeah, that’s not true. Estimates put the number of sexual assaults at 1 in 5 college aged women. That is a conservative estimate. So unless some small school has the entirety of their population sexually assaulted then someone is fibbing.

Shame, shame on you US colleges and universities. I haven’t seen the hard data, but I’m going to say it, these figures are statistically improbable. So if these schools aren’t covering up rapes, which is an impossibility folks, then students are afraid to come forward and report. The general rule of thumb being discussed is that if a school has a low number of reported rapes that doesn’t mean there are no rapes; it means “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Some of the low-lights from the total number of sexual assaults reported between 2010 and 2012:
  • Penn State: 84
  • John Carroll University: 7
  • The George Washington University: 37
  • University of Maryland, Baltimore: 0
All of this brings me back to my main question of the summer: how do we get The Washington Post to stop talking about rape? This might be the question of our time.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Think rape is exaggerated?

I saw this lovely infographic yesterday, but because I was off yesterday I need to finish a ton of work. So below you will find a graphic on rape in the US based on data from the Department of Justice and the FBI. If you need more reading about rape head over to the nation, read Valenit's piece about rape culture, the article about the differences in the rape cases at Penn State and Notre Dame (didn't know one was going on there? read the article), and read the latest about Steubenville. Aside, if there was any doubt that OSU is superior to Penn State (and forgive those stupid t-shirts) it is the kid who posted that pro-Steubenville rape video won't be going back.

The graphic was made by the Enliven Project, more on them here. They appear to be pretty awesome. I like that they note the challenges of data when dealing with issues of sexual violence.

Naturally, I forgot to mention somethings I take for granted that people know. See Amanda Marcotte for the full list, but obviously this graphic is flawed. It is representative of number of rapes, but not number of rapists, we know most rapes are committed by a small number of men. Also, of note Marcotte asserts the number of false allegations is over exaggerated, which is probably true. Useful graphic anyway.