Sarah Edwards — the lead author of a recent study purportedly showing that one in three men would rape if they could get away with it and so long as it wasn’t referred to as rape — really, really believes that one in five women will be sexually assaulted during college.

Despite significant flaws in the 2007 study that produced that one-in-five figure — as well as more representative studies showing the rate to be much lower — Edwards, a University of North Dakota assistant professor of counseling psychology, wholeheartedly believes the study. In an email to the Washington Examiner, she said that those who deny the higher rate just can’t handle the information.

“I think people are more interested in ways to rationalize away results of a study like that because it helps them deal with the emotional impact of hearing such statistics,” Edwards said. “It’s emotionally easier to try to rationalize than take in the results, and really think about what this means for all of these women, at these universities, as well as women all over the U.S., who experience sexual aggression in college.”

Edwards did not respond to an Examiner follow-up question about whether she was engaging in the same behavior by trying to rationalize away the flaws in that 2007 study, or to rationalize away the recent and more comprehensive study suggesting that rape is less prevalent on college campuses than elsewhere.

Edwards also provided the Examiner with the debriefing material that was supposed to address “rape myths.” Researchers were tasked with confirming that male participants' “assumptions go in the right direction” following the survey. In other words, make sure those men believe what the researchers believe.

Some of the assumptions were innocuous, like telling the men they should respect a “no” (even though that’s no longer acceptable; men are now required by feminists to get a “yes” for every stage of potential sexual activity). Other dispelled “myths” conform to current politically correct wisdom — for example, ignoring men as sexual assault victims and infantilizing drunk women as if they were incapable of giving consent.

The more dangerous claim the researchers are spreading is that false accusations don’t happen. Researchers told the men that “most women who claim they were raped don’t make it up but were actually assaulted.” It’s not so much that women completely make up being raped (like Tawana Brawley or Crystal Mangum did) but more the idea that men are being branded as rapists over drunken hookups, misunderstandings and he said/she said situations. Perhaps a better term for these than "falsely accused" would be “wrongly accused.”

Further, Edwards readily admitted she hopes this study gets her grant money. Following this study, which was clearly designed to elicit eye-catching headlines, Edwards hopes to broaden her “research” by conducting the same study on a national scale.

“[W]e have a plan to launch a nationally based study, which samples 50 men from each state with a similar paradigm in order to generalize our results,” Edwards said. “However, in order to engage in such an effort, we are seeking out funding and grant opportunities.”

Edwards said she believed the men whose questions were analyzed took the survey seriously, but declined to provide the Examiner the actual questions that were asked during the study. Edwards also said that the men surveyed were not students at the University of North Dakota (despite the study claiming the men received extra credit) but didn’t tell the Examiner what university provided the extra credit.

For some perspective on this study from the other side, we have Mark J. Perry, an economics professor and American Enterprise Institute scholar. In an email to the Examiner, Perry explained additional flaws in Edwards’ study, such as the missing margin of error.

A typical survey (like those conducted by Gallup) would have a margin of error of about 3 percent. One can see this calculated at a website called ComRes. If you change the parameters to match the student population of a typical North Dakota university and the number of men surveyed, the margin of error jumps to 10.5 percent. Changing the population size to 9 million (the number of male college students in the U.S.) the margin of error holds steady at 10.5 percent.

If you change the sample size to 73 (the number of respondents actually included in Edwards’ analysis), the margin of error rises to 11.44 percent for a typical North Dakota university and 11.47 percent for all U.S. male college students. A margin of error that size means that Edwards’ finding that 31.7 percent of respondents (23 guys) would rape if they could get away with it could actually be closer to 20 percent or 43.17 percent. This range, according to Perry, is “so wide it really can’t be taken seriously.”

And if one looks at the other major statistic in Edwards’ study — that 13.6 percent of respondents (9 guys) actually said they would rape if there were no consequences — the massive margin of error puts that range at between 2.13 percent and 25 percent.

Perry also noted that the study doesn’t explain how the 86 men were selected.

“Since they received extra credit, they were probably all taking the same class from one of the professors who wrote the paper,” Perry wrote. “In that case, they weren’t selected at random from the student population, which could have biased the results.”

Perry also blasted news outlets like Newsweek for their “shoddy journalism” in writing headlines insisting that one-third of college men would rape a woman if they could get away with it “based on such a small sample from just one school and one study.”

Edwards’ study creates a problem for further research into the nature and prevalence of sexual assault. By seeking eye-catching headlines instead of truth, studies like this do a disservice to the men and women affected by the sexual assault discussion. This study, along with the one-in-five myth, have resulted in policies that define nearly all sex as rape and have allowed dozens of young men to be branded as rapists with no evidence beside an accusation.

To return some semblance of sanity to the discussion, studies purporting to show that huge populations of American males are monsters (far out of line with actual crime statistics) need to be taken with a grain of salt and not accepted as outright fact without any critical thinking.