The Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative non-profit, hosted a panel Thursday called “An Honest Conversation about ‘Rape Culture’ and Sexual Violence.” Instead, it was a conversation about whether "rape culture" exists, as several panelists targeted a statistic the Obama administration used in its April report on campus sexual assault: that one in five women is sexually assaulted in college.

That statistic is partly why the panel was convened in the first place. Nationally syndicated columnist George Will doubted the number in a recent opinion piece where he also mocked the "supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. 'sexual assault.'" In response to the backlash against Will—The St. Louis Dispatch dropped his column—the Independent Women’s Forum organized this supposed “straight talk” panel. After moderator Sabrina Schaeffer introduced the four panelists, Christina Hoff Sommers, a former philosophy professor best known for her critiques of late-twentieth-century feminism, began by challenging the legitimacy of the “one in five” statistic.

“Inflated statistics lead to ineffective policies and worse than that, they can breed panic and overreaction,” Sommers said, “and that’s what I think we have right now. I believe that the rape culture movement is fueled by exaggerated claims of intimacy and a lot of paranoia about men.”

The statistic is based on a study by the U.S. Department of Justice from 2005 to 2007, when researchers conducted an anonymous web-based survey at two large public universities (one in the Midwest and one in the South). Of 5,446 women between the ages of 18 and 25 who responded (a response rate of about 42 percent), about 19 percent reported experiencing an attempted or completed sexual assault since entering college—12.6 percent reported an attempted sexual assault and 13.7 percent reported an actual sexual assault (there was some overlap). The study’s definition of sexual assault also included non-rape acts.

Therefore, based on this survey, only 13.7 percent of women respondents had been sexually assaulted. However, these survey results included freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. In 2009, researchers released a more complete analysis of the data, which showed that of senior women who responded, 19 percent had experienced an actual sexual assault. Hence the Obama administration's assertion that one in five women is sexually assaulted in college.