Despite an overall decline in violence against women, 2014 was the year that campus rape gained legal traction and national attention. Citing data that one in five college women are sexually assaulted, a White House Task Force called for universities to lower the standard of proof necessary to find guilt in a sexual assault claim. The California legislature even passed a bill that tied state funding of higher education to a campus policy of affirmative consent or “yes means yes,” meaning that even if a college student didn’t say “No” to a sexual advance, he (but more likely, she) can pursue a claim for having failed to “assent affirmatively.”

The prominence of campus rape as a political and feminist issue was the result of a host of factors, including long-gestating changes to Title IX and the work of campus activists and journalists. Much of this work was meaningful and brave. But by the end of the year, signs began to emerge that the collective panic over campus sexual assault may have been a little misguided. First, there was the Rolling Stone debacle. So desirable had stories of campus sexual assault become, that the magazine’s reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, hunted until she found one at the University of Virginia that implicated everyone imaginable—the school’s administrators, fraternities, and ordinary students. It turned out that Erdely’s reporting was unsubstantiated and, in several key aspects, untrue. In the aftermath, many people insisted that we not use the incident to cast doubt on other rape survivors’ stories. And while this is undoubtedly correct, it’s also true that the Rolling Stone story wasn’t merely an isolated incident—that the collective hysteria surrounding campus rape lulled the magazine’s editors and readers into letting down their critical faculties.

As Erdely’s story crumbled, new data emerged to suggest that campus rape was not quite the pandemic that had been described. According to new research conducted by the Department of Justice that came out in December, the oft-cited statistic that one in five women in college will be sexually assaulted is actually a wildly inflated tally, based on self-selecting surveys. But a new study in December put the actual number of female college students aged 18-24 who will experience sexual assault at 6.1 per 1,000 students.

“This is nothing to be proud of,” Professor Callie Marie Rennison, a co-author of the study, wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times. But it’s also not one in five.

“I think people have lost context,” Rennison said, when reached by phone. The study also found that women of the same age who don’t attend college are sexually victimized at rates 30 percent greater than their more educated counterparts. “The context is, yeah, college women are victimized, but non-college women are victimized at much higher rates, and I don’t hear anyone talking about them.”