The 2007 CSA (Campus Sexual Assault) Study is a very important study. It was the source of the infamous statistic: “One out of five undergraduate women experience an attempted or completed sexual assault since entering college” (6-3), which is more commonly quoted as “1 in 5 college women are victims of attempted or completed sexual assault” or “1 in 5 college women will be victims of attempted or completed sexual”. The study was commonly miscited as “1 in 5 college women will be victims of sexual assault” (ignoring the often inconvenient distinctions between completed and attempted sexual assault). Others even claimed “1 in 5 college women are victims of rape”.

The CSA’s statistic was cited by news media, advocates and politicians. Even President Obama loudly (and incorrectly) proclaimed :

“It is estimated that 1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there – 1 in 5.”

Perhaps more importantly, the CSA study was cited by the infamous “ Dear College ” letter, which FIRE and many others have claimed is a danger to student’s basic civil rights. The CSA may also have influenced the passage of California’s similarly controversial Affirmative Consent Law

As is normal for sensational statistics on violence against women, the CSA “1 in 5” statistic quickly became gospel despite its many glaring (but rarely mentioned) flaws. However, critics of the study became progressively louder. The greatest blow to the study’s credibility occurred in late 2014, when official Bureau of Justice Statistics survey data was released that not only challenged the CSA’s high numbers, but also showed college women report less rape/sexual assault than non-college women of the same age group.

Meet the CSA - not a DOJ study

Journalists, activists and politicians have an incredibly annoying habit of not naming the studies they cite (as well as not correctly citing what the studies say). The CSA was often referred to as a “Department of Justice study” or maybe “a study commissioned by the Department of Justice.” However, the DOJ only indirectly funded the study through a grant by the National Institute of Justice. The actual research was conducted by RTI International, a nonprofit organization. Neither the DOJ nor the US government did any of the actual research. The CSA is very clear on this. The front page of the report has the following disclaimers:

“The report has not been published by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

“Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice”

Literally every page of the CSA report’s pdf contains the following disclaimer:

“This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been publicized by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice”

Problem 1: Sample size and selection

One of the most obvious flaws in the CSA is its testing sample. CSA researchers only surveyed students at two universities. Only two! The CSA survey results cannot be considered representative of America universities in general. According to Wikipedia, the U.S. has 4,726 colleges. All these schools likely have different cultures, different students, different policies and are located in areas with different crime rates.

To makes things worse, we don’t know what two universities the CSA surveyed. All the CSA report tells us is they are:

“two large public universities, one located in the South (University 1) and one located in the Midwest (University 2). Both universities are located in semi-urban areas. University 1 has a student body of approximately 30,000 students; University 2 has approximately 35,000 students. Approximately 10% of students at University 1 are African American and 3% are Hispanic. About 11% of students at University 2 are African American and 2% are Hispanic. Fifty-eight percent of students are University 1 are women and 55% of students are University 2 are women.” (3-1)

If we knew the specific universities, we could look up crime rates in the area around the university. Are these universities in high or low crime areas? We could even compare the CSA results to the official number of sexual assault reports made at the college, which have been public record for years thanks to the Clery Act (you can even look them up online). The CSA doesn’t even give us the states the universities are in.

Why the secrecy? All the survey takers remain just as anonymous even if we know the universities in question. Maybe its to protect the reputation of the university? This makes more sense, but its not a very good reason, especially when universities already have to publish the number of reported sexual assaults under the Clery Act. Ultimately, all omitting the names of the universities really does is protect the CSA study from outside scrutiny.

There may be other problems with bias in the testing sample. Survey takers were volunteers recruited through a mailing campaign. The problem with voluntary response surveys is they may disproportionately get respondents with an axe to grind or a story to tell. Who is going to show up to take a long boring sexual assault survey if they don’t have anything to say about sexual assault? To their credit, the CSA tried to guard against this be giving respondents a $10 gift card for completing the survey. However, the CSA still found:

The overall response rates for survey completion for the undergraduate women sampled at the two universities were 42.2% and 42.8%, respectively. The response rates for males were lower.

This might actually be a pretty good response for this kind of survey. However, it still could indicate that people who responded may have disproportionately been victims of sexual assault.

CSA’s definition of “sexual assault”

The CSA report states:

“Sexual assault included forced touching of a sexual nature, oral sex, sexual intercourse, anal sex, and/or sexual penetration with a finger or object.” (xi)

This is very broad. Under the CSA definition, a “sexual assault” could be a violent rape or an unwanted kiss. Things get even murkier when you consider the CSA is counting both completed and attempted sexual assault.

Attempted sexual assault is worth recording, but it should be recognized that whether an attempted sexual assault has occurred might be much more subjective, especially when the barrier to offend set so low. Since almost anything that involves successful physical contact could be classified as a completed sexual assault, what does an attempted sexual assault look like under the CSA? An attempted ass grab? A failed kiss?

Keep in mind few people will actually read the report and learn about the CSA’s broad definition. Instead, they will just hear journalists, activists and politicians yell from the rooftops that “1 in 5" college women are/will be victims of “sexual assault!” However, the CSA’s headline "1-in-5” statistic is useless, because it tells us very little about sexual assault on (only two) college campuses. Are we dealing with rampant rape or an epidemic of attempted grab ass?

CSA’s sexual assault categories

Despite hyping its largely useless 1-in-5 statistic, the CSA actually does break down its findings into more useful categories:

For completed sexual assaults, a series of follow-up questions enabled us to define the assault as sexual battery (i.e., sexual assault that entailed sexual touching only) and/or rape (i.e., sexual assault that entailed oral, vaginal, or anal penetration).(xi)

Furthermore, the CSA also divides sexual assaults into two other categories: Physically Forced Sexual Assault and Incapacitated Sexual Assault.

The CSA doesn’t explicitly define Physically Forced Sexual Assault, but strongly implies it means “assaults occurring as a result of physical force or threats of physical force from assaults”. This seems to match up to the survey questions on the CSA’s questionnaire, which I managed to track down after significant searching.

The CSA is more clear about Incapacitated Sexual Assault and its many subcategories:

Incapacitated Sexual Assault: “any unwanted sexual contact occurring when a victim is unable to provide consent or stop what is happening because she is passed out, drugged, drunk, incapacitated, or asleep, regardless of whether the perpetrator was responsible for her substance use or whether substances were administered without her knowledge”(1-5)

DFSA (drug-facilitated sexual assault): “unwanted sexual contact occurring when the victim is incapacitated and unable to provide consent after she had been given a drug without her knowledge or consent” (1-5).

SDFSA (suspected drug-facilitated sexual assault): “incapacitated sexual assault occurring after the victim suspects that she had been given a drug without her knowledge or consent” (1-5).

AOD (Alcohol and/or other drug)-enabled sexual assault: “unwanted sexual contact when she is incapacitated and unable to provide consent because of voluntary consumption of alcohol or other drugs” (1-5>.

Other Incapacitated SA: “which cover "the remaining, and likely uncommon, situations in which a victims can be incapacitated, such as by being asleep or unconscious”

Note the definitions only mention “she” and “her knowledge”, never “he or she” or “his or her knowledge”. The study surveyed both men and women, but its definitions appear only concerned with female victims.

CSA’s incredible anti-male bias

The CSA surveyed both male and female students. However, the CSA quickly reveals it is largely unconcerned with male victims. In the CSA report’s summary section, the authors state:

“Because the male component of the study was exploratory, the data and results presented in this summary represent women only.”

The CSA authors pretty much admit they don’t care about male victims. Apparently, they were just allowed as a curiosity. This isn’t a study about sexual assault victimization, this is a study about female sexual assault victimization.

Male victims of female rapists intentionally excluded

The CSA questionnaire is divided into several sections: Background Information, Alcohol and Other Drug Use, Dating, Experiences and Behavior. The Experiences sections contains the CSA’s questions on sexual assault victimization. However, the CSA report claims:

“The Experiences section received by male respondents had the same level of detail and content, but it was tailored to be gender-appropriate.”

Male and female respondents are asked different questions - big red flag! The CSA report doesn’t elaborate what “gender-appropriate” means. The CSA report also doesn’t include a copy of the CSA questionnaire. Again, it seems like the CSA is trying to make it difficult for others to examine their work. However, after a lot of searching, I finally managed to find a copy of the CSA questionnaire.

I am infuriated by what I found. The opening of the Experience section recording sexual victimization states:

forced touching of a sexual nature (forced kissing, touching of private parts, grabbing, fondling, rubbing up against you in a sexual way, even if it is over your clothes)

oral sex (someone’s mouth or tongue making contact with your genitals or your mouth or tongue making contact with someone else’s genitals)

[If B0=female] sexual intercourse (someone’s penis being put in your vagina)

anal sex (someone’s penis being put in your anus)

sexual penetration with a finger or object (someone putting their finger or an object like a bottle or a candle in your [If B0=female, fill “vagina or”] anus.” (12) “These questions ask about [if B0=male, fill “four”, if B0=female, fill “five”] types of unwanted sexual contact:

“Unwanted sexual contact” = sexual assault. Notice that the CSA does not allow males respondents to be victims of sexual assault through “sexual intercourse”. In other words, much like the CDC’s NISVS, the CSA quietly excludes male victims of female rapists. In fact, the CSA is even worse than the NISVS. At least the CDC still defines male victims of made-to-penetrate rape as victims of sexual assault (but not proper “rape”). If you actually bother to read the full CDC NISVS report, you can see that CDC was trying to ignore that its own findings on the similar rate at which men and women are victims of rape. You can see how the CDC was trying to hide over 1,000,000 male victims of female rapists per year. However, the CSA questionnaire simply excludes these male victims completely, so we have no idea what it could have found if it allowed for male victims of female rapists.

Only male survey takers are asked about perpetration

If the CSA doesn’t seem to care about male victims, why bother including men at all? One possible reason is they wanted to ask male survey takers perpetration questions:

“For male respondents, a Behaviors module asking about the perpetration of the same types of sexual assault covered in the Experiences module was included.” (xi)

That’s right. Only men completed the Behavior section (pages 31-41 of the questionnaire). The CSA only asked men how often they commit sexual assault. Women were not asked any perpetration questions. Men were asked 10 more pages of questions than women, but somehow men’s participation is only “exploratory”.

Also notice a key difference in the Experience and Behavior sections of the questionnaire. In the Experience section, which both men and women complete, survey takers are not asked about the gender of their sexual assault perpetrators. In the Behavior section, which only men complete, survey takers are asked about the gender of their victims. Why the difference?

My theory is that the CSA authors didn’t want to risk male/female survey takers claiming they had female perpetrators of sexual assault. The researchers seem to be rigging their survey to create a narrative of women as the primary victims and men as the sole perpetrators. The CSA isn’t about finding the truth, its about creating this narrative.

Hiding Female Perpetrators: supporting patriarchy theory > understanding/helping victims

I have often pointed out (most recently with my post on Mary Koss) that feminists are often a negative force in sexual assault research because they produce biased research designed to support their fantastical belief in patriarchy theory at the expense of coming to a real understanding of the issue. This often takes the form inflating female victimization as well as hiding male victimization and female perpetration.

While there aren’t any blazing feminist flags in the CSA report (Mary Koss is cited often, but there aren’t any direct references to patriarchy theory), this is what appears to be happening here. My theory is further supported by the way the study often portrays women as victims and men as perpetrators, but never vice-a-versa. For example, this question in the Experiences section of the questionnaire:

C22. [(Was the person/were any of the people) a member of a fraternity at the time of (the incident/any of the incidents)?

o Yes

o No

o Don’t know

Not a “sorority or fraternity.” Not a “Greek organization.” A “fraternity”.

The ridiculous Final Section of the questionnaire offers another glimpse at how CSA wants its survey takers to view perpetrators and victims. It asks survey takers to rate if the following are rape on a scale from “No” to “Definitely”

On a first date, a man takes a woman out on a date and pays for their expensive dinner. At the end of the night, she tells him she does not want to have sex, but he holds her down and has sexual intercourse with her anyway.

A couple who has had sex before gets drunk together at a party. She tells him she does not want to have sex, but he holds her down and has sexual intercourse with her anyway.

A woman performs oral sex on a man because he threatens to hurt her if she doesn’t.

A woman has sexual intercourse with a man because he threatens to hurt her if she doesn’t.

A 12 year-old boy performs oral sex on a 36 year-old man because the man tells him he has to.

At a party, a man comes across a woman who is drunk and lying unconscious on a couch. He begins to kiss and touch her and eventually has sexual intercourse with her.

A man gives a woman a drug without her knowledge or consent. She becomes semi- conscious and he has sexual intercourse with her.” (42) “Do you consider the following situations to be rape?

At the end of the section the survey taker is told in big red letters “All of these situations constitute rape” (42). For having such a broad definition of sexual assault, the CSA certainly is purposing a narrow view of what it actually looks like. All the perpetrators are men. All but one victim is female. There are no male or female victims of female perpetrators. There aren’t even any adult male victims.

Most “rape” victims said they weren’t actually raped

The CSA really shouldn’t be self-righteously declaring what is and isn’t rape, since the vast majority of the CSA’s recorded rape victims maintained they were not actually raped:

“When asked if they considered the incident to be rape, a significantly higher percentage of physically forced victims (40%) answered affirmatively, compared to only 25% of the incapacitated assault victims. Because our classification of sexual assault includes both battery (unwanted touching achieved by physical force or incapacitation of the victim) and rape (vaginal, oral, anal, or object penetration achieved by physical force or incapacitation of the victim), not all victims were indeed raped. When subsetting to victims who were raped, 64.6% of physically forced rape victims and 37.8% of incapacitated rape victims considered the incident to be rape.” (5-20)

Keep in mind incapacitated rapes make up the vast majority of all reported rapes in the CSA with both male and female survey takers supposedly reporting incapacitated rape over twice as much as rape by force.

The CSA report offers no further explanation for why this all may have happened, how it can justify still counting these individuals as rape victims in its statistics, if these individuals still consider themselves victims of sexual assault at all, or if other recorded sexual assault victims may not consider themselves victims too. The authors simple brush off something that calls the validity of their entire survey into question.

CSA turns drunken hook-ups into rape/sexual assault?

The CSA found AOD-Enabled SA (“unwanted sexual contact when she is incapacitated and unable to provide consent because of voluntary consumption of alcohol or other drugs”) make up the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults. AOD-Enabled SA appears more common then all other forms of sexual assault combined for both women and men.

According to the CSA:

“The large majority (n = 566, 84%) of the 651 women who experienced incapacitated sexual assault were victims of AOD-enabled, rather than drug-facilitated, sexual assault. Only 31 (0.6%) of the 5,446 undergraduate women who participated in the CSA Study reported being sexually assaulted after being given a drug without their knowledge or consent since entering college.”

“the vast majority of incapacitated sexual assault victims (89%) reported drinking alcohol, and being drunk (82%), prior to their victimization. This is much higher than the proportion of physically forced victims who reported drinking (33%) and being drunk (13%) prior to their assault.” (5-18)

Some might claim that sexual predators target drunk individuals and there might be some truth to that. However, the fact that most of the CSA’s supposed “rape victims” aren’t actually rape victims makes me suspicious the CSA might be portraying the alcohol-fueled sexual “hook-ups” common in American universities as sexual assaults.

This would explain a lot of the other study results. The low reporting numbers (2.1% of incapacitated sexual / 12.9% of forced sexual assault victims) start to make sense when you consider that many “victims” may have not reported because they didn’t consider themselves victims of anything (5-22). When asked to select reasons why they didn’t report, the most popular response for both incapacitated (66.5%) and forced (55.6%) sexual assault victims was “Did not think it was serious enough to report.” The second most popular choice (49.7%) for incapacitated sexual assault victims is “Victim thought she was partially/fully responsible”, followed by (35.9%) “Unclear that it was a crime or that harm was intended”.

The CSA may be defining non-victims as victims and then expressing shock when these non-victims strangely don’t go to the police.

Downfall of the CSA: BJS survey data shows college students less likely to be raped

The CSA was often cited for years to fan rape culture hysteria. However, criticism of the study started started to grow louder. Things finally came to a head in 2014 when the U.S. government’s BJS (Bureau of Justice Statistics) published Rape and Sexual Assault Among College-age Females, 1995-2013. Using the official NCVS survey (the largest, most reputable and longest running national crime survey in the US), the bureau found:

“The rate of rape and sexual assault was 1.2 times higher for nonstudents (7.6 per 1,000) than for students (6.1 per 1,000)”

Not 1-in-5, but 6 in 1000! In addition, its less than non-students!

The BJS paper contains a section specifically comparing their NCVS data, the CDC’s NISVS and the CSA. Like the CSA, the NCVS also uses a similarly broad definition of sexual assault, which also includes attempted sexual assault. The BJS points out that the 2013 NCVS survey had a 88% individual response rate, compared to the 33-43% response rate of the CSA. The BJS paper also looked at a much larger period of time and showed that (although it had fluctuated) the rate of sexual assault had dropped significantly over the years. Although the BJS paper only discusses female victims (even though NCVS data does include male victimization), unlike the CSA, the BJS paper actually acknowledges female perpetrators, showing data for female perpetrators and mixed-sex groups of perpetrators.

I would really like to believe the BJS saw the hysteria created by RTI’s flawed CSA and decided to put a stop to things. I’m not saying the BJS’s paper or the NCVS is perfect, but it is light years better than the CSA.

Lead authors of the CSA respond, shoot themselves in the feet

After a through schooling from the BJS, the authors of the CSA felt compelled to defend themselves. In a December 15, 2014 Time editorial “Setting the Record Straight on ‘1-in 5’”, Christopher Krebs and Christine Lindquist, lead authors of the CSA, wrote “First and foremost, the 1-in-5 statistic is not a nationally representative estimate of the prevalence of sexual assault.”

Krebs was also quoted as making a similar statement in a interview with Emily Yoffe for her article, published earlier that month. Yoffe writes:

“I asked the lead author of the study, Christopher Krebs, whether the CSA represents the experience of those millions of female students. His answer was unequivocal: “We don’t think one in five is a nationally representative statistic.” It couldn’t be, he said, because his team sampled only two schools. “In no way does that make our results nationally representative,” Krebs said. And yet President Obama used this number to make the case for his sweeping changes in national policy.”

The lead authors of the study said the CSA statistics are not nationally representative. Think about that carefully. Statistics are only useful if the are representative. That is the whole point of a survey! The main authors of the study essentially said their own study is useless.

The rest of the editorial is mostly Krebs and Lindquist desperately trying to cover their own asses. They claim, “[W]e have never presented it as being representative of anything other than the senior undergraduate women at the two universities where data were collected—two large public universities, one in the South and one in the Midwest.”

Except the CSA report never made this point. There is absolutely no mention that the study is not nationally representative in the report’s section on Study Limitations. There is nothing to suggest the authors didn’t want people to consider the results nationally representative:

“…CSA Study results carry many social and policy-oriented implications. One out of five undergraduate women experience an attempted or completed sexual assault since entering college.” (6-3)

This also begs the question why Krebbs and Lindquist waited over 5 years to point all this out. Didn’t they think this was important to point out when the CSA was cited in the Dear College letter or by the Whitehouse several years ago? Didn’t they think it was important to point this out when it was affecting public policy? When it was terrifying college-age women around the country!?

Flailing to defend their actions, Krebbs and Linquists even make some blatantly false statements about their own research. Krebbs and Lindquist claim the “survey does attempt to measure attempted sexual assaults, but only victims of completed incidents are included in the 1-in-5 statistic.” This is just factually wrong. If it were true than it would be the “1 in 7” not the “1 in 5” statistic! The CSA report is very clear:

“13.7% of undergraduate women had been victims of at least one completed sexual assault since entering college: 4.7% were victims of physically forced sexual assault; 7.8% of women were sexually assaulted when they were incapacitated after voluntarily consuming drugs and/or alcohol (i.e., they were victims of alcohol and/or other drug- [AOD] enabled sexual assault); 0.6% were sexually assaulted when they were incapacitated after having been given a drug without their knowledge (i.e.,they were certain they had been victims of drug-facilitated sexual assault [DFSA])” (vii)

The number only approaches 1 in 5, when you combine both attempted and completed sexual assaults since entering college, which raises the number from 13.7% to 19% (notice the CSA is still rounding up). It’s like the authors haven’t read their own study.

Ultimately, Krebbs and Lindquist justify the whole debacle by claiming the “study results are helping fuel a conversation about sexual assault on college campuses.” This is a common retort used by bad researchers on sexual assault who have had the flaws in their research exposed. Only these people would claim that promoting terrifying misinformation about sexual assault is “helping fuel a conversation.”

Conclusion: Nature abhors a vacuum - a new CSA?

In my very first post on this blog, I noted that once flawed biased research on the victimization of women is debunked, new similarly flawed research will be produced to take its place. The CSA has fallen and now the demagogues that used it need a replacement. This isn’t about truth or helping victims. It’s about rape culture propagandists and feminist ideologues having a tool they can use to recruit, bully and otherwise get their way.

This is why is so important to understand the faults of the CSA, because history is going to repeat itself and we need to be ready. Already, I can see candidates rising up to claim the CSA’s lost pedestal. No doubt I will post about them in the future.