The shocking claim that one of every five college coeds is a victim of sexual assault is just plain wrong, says Kevin Williamson, a roving correspondent for National Review Online.
"As far as the actual scholarly literature . . . there's just absolutely no support for any belief that one in five women is being sexually assaulted over the course of their college career," Williamson said Monday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
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"Nobody really seems to have a good idea of what the actual rate is. It looks close to 2 percent, rather than 20 percent, but estimates range from one number to 11 times that number."
The one-in-five statistic comes from the Campus Sexual Assault Study, which was conducted for the Justice Department's National Institute of Justice and released in 2007.
"There's always this mystery, at least it's always been a mystery to me, that you hear these numbers, the percentage of sexual assaults that get reported, to some tiny number: 8 percent, 6 percent or 5 percent. I always wondered why that was, Williamson said.
"The Justice Department has looked into this, and what they're finding is that the things that count as sexual assault on a lot of the surveys aren't things that are crimes, so they were never reported."
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