USA TODAY Allows False Sex Assault Statistic To Go Unchallenged. Also-Males Should Avoid Biased XavierU
No matter how many times the claim that an exorbitant number of college women will be sexually assaulted during their time as an undergraduate is debunked, it still gets presented as if it were a fact of life. In August 2018, USA Today attempted to explain the issue of campus sexual assault in a series of videos, but right off the bat, the media outlet is making a bad faith argument. USA Today teased the series by comparing rates of breast cancer to false and misleading statistics about campus sexual assault. USA Today presented Xavier University Title IX officer Kate Lawson, who brought up the so-misleading-it-should-be-called-fake statistic in the first part of the series. “About 1-in-4 to 1-in-5 women will experience rape or attempted rape during college,” Lawson says. This is flat out false. Even the studies where she gets the scary “1-in-4” or “1-in-5” numbers don’t say this. In those incredibly misleading studies, the high numbers are achieved by claiming that many women will be sexually assaulted (which includes rape but does not necessarily mean rape) or experience attempted sexual assault (which, again, includes attempted rape but does not mean attempted rape). Yet here is an Xavier administrator vastly inflating the issue. It seems to be a theme at that university, as the school’s president, Father Michael Graham, stated that campus sexual assault is “an epidemic” that is “pervasive” and “in the culture,” as if it is a fact. All notions of this alleged epidemic come from those unreliable and faulty statistics.
dailywire.com By Ashe Schow
