A Recipe for Sexual Assault
While the Justice Department estimates that one in five female college students experience some form of sexual assault, the other half of the equation is far more circumspect: Only 6 percent or so of male college students commit sexual assault, with each committing nearly six rapes on average, according to the psychologist David Lisak, who’s conducted extensive and widely cited research on sexual assault. That suggests that many sexual assaults on campus are committed by serial predators.
.. That would mean that colleges and universities with lots of dorms and few off-campus options might be less rape-prone, especially if RAs are required to attend official dorm parties. (That’s also why I’ve proposed that colleges experiment with policies stipulating that only sororities—and not fraternities—serve alcohol as a means of reducing the prevalence of sexual assault on campus. Then, sisters would decide who gets into a party and who doesn’t—and when a woman gets too drunk, she can, of course, go upstairs to her own room.)
.. A relatively dated, but reputable, survey suggested that athletes are overrepresented in reports of sexual assaults on campuses. Not all athletes are equally likely to be accused of sexual assault. Research suggests that the so-called “helmet sports”—football, hockey, and lacrosse—are dramatically overrepresented in incidents of assault, while tennis, swimming, soccer, and track are far less so. The “revenue” sports also exist in a protected bubble of alumni boosters and loyal local fans (including police and prosecutors) who run constant interference for them.
.. He’s found that between 16 percent and 20 percent of male students said they’d commit rape if they could be certain of getting away with it.
.. Sexual assault happens everywhere, yes, but it happens more often in some places than in others. As the aforementioned research on athletics and fraternities suggests, it likely happens the most on residential college campuses where there are lots of people of the same age going to alcohol-soaked parties in all-male residences with no official administrative oversight—in places there is a high-level of gender inequality in social life, a pervasive attitude male sexual entitlement—in places where men bond over sexual conquests and believe that true brotherhood means silence. Tinker with any of those variables, and there might be some shifts in rates. Take them all on, and assault rates will, I would hypothesize, plummet.