More evidence rape a significant problem on U.S. college campuses

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[May 21, 2015]  By Andrew M. Seaman

(Reuters Health) - About one in six women experienced completed or attempted rape during their first year of college at one school in upstate New York, according to a new study.

The report's lead author said the results add to existing evidence suggesting the hype surrounding campus rape is not overblown. There may even be a greater risk of rape during the first year of college, she told Reuters Health.

"We are now starting to have independent data emerge from different campuses and from different assessment settings," said Kate Carey of the Brown University School of Public Health in Providence, Rhode Island. "They are starting to converge to support the general notion that about one in every five women in college is going to experience sexual assault."

For the new study, the researchers recruited first-year women aged 18 to 21 years old with the help of mailings, flyers, word of mouth and existing research pools.

Women completed a questionnaire when they first enrolled in the study and again every four months to determine how often they experienced attempted or completed rape through force or incapacitation by alcohol or drugs.

Overall, 483 women - or 26 percent of women in the freshman class - completed the study, which was published in the Journal of Adolescent Health

Before entering college, 18 percent of the women had experienced attempted or completed incapacitated rape and 15 percent experienced attempted or completed forcible rape, according to the survey responses.

During their first year of college 15 percent reported experiencing attempted or completed incapacitated rape and 9 percent reported experiencing attempted completed or forcible rape.

By the time they entered their sophomore year, 26 percent of women reported experiencing attempted or completed incapacitated rape and 22 percent reported experiencing attempted or completed forcible rape sometime during their lives.

In all, the researchers point out that by the start of sophomore year, 37 percent of the young women had experienced one of these forms of sexual assault.

"We knew that sexual assault is typically under reported and some of our big studies that report national crime statistics tend to reveal lower rates than some of the college specific assessments," Carey said. "I was a bit surprised by both the estimates the participants gave us for pre-college experience of completed and attempted rape and the prevalence during the first year."

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One expert who wasn't involved in the new study said its findings are confirmation that this problem of rape and sexual assault exists at many colleges.

"It’s confirmation that many studies are finding rates that are very troubling," said Christopher Krebs, who investigates the topic as a senior research social scientist at RTI International in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

But it's often difficult to compare numbers from one study on campus rape to others, he said.

For example, studies may measure sexual assaults, which would include encounters in addition to rape.

"Their measure is a much more serious measure, and their numbers are a bit higher than what we found in our research," Krebs said.

Carey said the type of questions women were asked may have resulted in additional rapes being tallied. Also, the women may have been more willing to report rapes since they may have felt comfortable with the researchers after a year.

"What we’re getting is more and more studies that are being done that are finding rates at individual schools that are troubling," Krebs said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1eg68zM http://bit.ly/1Fovggq Journal of Adolescent Health, online May 20, 2015.

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