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 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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