The Post’s New Poll on Campus ‘Sexual Assault’ Is Bogus

Late this morning, the Washington Post sent a “News Alert” e-mail announcing the results of an “exclusive” poll it conducted together with the Kaiser Family Foundation. The poll purports to find that “20 percent of young women who attended college during the past four years say they were sexually assaulted.” This is an explosive number — and not just because the very thought of one in five women being sexually assaulted on campus is horrifying.

The number, it turns out, exactly mirrors the percentage announced in a 2007 federally funded study of two universities, which has been cited by President Obama, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and the Department of Education as proof of a campus sexual-assault crisis. This has, in turn, provided the justification for the ongoing, draconian crackdown on free speech and due process at colleges across the nation, one that has done real harm to innocent young men.

The original 20 percent number was suspect from the start. The 2007 survey used an exceedingly generous definition of sexual assault and its response rate was relatively low. A more comprehensive and rigorous Bureau of Justice Statistics survey subsequently put the rate at 6.1 per 1,000, and found that sexual assault was 1.2 times more frequent for nonstudents than students and had — in fact — been declining since the 1990s. When confronted with the BJS survey, even Senator Gillibrand removed the one in five number from her website.

So the Post number, if valid, would give a second wind to an Obama administration crackdown that was running on factual fumes. Unfortunately for the Post and the administration, the study’s number is not even close to valid. Even worse, in its main story about the poll, the Post misleads about the key question — the source of its one in five headline.

Read the rest of the article here on National Review