ARE THEY RELIABLE? Let’s talk about those sexual assault surveys that insist one-in-five college women are victimized. “That rape surveys are unreliable can be inferred from the irrefutable fact that when rape claims are actually reported to police or campus authorities and subjected to competing claims of innocence, and where the evidence is actually examined, the majority of claims can’t be classified one way or the other as rape or non-rape, founded or unfounded, true or false. This is true even using the preponderance of the evidence standard, as shown on college campuses across the United States. (The research of Dr. David Lisak, well respected in the feminist community, actually supports this conclusion — when they are examined, most rape claims cannot be definitively classified as rape.) So why, on earth, do we assume that every assertion of rape posited in a survey should be regarded as an actual rape?”

Related: Rape: Why 1 in 4 is Wrong, which relies heavily (and justifiably so) on Christina Hoff Sommers’s article “Researching the ‘Rape Culture’ of America.”

Also: The Campus Rape Myth.