That "one in three women will be raped" figure has been debunked many, many times. I'm amazed people are still saying it. The one in three statistic began with the
Ms. Magazine Campus Project on Sexual Assault directed by Mary Koss. In her initial findings, Koss asserted that 27 percent of college women had been victims of rape or attempted rape an average of two times between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one.
Some of the questions on the Koss survey that resulted in that inflated figure:
- "Have you had a man attempt sexual intercourse when you didn't want to by giving you alcohol or drugs, but intercourse did not (emphasis added) occur?"
- "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?"
More importantly, only 27 percent of the women Koss says were raped agreed that they had been raped. If the "victim's" perception means anything, then this greatly deflates Koss's original assertion.
I guess one in three is catchy, and so we will always be stuck with this B.S. statistic.