Everything You Think You Know About Campus Sexual Assault Is Wrong, by Justin Dillon.

By now, if you have followed this controversy at all over the last few years, you have heard of “one in five” — the idea that one in five women are sexually assaulted on college campuses.

Now, you might think that seems like an awfully big number given how many college students there are in the [USA]. If that statistic were true, it would constitute an absolute epidemic of rape. The authors put that number in sharp relief:

“The most recent data from the Department of Education indicate that approximately 10 million women are enrolled (full- or part-time) as undergraduates. The one-in-five figure would indicate that 2 million of them will be sexually assaulted at college. That’s 400,000 to 500,000 sexual assaults per year … For comparison’s sake, under the expanded definition of rape used in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, in 2014 there were 116,645 rapes in the entire United States, a nation of 160 million females, one-sixteenth of whom are in college.”

When you actually sit down and do the math, common sense would tell you that “one in five” is false. …

“The National Crime Victimization survey (NCVS), conducted every six months by the U.S. Census Bureau for the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), has long been regarded as the gold standard of crime surveys. In 2014, BJS estimated that 0.61 percent of female college (and trade school) students, of whom 0.2 percent are raped, are sexually assaulted per year. Nonrape sexual assaults include unwanted sexual touching, attempted rape, and threats.”

So PC says one in five, but the reality is one in fifty.