News & Notes: Patton ’77 claims college rape is rare

Susan Patton ’77, who in 2013 wrote a letter to The Daily Princetonian encouraging women to find a male partner during their time at the University, co-wrote a letter on Friday to the Baltimore Sun criticizing the perception that rape is common on college campuses.

Using the FBI statistic for the rate of “forcible rapes” in 2012, she and Jonathan David Farley, a mathematician, calculated the probability of a woman not being raped in college at 99.8 percent. Although preliminary data for 2013 is available, the FBI no longer distinguishes between “forcible” and “non-forcible” rape. The calculation assumes rape is equally probable on and off college campuses and among people of different ages.

“Of course, the rape-statistic apologists will say that rape is massively underreported,” Patton and Farley wrote.

Patton and Farley said the commonly cited statistic that one in four women will be raped in college comes from a telephone survey in which, out of 16,000 respondents, only 24 women and 8 men reported during their interviews that they had been raped in the 12 months preceding the survey. Patton and Farley then use this statistics to calculate an annual risk of rape of 0.3 percent. However, they do not address the possibility that the study's respondents' annual risk of rape may have differed from that of students on college campuses.

A 2008 University survey obtained by The Daily Princetonian showed that nearly one in six female undergraduates reported experiencing non-consensual vaginal penetration during their time at the University.