Co-eds More Likely to Get Raped at Duke Than in Nation’s Most Crime-ridden City

A recently released Duke University sexual assault survey suggests female students at the prestigious university are raped at a higher rate than in America’s most dangerous city.

But it’s not being taken at face value by due process advocates and skeptics of the campus rape “frenzy,” who say the survey and its results are plagued with errors.

The Duke University Student Experiences Survey, released in February, purports to have found widespread sexual assault at the private North Carolina university. It defines sexual assault as including “any unwanted, nonconsensual sexual contact,” which critics say is misguided and causes confusion on the overall findings.

The survey found 40 percent of undergraduate female respondents and 10 percent of undergraduate male respondents have been sexually assaulted since they enrolled at Duke.

Those figures would make Duke more dangerous than America’s most crime-ridden city, KC Johnson, co-author of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities, wrote at Minding the Campus.

“This data would mean that each year, a female undergraduate at Duke is 5.5 times more likely to be a victim of violent crime than a resident of St. Louis, which FBI statistics listed as the nation’s most dangerous city in 2016,” Johnson wrote.

The survey had a response rate of 47 percent and about 70 percent of undergraduate, graduate and professional students were invited to take it. The survey had a 50 percent response rate from undergraduate females.

The survey states that “16% of undergraduate women reported experiencing rape and 24% reported battery.”

“And yet, incredibly, parents still spend around $280,000 to send their daughters into this den of crime for four years,” wrote Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center.

U.S. News & World Report lists Duke as having 6,639 undergraduate students, with 49 percent being female. (The latest figures the university itself provides are from fall 2015.)

That would mean approximately 520 undergraduate female students can say they have been raped since enrolling.

America’s most dangerous city, St. Louis, which has a population of more than 300,000, had 551 rapes reported in 2015 and 2016, according to the city’s crime data.

A survey ‘at war with itself’

While the survey depicts rampant sexual assault within the Duke community, Johnson argues a close examination of the data shows multiple examples of a survey “at war with itself.”

He points to the paradox that more than quarter of the females allegedly assaulted also said they feel Duke is a safe place.

“The survey indicates that 88 percent of female undergraduates say they feel safe on campus. So—at a minimum—28 percent of Duke female undergraduates say they feel safe at a school where they experienced sexual assault,” Johnson writes.

In his final semester at the University of California-Santa Barbara last spring, Andrew Cavarno unsuccessfully sought to debate those who believe 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted in college.

Cavarno told The Fix the findings portray Duke as one of the most dangerous places in the world for women, but that female students don’t see the university that way.

“Therefore, if this was actually the case, one would expect the female students to be acutely aware of this danger. However, a ‘clear majority’ of female undergraduate students reported feeling safe on campus,” said Cavarno, who’s working to organize a national due process group and has given multiple presentations debunking “campus rape hysteria.”

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(Source: https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/31829/)