AN ELUSIVE PLAGUE OF SERIAL RAPISTS
One flawed study rewrote campus sexual assault policy
Are most instances of sexual violence on college campuses the work of serial predators who attack over and over? That’s the theory that has dominated public debate over how to best confront the campus rape crisis. But there’s serious doubt the theory has much to do with reality.
Federal legislators and many university administrators want the U.S. government more involved in policing campus rape through rules aimed at removing serial rapists, often at the cost of due process for the accused.
The research of David Lisak, a former University of Massachusetts-Boston psychology professor who originated the serial predator theory of campus assault, is at the center of the effort. “The vast majority of sexual assaults on campuses, in fact over 90%, are being perpetrated by serial offenders,” Lisak said in 2013.
WHITE HOUSE INFLUENCE
In a January 2014 memo, President Obama cited Lisak’s work multiple times as evidence of a cycle of sexual violence on campuses. “We know that the majority of rapes are committed by serial rapists, and those folks are very unlikely to be reached by any prevention messages ... or education,” said Bea Hanson of the Department of Justice and the Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.
Before Lisak, student violence was commonly assumed to be the work of “date rapists,” typically stereotyped as young men who had misread social cues, had too many drinks and crossed a line. That doesn’t detract from the seriousness of the crime, but it does suggest a certain set of strategies for prevention, such as educating students about consent, boundaries and responsible drinking.
Lisak’s 2002 study, “Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists,” turned this thinking on its head. Lisak claimed that most rapists were repeat offenders who planned their attacks. For universities confronting rape, dealing with young men who don’t understand consent and alcohol norms is one matter; dealing with irredeemable sociopaths is quite another.
Linda LeFauve, associate vice president of Davidson College, and I spent months examining Lisak’s study and discovered flaws that call into question the facts that now inform federal policy.
The underlying data in Lisak’s study were not collected by Lisak. His study consists of pooled data from four surveys conducted by his graduate students at UMassBoston during the 1990s. The participants were 1,882 men who stumbled across surveys being administered at campus booths.
A SINGLE CAMPUS
The men were given questionnaires asking about violence they had committed throughout their lives. Researchers made no effort to ensure that participants were students because their aim was to study violence more generally, not student-on-student violence. While the locations of the booths suggests most participants probably would have been students, the average age of the participants was 26.5, older than the average college student at the time.
Of the 1,882 participants completing the survey, 120 were deemed to be rapists or attempted rapists, of these 76 were serial rapists. From this snapshot of 76 men on one campus that has no dorms or other on-campus student residential housing, the serial predator theory emerged.
Lisak admitted these details during a telephone interview with LeFauve, confessing that the surveys “may have been about child abuse history or relationships with parents” rather than campus violence.
James Hopper, one of Lisak’s former students at UMass-Boston who contributed data used in Lisak’s study, said the men completing the questionnaires were “not a typical college sample.”
Other researchers are now challenging Lisak’s theories.
“There are serial rapists, but serial rapists are not responsible for the problem,” says Kevin Swartout, a Georgia State University psychology professor who was lead researcher on a new report contradicting Lisak’s study.
The notion that the majority of campus rapists are serial predators is “one of the most egregious examples of a policy with an inadequate scientific basis that lives on because it offers a simplistic solution,” said Mary Koss, a professor of public health at the University of Arizona and Swartout’s co-author.
It’s astonishing that so many relied upon Lisak’s thinking and built policies around the findings of a single study.
Until we have a better handle on the facts, it would be wise for federal officials to call off the hunt for predators that might not be there.