A new poll done by the Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation backs the oft-quoted—and lately, often disputed—Justice Department statistic that one in five college women are sexually assaulted. The poll surveyed 1,000 people who attended college in the last four years and found that twenty percent said they were sexually assaulted.
The one in five statistic originally came from a 2007 survey published by the U.S. Department of Justice, but came under question, particularly in the past year, with the Washington Post pointing out that it only surveyed two schools and that the response rate was “relatively low.” They didn’t quite call it a lie, but did say it was “problematic.”
The new survey, though, is nationwide, covering 1,053 people at 500 schools, large and small, and found that twenty percent of women and five percent of men said they’d been sexually assaulted. The Post says sexual assault was defined in this way: “[F]orced touching of a sexual nature, oral sex, vaginal sexual intercourse, anal sex and sexual penetration with a finger or object.” They also point out that some of the original skepticism about the 2007 study stemmed from a later one that was conducted very differently and may not be a reliable sexual assault indicator:
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