The 2007 Campus Sexual Assault Study (CSA) made quite a splash when it came out. The survey used a Web-based survey with 5,446 females and found 13.7% of females ages 18 to 25 who were enrolled in two colleges had experienced a completed sexual assault since entering college (19% had experienced some type of sexual assault if one includes attempted assaults). A dramatically different result was supplied by the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) from 2013. The NCVS surveys interview about 31,000 females per year and found a much as 0.47 percent of females ages 18 to 24 who were enrolled in post-secondary school experienced unwanted sexual contact during the prior 12 months. These numbers are an overestimate of the sexual assaults on campuses because the surveys don’t differentiate where the assaults occurred.
In 2013, the rate of sexual assaults on women attending 18 to 24 who are attending college and not attending college suffered the same rate of sexual assaults. Those rates of sexual assaults were much higher than for women as a whole, but that is not particularly surprising given the age
Since this Campus Sexual Assault survey covers women in two four year colleges, the annual rate is about about 6 percent (that is weighting the number of women by the percent that are freshman, sophomores, etc.). Still it is an annual rate that is about 12.6 times than what was shown in the NCVS survey. The big problem that the CSA Web-based survey is that the survey is not only much smaller (17.6%), but it is from only two schools and, even if the Web-based survey is accurate for those two colleges, it might not be representative of colleges across the US. The NCVS survey indicates that the CSA survey isn’t either representative or accurate.
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