UVA and the alleged frat rape - Rolling Stone backpedals

Not sure if you all have discussed this yet: sounds like the frat is going to take whatever legal recourse they can against RS and probably the author.

What's the odds of that getting anywhere? Payoff, settlement?

 

Settlement. Why do you think they didn't fire anyone? So they couldn't turn on them. The 'apologies' -- blaming the victim , etc. -- were better crafted than the absent vetting of the original story. Idiots.

 

With litigation hanging over its head, the last thing the magazine will do is fire anyone right now.

 

Don't know if you're familiar with this work:

Lisak et al., 2010. "False Allegations of Sexual Assualt: An Analysis of Ten Years of Reported Cases," Violence Against Women, 16(12): 1318-1334.

Speaks probably about as closely to what we're discussing as you're going to get.

The authors reviewed every case of sexual assault reported (over a 10-year period) at a major Northeastern U.S. university. They defined a false report as such "if there was evidence that a thorough investigation was pursued and that the investigation had yielded evidence that the reported sexual assault had in fact not occurred." A case was categorized as "did not proceed" if it didn't "result in a referral for prosecution or disciplinary action because of insufficient evidence or because the victim withdrew from the process or was unable to identify the perpetrator or because the victim mislabeled the incident (e.g., gave a truthful account of the incident, but the incident did not meet the legal elements of the crime of sexual assault)."

They found that 5.9%* of the cases were truly false reports. A 95% CI for that proportion would be [1.6%; 10.2%].

As striking to me, however, was the fact that so few cases had actually been opened over a 10-year period. The authors were of UMass-Boston and Northeastern, and given what they were looking into, I think it's almost a lock that their study school was one of those two. Depending on which statistic you're into -- 1-in-5 or 1-in-20 -- you'd have to assume that more than 90% of potential sexual assaults go unreported (more than 98% if you're of the 1-in-5 tribe).

*EDIT: That's of the total number of cases they looked at. The actual number of cases they could classify was 117 (of 136), so conceivably the percentage is higher. Of the 117 able-to-classify cases, the percentage that were classified as false was 6.8% (95% CI [2.3%; 11.2%]).

 

Forced kissing is in the news again this morning with a secret service senior supervisor suspended for an incident that followed a celebration at a Washington bar for his recent promotion.

Secret Service manager put on leave during probe of alleged assault - The Washington Post

 

Richard Bradley was the first journalist to publicly question the piece, other than our own PW2.

Here's his take on the Columbia report. It's a good read:

Shots in the Dark Shots in the Dark | Culture and ideas from baseball to Harvard to politics and more

 

I'm barely into it, and there are already about 10 points he's made that I want to quote, and comment on.

 

That's one hell of a read. Sabrina Rubin Erdeley is an embarrassment, and she deserved every bit of that takedown.

 

Thanks for posting that link, Dick. Great read.
Much of the ire goes towards Erdely and Rolling Stone for the story, for good reason. But one of the main things that jumped out to me in the Columbia report was how untransparent Rolling Stone tended to be during the investigation. Not that it's surprising, but they didn't do themselves any favors at all.
One part of Bradley's excellent blog really caught my end, the highlighted part three grafs from the end. Bradley lists various ways the RS story is deceptive. Looking at that list, however, I see multiple issues I often have with investigative "stories." Relatively early in my career I did a big expose piece and had the person in charge of the group (and her attorney) explain her side of the story. Most people who saw the story could tell the lady was lying through her teeth, but she was given a chance to fully tell her side in print. A few months later a bigger paper looked at the same issue and clearly followed a predetermined slant, only including details and quotes (or partial quotes) supporting that theory.
In other words, I've seen a number of stories over the years guilty of multiple issues Bradley refers to in that particular graf.

 

Why hadn't PW2 been back to join this thread? Would love to hear his/her take.

 

Vox:

Sexual assault isn’t just a college problem — it’s a problem for all young women

As many as 1 in 4 women could be sexually assaulted while in college, according to a new policy brief from University of Michigan researchers analyzing previous surveys. But sexual assault is no less of a danger for young women who did not go to college — and those women are more likely to experience other forms of dating and domestic violence than their college-attending peers.

Taken together, the findings suggest that colleges aren't breeding sexual predators; rape and sexual assault are scarily common for all young women, and the problem isn't unique to higher education.

But federal law gives greater protection and more options to women who attend college than to women who do not.


And, the one in five number might be right:

The statistic on the prevalence of college sexual assault cited by the White House and activists, that 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted by graduation, is flawed. It's based on a 2007 survey of just two campuses whose author argues it shouldn't be generalized to the broader population.

Still, it could be generally accurate. Elizabeth Armstrong, a University of Michigan sociology professor, and Jamie Budnick, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Michigan, examined five surveys of college women, eliminating those that found the highest and lowest frequency of sexual assault. They also excluded reports of fondling and psychological coercion. The three surveys that remain, including the source of the 1 in 5 statistic, produce roughly similar estimates: between 14 percent and 26 percent of women would be sexually assaulted in college. That estimate is also in line with broad demographic surveys that aren't targeted at college women in particular.

Sexual assault isn’t just a college problem — it’s a problem for all young women - Vox

 

The lawsuits begin. But not with the bros.

U-Va. dean sues Rolling Stone for ‘false’ portrayal in retracted rape story - The Washington Post

Eramo, who is the university’s chief administrator dealing with sexual assaults, argues in the lawsuit that the story destroyed her credibility, permanently damaged her reputation and caused her emotional distress. She assailed the account as containing numerous falsehoods that the magazine could have avoided if it had worked to verify the story of its main character, a student named Jackie who alleged she was gang raped in 2012 and that the university mishandled her case.