1980s National Spotlight

One in Four: Mary Koss and the Persistent Percentage

A new approach to researching sexual violence reveals the true prevalence of rape on campus.

Mary Koss bumped into her life’s work on her first day in Ohio. She moved in in 1975 from St. Olaf, where she’d been an assistant professor of psychology, to Kent State to focus more on research. She was entering a building on campus when a man passed her on his way out and--without even a hello--stopped her to say she should sign his grant application. He said it had just been turned down “because he was a man,” but with her name attached he could probably get it funded.He was planning to study what happened when he showed male undergraduates pictures of female students wearing padded bras of different sizes. The men would be asked how “rapeable” each woman was, how likely they would be to have sex with the men, and if each woman were raped, how much it would be her fault. Koss turned him down flat, but the seed of an idea had been planted. Her first major study, conducted in 1978, investigated the question “How prevalent is rape on campus?”Researchers investigating sexual violence at the time were asking “Have you ever been raped?” Koss wondered if the numbers would change if the language did. Borrowing a technique from research on alcoholism, she omitted the word “rape” and asked instead, “Has someone ever used force or threatened harm to get you to have sex with them?” Viewed through this lens, rape was a much larger problem. One in four female respondents said they had experienced rape or attempted rape at college. They hadn’t been assaulted by strangers who pounced on them in a dark alley, they had been forced into sex by people they knew—boyfriends, friends, and acquaintances. Koss called this phenomenon “hidden rape” and “acquaintance rape.” She found in a later study that 84 percent of rape victims had known their attacker. Koss expanded her scope in 1987, when she was commissioned by the National Institute of Mental Health to survey more than 6,000 students from 32 colleges and universities. It was the first national, large-scale survey on rape on campus, and the results were almost identical to her first investigation: one in four female subjects had experienced rape or attempted rape while attending college. Mirroring the way victims of assault are frequently doubted and second-guessed, national media covered Koss’s study with outrage and scorn. They adopted the sensationalistic term “date rape” and impugned Koss’s integrity along with her results, even accusing her of changing survivors’ accounts to beef up her data. But Koss’s numbers were solid. And the needle hasn't budged. In 2020 the American Association of Universities analyzed surveys returned by more than 181,000 students from 33 schools and found that the proportion of students willing to reveal that they’d experienced sexual assault (nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force or inability to consent) on campus was 26 percent of women, 23 percent of transgender and nonbinary students, and nearly 7 percent of men. Less than half (45 percent) of victims said it was very or extremely likely school officials would take a report of sexual assault seriously. The majority of them didn’t report their assaults. Sexual violence remains as big a problem now as it was when Koss started asking the right questions in 1978.

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