Federal Research On Sexual Violence Is A Mess

The federal government is sitting on a ton of data about sexual violence in the United States, but most of the statistics cannot be compared to each other because of wide variations in how they’re measured, a new review from the Government Accountability Office concludes. There are currently 10 collection efforts that look at sexual violence against victims over age 12. The efforts are managed by four federal agencies and use 23 different terms to describe sexual violence, according to the GAO report, released Thursday.  “The same act of sexual violence could be categorized by one data collection effort as ‘rape,’ whereas it could be categorized by other efforts as ‘assault-sexual’ or ‘nonconsensual sexual acts,’” the report notes.  As a result, estimates of the number of sexual assault victims in the U.S., based on different accountings of federal data, range from 244,190 to 1,929,000 a year. Officials from the four agencies in charge of these statistics ― the Departments of Defense, Education, Justice and Health and Human Services ― say that because of the differences across the various data collection efforts, “the results are not comparable,” the report says.  In other words, you cannot compare the National Crime Victimization Survey, which found that 0.61 percent of college women are raped, to the DOJ-funded Campus Sexual Assault Study, which found that 19 percent of college wo...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news