page_title: Measures of campus sexual assault
section_title: National Crime Victimization Surveys
hierarchical_section_title: Measures of campus sexual assault / Selected Surveys of Campus Sexual Assault in the United States / National Crime Victimization Surveys
caption_attribution_description: English: Rate of rape or sexual assault for females, by age and post- secondary enrollment status, 1997–2013
context_page_description: Research consistently shows that the majority of rape and other sexual assault victims do not report their attacks to law enforcement. Reasons for not reporting include fear of reprisal, shame, uncertainty about whether a crime was committed, or a belief that an incident was not sufficiently serious enough to report. As a result, researchers generally rely on surveys to measure sexual violence that is not reported to the police. Estimates of campus sexual assault measured on surveys vary across populations and over time, however a recent review concluded that a "reasonable average" of around 1 in 5 of women were sexually assaulted during their time in college. And although much of the research on sexual assault has focused on college campuses, there is evidence that non-students of the same age are actually at higher risk than college students.
context_section_description: The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is a national survey administered twice year by the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The purpose of the NCVS is to offer a uniform report of the incidence of crime including rape and sexual assault victimizations in the general population.
  A 2014 assessment by Sinozich and Langton used longitudinal data from the NCVS to measure rape and sexual assault among college aged U.S. women from 1995 to 2013. Their findings indicated that rape, a subset of all sexual assault, had an incidence of 1.4 per 1,000 female students in 2013 during the period studied. The study also found that college aged women (regardless of enrollment status) were assaulted at a significantly higher rate than non-college age women, 4.3 per 1,000 per year versus 1.4 per 1,000 per year, but that women who were not enrolled in college were 1.2 times more likely to be assaulted than college aged women who were enrolled.
  The NCVS is one of the few national level, longitudinal sources of data on rape and sexual assault, and it has a relatively high response rate (88%) compared to other studies of sexual victimization. Data is collected using telephone interviews, which permits clarifying questions, and uses a bounded time frame of six months, limiting the likelihood that results are overestimated due to "telescoping" (the reporting of events occurring outside of a reference period as though they occurred within the specified period).
  However, results reported by the NCVS are consistently lower than studies using other methodologies. Researchers, such as Bonnie Fisher and Mary Koss, have charged that the question wording, context, and sampling methodology used on the NCVS leads a systematic underestimate of the incidence of rape and sexual assault. A recent assessment of the NCVS methodology conducted by the National Research Council pointed to four flaws in the NCSV approach: the use of a sampling methodology that was inefficient in measuring low-incidence events like rape and sexual assault; the ambiguous wording questions related to sexual violence; the criminal justice definitions of assault; and the lack of privacy offered to survey respondents (phone interview vs. completely anonymous survey). The authors concluded that these flaws make it "highly likely that the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is underestimating rape and sexual assault."
caption: Rape/sexual assaults per 1,000 females reported on National Crime Victimization Survey (1995–2013).[7]
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