Slashdot Mirror
The War On Campus Sexual Assault Goes Digital
HughPickens.com writes: According to a recent study of 27 schools, about one-quarter of female undergraduates said they had experienced nonconsensual sex or touching since entering college, but most of the students said they did not report it to school officials or support services. Now Natasha Singer reports at the NYT that in an effort to give students additional options — and to provide schools with more concrete data — a nonprofit software start-up in San Francisco called Sexual Health Innovations has developed an online reporting system for campus sexual violence. One of the most interesting features of Callisto is a matching system — in which a student can ask the site to store information about an assault in escrow and forward it to the school only if someone else reports another attack identifying the same assailant. The point is not just to discover possible repeat offenders. In college communities, where many survivors of sexual assault know their assailants, the idea of the information escrow is to reduce students' fears that the first person to make an accusation could face undue repercussions.
"It's this last option that makes Callisto unique," writes Olga Khazan. "Most rapes are committed by repeat offenders, yet most victims know their attackers. Some victims are reluctant to report assaults because they aren't sure whether a crime occurred, or they write it off as a one-time incident. Knowing about other victims might be the final straw that puts an end to their hesitation—or their benefit of the doubt. Callisto's creators claim that if they could stop perpetrators after their second victim, 60 percent of campus rapes could be prevented." This kind of system is based partly on a Michigan Law Review article about "information escrows," or systems that allow for the transmitting of sensitive information in ways that reduce "first-mover disadvantage" also known to economists as the "hungry penguin problem". As game theorist Michael Chwe points out, the fact that each person creates her report independently makes it less likely they'll later be accused of submitting copycat reports, if there are similarities between the incidents.
"It's this last option that makes Callisto unique," writes Olga Khazan. "Most rapes are committed by repeat offenders, yet most victims know their attackers. Some victims are reluctant to report assaults because they aren't sure whether a crime occurred, or they write it off as a one-time incident. Knowing about other victims might be the final straw that puts an end to their hesitation—or their benefit of the doubt. Callisto's creators claim that if they could stop perpetrators after their second victim, 60 percent of campus rapes could be prevented." This kind of system is based partly on a Michigan Law Review article about "information escrows," or systems that allow for the transmitting of sensitive information in ways that reduce "first-mover disadvantage" also known to economists as the "hungry penguin problem". As game theorist Michael Chwe points out, the fact that each person creates her report independently makes it less likely they'll later be accused of submitting copycat reports, if there are similarities between the incidents.
Or will they just assume the guy is guilty?
"Hey, I don't like that guy. Let's all report him through the rape app. We're girls so we'll be believed over him, particularly by the media. The media will even believe us after it's been shown that we were lying because it fits with their narrative."
If you look up the study, the exact quote is âoenonconsensual penetration or sexual touching involving physical force or incapacitation,â.
The summary is brain-dead, but in a way that *understates* the problem, compared to the actual quote (which doesn't contain the word "rape").
Two things:
(1) You'll notice that the section of the summary which mentions "touching" is actually a very close paraphrase of the NYT article which is linked there. So the NYT is actually what's "brain-dead," and TFS just continued the "brain-dead" trend of not looking at the source.
(2) I'm sure this will be ignored by most people here, but can I just offer a plea to moderators to think about posts a bit before modding them "+1 Insightful" or "+1 Informative"?
The particular issue is with the common type of Slashdot post which shows up frequently around just about any study -- "Well, gee, a proper study of X would have to consider [obvious factor Y]." The default policy here seems to be to assume that all researchers running studies are absolute morons and would never consider whatever obvious flaw I came up with after 2 seconds of thought and posted on Slashdot. Or, as in this case, we assume that the researchers have some sort of agenda and ignored obvious data flaws or whatever.
Guess what, mods? 90% of these posts are WRONG. Most studies do have some subtle flaws, but researchers generally make an attempt to address many of the obvious ones.
The problem is that summaries are generally too short to contain all the details, so you'd actually have to RTFA to see that the researchers actually did take into account "obvious factor Y." Sometimes TFS is also misleading or poorly worded in such a way, which contributes to the problem. This is an editorial problem, but complaining about the editors here is fruitless, so I'll appeal to those with moderation points:
If you see a post that seems "too good to be true" in claiming to have found some obvious flaw that completely invalidates a study, either take a minute and look at the study and check it, or just ignore the post. Don't just mod it as "Insightful" or "informative" because you wish it were true, or you'd like to think everyone else in the world is an idiot (or, in this case, a manipulative idiot).
I'm tired of seeing obviously stupid posts rise to "+5 Informative" within an hour of a story going up (two such posts in a row here). I'll excuse the people posting such crap, because there's always a lot of crap posts here. But moderation should be taken at least a little more seriously.