In four years of college, about a fourth of undergraduate women at a large group at 27 leading universities are sexually assaulted by force or when they are incapacitated by alcohol or drugs, according to one of the largest studies of its kind released Monday.
Responding to a survey commissioned by the American Association of Universities, 26.1 percent of female college seniors said that since entering college, they had experienced some kind of unwanted sexual contact - anything from touching to rape - carried out by force or incapacitation. Of those, 13.5 percent had experienced penetration, attempted penetration or oral sex. In all, about a third of women who responded to a survey reported some type of unwanted sexual contact since entering college.
The survey confirmed findings from previous studies, but stands out for its sheer size - 150,000 students at 27 colleges and universities took part - and for the prominence of the schools involved, which include many of the nation's elite campuses, including all of the Ivy League except Princeton.
The findings in the American Association of Universities study are consistent with previous surveys that have estimated that 1 in 5 women may be sexually assaulted while in college, though those reports have sometimes used varying definitions of sexual assault.
As more attention has been paid in recent years to campus sexual assault, victim advocates and government officials have pushed for rigorous "campus climate" surveys, including detailed information on the frequency of assaults, contending that the first step toward addressing the problem is to understand the extent of it. Official campus crime figures vastly underreport sex crimes, because most victims do not file formal reports.
"This is pretty consistent with what we've seen before in other studies around the country, and it reinforces the message," said John D. Foubert, a professor for higher education at Oklahoma State University who studies campus sexual assault and who was not involved in the study.
The new study cautioned that the rate of students responding to the survey, 19 percent, was far lower than in some previous studies.
But some elite universities, with much higher participation rates, also made public their figures for the survey, and the picture was not any better. Harvard's figures were similar to those in the study as a whole, and Yale's were worse.
Men experienced much lower rates of sexual assault than women. Across the 27 universities, 8.6 percent of male seniors said they had experienced some kind of unwanted sexual contact, including 2.9 percent who said they had experienced penetration, attempted penetration or oral sex, carried out by force or incapacitation.
Transgender students and others who do not identify as either male or female had higher rates of assault than women.
Foubert said he did not know of any previous large-scale study that had looked at transgender students.
Graduate students had significantly lower rates of unwanted sexual contact than undergraduates.
© 2015, The New York Times News Service