Quantifying Rape: A Feminist Science Studies Analysis

• In Event: 4284 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 16. Sexual Assault, Trafficking, and Street Harassment

Abstract

Quantitative data have been central to sexual violence scholarship and activism for decades in the United States. In the 1980s, reports that 1 in 4 college women had experienced completed or attempted rape transformed rape from an individual problem into an epidemic in public consciousness. More recently, reports that 1 in 5 women experience sexual assault in college prompted federal intervention into campus sexual assault. However, such prevalence estimates have often been controversial, garnering immense support as well as harsh criticism from various scholars and public figures. This project draws on insights from feminist science studies, particularly Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge and Karen Barad’s framework of agential realism, to critically analyze the calculation of and controversy surrounding prevalence research. Ultimately, I argue that rape statistics comprise intra-active phenomena. Efforts to quantify rape cannot be fully disentangled from broader social contexts, or the political and disciplinary orientations of researchers and those who fund their work. The instruments used to count rape, particularly questions in quantitative surveys and the definitions that inform them, have profound effects on prevalence estimates. Such concepts also apply to the backlash against rape statistics. Critics of “1 in 4 women” and other figures are as complexly situated as the researchers they strive to discredit, and their alternative estimates are equally entangled with particular measurement strategies. I conclude with a call for researchers to continue quantifying rape, with emphases on transparency and accountability within and beyond scholarly communities.

Author

• Ethan Czuy Levine, Temple University