Measuring Rape Against Women: The Significance of Survey Questions

Findings and conclusions of the research reported here are those of the author and do not represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Many thanks to Mary Koss, who presented this paper at the conference because the author's mother's emergency surgery caused her to cancel her travel plans at the last minute. In the early 1980s, estimates of rape against women were derived from two primary sources, the nationwide crime victimization survey (the National Crime Survey [NCS]) and the " official " statistics from the Scholars claimed, however, that these data sources substantially underestimated the true incidence of rape. UCR, for example, relied on reported crimes, but many rapes are not reported to the police. Two methodological reasons led NCS to underestimate rape. First, its definition of rape was considered too narrow because it included only carnal knowledge and, therefore, excluded " many acts within the scope of contemporary rape statutes, such as offenses other than penile-vaginal penetration " (Koss, 1996, p. 58). Second, critics contended that NCS was poorly designed to elicit reports of rape from interviewees who had in fact been raped The critical issue was how to develop measurement strategies that would reveal the real extent of not only rape but also other forms of sexual victimization in American society. Aware of the measurement limitations inherent in these two sources of rape estimates, Koss and her colleagues (Koss and Oros, 1982; Koss and Gidycz, 1985) built on Russell's work (1982) and developed the Sexual Experiences Survey (SES) to overcome the problem of underestimating the true extent of rape and other forms of sexual victimization. SES pioneered several methodological advances. It— ♦ Used legal statutes as a basis for developing measures of rape. ♦ Included " behaviorally specific " questions that used graphic language to describe the elements of the criminal victimization and to cue the respondents to recall experiences of victimization. ♦ Assessed a wide range of victimization (e.g., unwanted sexual contact, sexual coercion, and attempted and completed rape) (see Fisher and Cullen, 2000a). Koss, Gidycz, and Wisniewski's (1987) groundbreaking national-level study of college women was among the first studies to employ SES (see also Koss, 1985). Their study sparked the exponential growth of rape research that used the original or a modified SES to provide lifetime and annual rape estimates for various samples (e.g., navy recruits, precollege-age women) in specific situations …