Open Letter To University Administrations Regarding Sexual Assault Problem

If I were to ask any parents of college age girls what they would pay to stop their daughter from being raped, most would certainly pay anything and everything they could, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably millions for those who could.

If I were to ask how much they would pay to stop a friend's daughter from being raped, it would still likely be a lot of money.

Instead, we play a dangerous game of chance, unnecessarily. Or, we wait until something bad happens then resort to ineffective solutions in a desperate attempt to do something rather than nothing.

We know that at a University with 10,000 female students, there will be an average of about one “reported” rape every single day and we know there are many more not reported.

The tuition for state residents at state colleges is about $10,000 and $25,000 for everyone else.  It’s about $35,000 for Private non-profit colleges in 2017/2018.

We can solve the problem with less than $100 from each $10,000, $25,000 or $35,000.

Instead, we waste money on measures that have very little if any capability of stopping the rape epidemic.

What would the University be willing to pay if they could be certain that they could reduce rapes by at least fifty percent. Would it be worth taking $100 or less from the $10,000, $25,000 or $35,000? It would mean that with less than $100 they could prevent a societal cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars and at least 170 girls from being raped at their University.  Keep in mind that nothing has every had anywhere near that sort of impact on the number of rapes occurring at their universities.

There is a technology that addresses both stranger rapes and what are referred to as “date rapes.” It is available. If our Universities ignore this and do nothing with it, what are they teaching the students who attend those very same Universities. Certainly nothing about finance, economics, sociology, psychology, politics or religion.  In fact, it flies in the face of most everything we claim to teach.

At the University described above, a University with 10,000 female students, that means we are saying this technology would prevent at least 175 rapes that would have been reported, likely many more that would not have been reported.

It would cost $890,000 the first year to provide all 10,000 students with the means to stop these rapes, both date rapes and stranger rapes. Therefore, the cost per “reported” rape prevented would be about $5,235.

In one study the average medical cost of rape within the first 30 days following treatment was determined to be $6,737 – 14 percent ($948) of which was paid by the victim. (Source: Truven Analytics Health MarketScan database, associated with 1,355 female rape patients in the United States seeking medical attention in 2013.)

They estimated that the average lifetime cost of rape is $122,461 per victim, with an economic burden for the population of close to $3.1 trillion over victims’ lifetimes, based on data indicating that an estimated 23 million U.S. women and two million men will experience rape.

Other researchers examined the cost of rape and found that the average cost to society per rape was $448,532, including criminal justice costs, cost of incarceration, time served, and lost productivity. The average lifetime victim costs were estimated <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14789940903564388> to be $138,310 in 2008 dollars. Another study also measured costs to both victim and society by combining victim injury data, medical costs data, and jury awards. Using data from the 2006 National Crime Victimization Survey, medical unit costs from Corso et al. <https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/medical_costs.pdf>, and Jury Verdict Research the authors estimated <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835847/> the total societal cost per rape was $240,776 in 2008 dollars.

Therefore, aside from the personal impact on individuals and loved ones, the total societal cost of 3-4 rapes exceeds the cost of preventing 150-200 rapes.

Office of Justice Programs World Wide Web Site http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov

National Institute of Justice World Wide Web Site http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij

Bureau of Justice Statistics World Wide Web Site http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs

The Financial Cost of Rape

iwprfemchat <https://femchat-iwpr.org/author/iwprfemchat/> in Economic Security for Survivors <https://femchat-iwpr.org/category/economic-security-for-survivors/> June 28, 2017

By Sarah Gonzalez Bocinski  <https://iwpr.org/people/sarah-gonzalez-bocinski-m-a/>and Malore Dusenbery <https://iwpr.org/people/malore-dusenbery-m-a/>

Matt DeLisi, Anna Kosloski, Molly Sween, Emily Hachmeister, Matt Moore & Alan Drury (2010) Murder by numbers: monetary costs imposed by a sample of homicide offenders, The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, 21:4, 501-513, DOI: 10.1080/14789940903564388

Michael H. Teig