Yesterday, the Daily Caller's Caroline May published a story claiming that the Justice Department exaggerates college rape statistics, and furthermore, a lot of rape victims don't report being too bent out of shape over the whole ordeal anyway so let's just call the whole thing off.

May's peeved at recent DOJ report titled “Acquaintance Rape of College Students” [PDF], which claims that "almost 25 percent of college women have been victims of rape or attempted rape since the age of 14." The statistic comes, in part, courtesy of a 2000 study called "The Sexual Victimization of College Women" [PDF]. May's dedicated rape skepticism led her straight to the source, which she subsequently declared "riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations." Let's take a look!

May's chief concern surrounds the discrepancy between the number of rapes reported in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and those uncovered in the commissioned 2000 SVCW report. Take it away:

Dr. Neil Gilbert, a professor of social welfare at University California, Berkeley, told The Daily Caller that the SVCW’s numbers are severely inflated due to the study’s broad definition of rape and the manner in which subjects were questioned.

According to Gilbert, the SVCW study results found a rate of rape that was 10 times higher than when the methodology for the National Crime Victimization Study (NCVS) was used. Namely, “the National Crime Victimization study had a check to make sure that the codes [or definitions of rape, force, etc.] of responses reflected the interviewees precise description. The SVCW study did not use this type of control on coding,” Gilbert explained.

In the SVCW study, researchers asked subjects to explain what happened to them and then decided, using their own definitions, what was and was not rape. The study defined rape in exceptionally wide terms: “Forced sexual intercourse including both psychological coercion as well as physical force. Forced sexual intercourse means vaginal, anal or oral penetration by the offender(s). This category also includes incidents where the penetration is from a foreign object such as a bottle. Includes attempted rapes, male as well as female victims, and both heterosexual and homosexual rape. Attempted rape includes verbal threats of rape.”

The inclusion of the phrase “psychological coercion” as part of the definition greatly increased the number of “victims.”

It's true that the SVCW survey used different methods of interviewing subjects to determine who had been a victim of sexual violence. As the study itself notes, the SVCW method "does not ask simply if a respondent 'had been raped'; rather, it describes an incident in graphic language that covers the elements of a criminal offense (e.g., someone 'made you have sexual intercourse by using force or threatening to harm you . . . by intercourse I mean putting a penis in your vagina')." In short: Some victims don't know what "rape" means or are otherwise uncomfortable openly admitting to having been "raped." The SVCW survey takes this into account.

What's not true is May's assertion that the SVCW expanded the definition of rape in order to inflate its condescendingly-scare-quoted group of "victims." The definition May quotes—the one that folds "psychological coercion" in with physical force—is actually the definition used by May's touted National Crime Victimization Survey, not the SVCW study.

The SVCW's definition of rape doesn't include psychological coercion, actually:

Unwanted completed penetration by force or the threat of force. Penetration includes: penile-vaginal, mouth on your genitals, mouth on someone else’s genitals, penile-anal, digital-vaginal, digital-anal, object-vaginal, and object-anal.

The SVCW did go on to ask women about their experiences with "sexual coercion," as well as "threat of rape"—but it did not include these affronts in its calculation of the 25 percent figure that May describes as "hair-raising."

Whatever: Once you've got a good fake inaccuracy to pin your rape victim hit piece on, might as well just let it all hang out:

Apart from the hair-raising 25 percent figure, the SVCW study reports that when those categorized as rape victims were asked if what they described was rape, nearly 50 percent said “no.” Further, 80 percent of the subjects researchers labeled as rape victims stated that the incident resulted in neither physical or emotional injuries. Only 5 percent of those identified as victims of rape actually reported the incident. “If an attorney defending a rapist were to use this, they’d say ‘Well, what’s the big deal? 80 percent of women who are raped don’t have any adverse affects,’” Gilbert said.

Yep, no biggie! May's piece at least manages to prove one thing: Some people are confused about what the definition of "rape" is. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen.