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The US Will Leave Fossil Fuels in the Ground—Until After the Paris Climate Talks

Officials postponed the auction of an oil and gas development lease until next spring. Anton Watman/Shutterstock It’s hard to lead the charge against the global consumption of fossil fuels while making money off the sale of them. Perhaps in recognition of this conundrum, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which manages some 245 million acres of public land, has announced it will postpone an oil and gas lease auction scheduled for December 10 until March 17, 2016. The leases for sale include nine parcels of land in Arkansas and Michigan, totaling 587 acres, eligible for fossil fuel exploration. That means the federal government won’t be selling off land for oil or gas development just as the COP21 climate talks in Paris approach their dramatic conclusion. The planned sale had been drawing heat from climate activists, who are rallying behind the “keep it in the ground” philosophy that to prevent the worst effects of climate change, the world needs to leave most of fossil fuel reserves untapped. President Barack Obama articulated that concept in his rationale for rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline in November: Ultimately, if we’re gonna prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re gonna have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky. That said, the sale will go ahead a few months after the delegates return home from Paris. If Obama rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline for the stated reasons, why go ahead with federal mineral rights leases? One difference is the money from these routine drilling rights sales goes to the government, not to a Canadian energy company. Another possibility is that the goal isn’t really to stop extracting fossil fuels. Read the rest at CityLab. View this article:  The US Will Leave Fossil Fuels in the Ground—Until After the Paris Climate Talks ; ; ;

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The US Will Leave Fossil Fuels in the Ground—Until After the Paris Climate Talks

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Vandalized Mosques, Threats of Violence—Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes on the Rise

Mother Jones

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One day after the deadly terror attacks in Paris, a woman in Michigan went on Twitter and threatened to “send a message to ISIS.” How? By violently targeting Dearborn, Michigan, a Detroit suburb where more than 40 percent of the population is of Arab ancestry. In response, the head of the FBI’s Detroit office announced an investigation into a string of recent threats in the city. (Sarah Beebee, the woman who sent the tweet, publicly apologized.)

Since the Paris attacks, there have been similar incidents across the United States, from vandalized mosques to threats of violence, rattling Muslim Americans.

Based on the latest FBI hate crime figures, these incidents are on the rise. The most recent FBI data, released last Monday, indicates that hate crimes based on race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation have dropped across the board—with the exception of crimes against Muslim Americans. In 2014, even as the total number of hate crimes dipped nearly 8 percent from the year before, anti-Muslim hate crimes rose 14 percent.

While anti-Muslim incidents have risen, they trail behind incidents targeting Jewish Americans. Last year, 609 hate crime incidents were reported against Jews, the highest number of crimes based on religious beliefs—and four times the number of anti-Muslim crimes. As Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post points out, these figures are likely undercounted, since police departments’ participation in the FBI’s crime assessment is voluntary and some departments track figures better than others.

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Some bright spots can be found in the FBI data: Crimes against people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity dropped from 1,264 in 2013 to 1,115 in 2014. And recorded incidents against Hispanic and black Americans dipped nearly 13 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

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The uptick in crimes against Muslim Americans, though, signals a troubling trend that lingers more than 15 years after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, described the climate in the aftermath of the Paris attacks as “increasingly bleak.” “There’s been an accumulation of anti-Islamic rhetoric in our lives and that, I think, has triggered these overt acts of violence and vandalism,” he recently told the Chicago Tribune.

Between 1996 and 2000, according to the Washington Post, the FBI recorded between 20 and 30 hate crime incidents against Muslim Americans. In 2001 alone, the figure skyrocketed to nearly 500. Even before the terrorist attacks in Paris, the number of anti-Muslim hate crime incidents remained roughly five times as high as it was before 9/11.

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Vandalized Mosques, Threats of Violence—Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes on the Rise

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Charter Schools: Great in Cities, Ho-Hum in Suburbs?

Mother Jones

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Evaluating charter schools is tricky. Maybe highly motivated parents send their kids to charters and others don’t. The solution is to identify schools that are oversubscribed and track students who won and lost the lottery to get in. That way you get a random set of parents on both sides. But maybe charters kick out bad students after they’ve attended for a year or two. The solution is to tag lottery winners as charter kids forever. They count against the charter’s performance regardless of where they end up later. Fine, but maybe oversubscribed charters are different in some way. What about less popular charters where you can’t do any of this lottery-based research?

Susan Dynarski, an education professor at the University of Michigan, acknowledges all of this, but says we can draw some conclusions anyway:

A consistent pattern has emerged from this research. In urban areas, where students are overwhelmingly low-achieving, poor and nonwhite, charter schools tend to do better than other public schools in improving student achievement. By contrast, outside of urban areas, where students tend to be white and middle class, charters do no better and sometimes do worse than other public schools.

This pattern — positive results in low-income city neighborhoods, zero to negative results in relatively affluent suburbs — holds in lottery studies in Massachusetts as well in a national study of charter schools funded by the Education Department.

Interesting. But if this is really the case, why?

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Charter Schools: Great in Cities, Ho-Hum in Suburbs?

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President Obama Calls Rejection of Syrian Refugees a "Betrayal of Our Values"

Mother Jones

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President Obama said on Monday morning that the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed more than 100 people on Friday should not affect the small intake of Syrian refugees into the United States. “Slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values,” he said during remarks at the G20 economic summit in Antalya, Turkey.

The comments were a direct rebuke to the governors of Alabama and Michigan, who announced over the weekend that their states would no longer resettle Syrian refugees because of security concerns. They were joined by the governors of Texas and Arkansas on Monday morning. While no Syrians have settled in Alabama since the start of the country’s uprising in 2011, Michigan is home to a large Arab and Middle Eastern community and at least 200 Syrians have found homes there, according to data compiled by the New York Times. That number was likely to rise after the Obama administration’s announcement in September that the US would take in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year, a nearly tenfold increase in the number of Syrians who have settled here since 2012.

Obama also took a clear swipe at former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, both of whom said on Sunday that the US should focus on taking in Christian refugees rather than Muslims. Their comments echoed those of Eastern European leaders who pushed back against accepting refugees over the summer by saying their countries weren’t prepared to accept Muslims. “When I heard political leaders suggest that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing a warn-torn country is admitted…that’s shameful,” Obama said, growing visibly heated. “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

Opponents of refugee resettlement have called for more stringent security checks on Syrians to make sure they have no connections to ISIS or other terrorist groups, but Syrians currently undergo a lengthy screening process that resettlement experts say is already sufficient to uncover terrorist ties. “Refugees are subject to the highest level of security checks of any category of traveler to the United States,” wrote Danna Van Brandt, a spokeswoman for the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, in an email to Mother Jones. “Screening includes the involvement of the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense.”

A Syrian passport bearing the name Ahmed Almuhamed was found near the remains of a suicide bomber at Paris’ Stade de France on Friday night. The passport was used by a refugee who entered Greece just six weeks ago, stoking fears that ISIS members may be using the refugee crisis as cover. But Syrian passports, both stolen and forged, are popular on the black market, and it’s still unknown if Almuhamed himself was the bomber. Obama cautioned on Monday about drawing quick links between terrorist groups and refugees. “It’s very important that…we do not close our hearts or these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism,” he said.

Obama also fielded several questions about his strategy in Syria, which he defended as the only “sustainable” strategy available to the United States. While he said there will be an “intensification” of the current US actions, which include a long-running bombing campaign against ISIS and the recent deployment of special operations soldiers to northern Syria, he rejected any possibility that the US will deploy a large ground force to take on ISIS. “It is not just my view, but the view of my closest military and civilian advisors, that that would be a mistake,” he said. “We would see a repetition of what we’ve see before: If you do not have local populations that are committed to inclusive governance and who are pushing back against ideological extremists, that they resurface unless you’re prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries.”

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President Obama Calls Rejection of Syrian Refugees a "Betrayal of Our Values"

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How to sell the gas tax to people who hate taxes and love driving

How to sell the gas tax to people who hate taxes and love driving

By on 10 Nov 2015commentsShare

Trying to get Americans to raise the gas tax is like trying to get kids to eat healthy. Deep down, both suburban car lovers and sticky little humans know that their respective standoffs are nothing more than ideological grandstanding, and that paying a bit more at the pump and knocking back those peas and carrots won’t actually be the worst thing ever. But here we are, cruising around crumbling infrastructure with our cheap gasoline. And there’s little Joey, starving to death at the kitchen table.

Here’s Grist’s own Ben Adler laying out the very real problems with this standoff — the tax one, not the peas and carrots one:

There is perhaps no more vicious, self-reinforcing cycle in American life today than our dependence on automobiles. We subsidize suburban sprawl through favorable tax treatment, we mandate it through zoning codes, and we socialize the costs of the pollution it causes. We then end up with communities segregated into shopping, offices, and homes, so spread out and car-oriented as to make walking impractical.

… With so much driving necessary to get anywhere, and far too many SUVs on the road, it’s no surprise that Americans are averse to raising taxes on gasoline.

Gas taxes are how we fund federal transportation spending. Currently, the gas tax is just 18.4 cents per gallon, the same as it was in 1993 — and one-third less once adjusted for inflation. Because we haven’t raised it for two decades, we have developed a shortfall for currently authorized spending — and that doesn’t even begin to address the considerably larger amount we should appropriate to fix our crumbling transportation infrastructure.

But a new study published in the journal Energy Policy has revealed a glimmer of hope. Through a series of online surveys conducted between 2012 and 2014, two sociologists at Michigan State University found that people were significantly more likely to support a gas tax hike if they were told that a) the money would go toward energy-efficient transportation, b) the money would go toward infrastructure repair that current taxes couldn’t cover, or c) the money would be refunded equally to all Americans, rather than given to the U.S. Treasury’s General Fund.

(Note to Joey’s parents: One thing that didn’t work was telling survey respondents how much other countries paid for gas. So, you know, maybe stop talking about how much the neighbor girl loves her broccoli.)

To design these surveys, the MSU researchers used what’s called “fear appeal literature.” This is mostly worth pointing out because the world should know that such a thing exists. But also, it’s kind of important. According to the researchers, the findings of such literature show that: “for people to take action against a threat, it is not sufficient that they believe that the threat is severe and that they are susceptible to its consequences. They also must believe that there are practical ways of protecting themselves against the threat.”

Makes sense. People want to know that their sacrifices actually matter. That’s why if I ever have kids, I plan to convince them that we’re all constantly on the verge of spontaneous combustion and that a healthy diet is the only thing keeping the flames at bay. I’ll practically have to pry those Brussels sprouts out of their terrified little hands!

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How voters would accept higher gas tax

, MSU Today.

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How to sell the gas tax to people who hate taxes and love driving

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Women Can Boost Their Testosterone Just by Acting Like a Boss

Mother Jones

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We often point to testosterone to explain the traits that make men “manly”: competitiveness, horniness, impulsiveness. People have even blamed the testosterone levels of the architects of the Great Recession for the devastatingly awful decisions that led to the financial crash.

But new research shows that the reason men have more testosterone than women may have as much to do with gender socialization as inherent biology. Scientists from the University of Michigan published a study today that found that the act of wielding power increases testosterone levels regardless of gender. The study’s authors went on to hypothesize that the reason women generally have less of the hormone than men may be, at least in part, because of gender norms that prevent women from accessing positions of power and discourage them from being competitive.

To come to this conclusion, researchers hired more than 100 actors to perform an activity during which they held power over someone else: firing a subordinate employee. The actors performed the firing both acting with stereotypically “masculine” traits (using dominant poses, taking up space, not smiling), and with stereotypically “feminine” traits (lifting their voice at the end of sentences, being hesitant, not making eye contact). Researchers also measured the levels of a control group watching a travel documentary.

What they found was fascinating.

Not only did the female subjects acting in a stereotypically masculine way see an increase in testosterone (compared with the control), but those performing in a “feminine” way saw a significant boost, as well. In other words, just the act of wielding power, regardless of whether the wielder is performing maleness, increases testosterone levels. The study found that men did not have much of a testosterone boost during the activity, which, the study’s authors guessed, could be because men’s more frequent engagement in competitions and power-wielding activities “might paradoxically lead to dampened testosterone responses.”

“Our results would support a pathway from gender to testosterone that is mediated by men engaging more frequently than women in behaviors such as wielding power that increase testosterone,” the study says.

What’s that in layman’s terms? Gender inequality, at least in part, may be part of what’s making men manly.

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Women Can Boost Their Testosterone Just by Acting Like a Boss

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Since Donald Trump Brought It Up, Let’s Ask Him Again for Evidence That He "Fought Against Going Into Iraq"

Mother Jones

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Ezra Klein today:

I don’t know if Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination. But even if he doesn’t, it’s increasingly clear he’s going to destroy Jeb Bush before he loses….Trump insists that George Bush was president both prior to and during the 9/11 attacks, and he was therefore at least partly responsible for the security failures that permitted the tragedy.

I’m not so sure. As I recall, liberals spent a lot of time in the mid-aughts trying to make the case that George Bush was negligent in protecting the country before the 9/11 attacks—Exhibit A being the infamous Presidential Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” You’d think that would be pretty devastating, but it had its 15 minutes of fame and then faded out even among lefties. I doubt it will have any greater effect now, especially in a Republican primary.

What it will do, unfortunately, is almost guarantee that it comes up as a question in the next Republican debate. Debate moderators seem to be wholly unable to ignore juicy Trump bait like this. That’s too bad. I don’t really care about relitigating George Bush’s negligence prior to 9/11, but I do care about letting Trump set the terms of the campaign. Enough.

But there is one interesting thing that might come of this. Trump has lately moved on to a more defensible criticism of George Bush, asking Jeb, “why did your brother attack and destabilize the Middle East by attacking Iraq when there were no weapons of mass destruction?” This is not interesting because of what it says about George Bush—I think we already know that—but because it gives us another chance to harass Trump for lying about his opposition to the war during the second GOP debate:

I am the only person on this dais [] that fought very, very hard against us — and I wasn’t a sitting politician — going into Iraq. Because I said going into Iraq — that was in 2003, you can check it out, check out — I’ll give you 25 different stories. In fact, a delegation was sent to my office to see me because I was so vocal about it. I’m a very militaristic person, but you have to know when to use the military. I’m the only person up here that fought against going into Iraq.

So far, no one has managed to find even the slightest record of Trump opposing the Iraq War before it started. The closest he came was a breezy comment at the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party, three days after the war started. During the day CNN had been reporting nonstop about the battle of Nasiriya, in which 11 Americans were killed and six captured—including Jessica Lynch. It was the first serious fighting of the war, and apparently it was enough to inspire a classic Trump complaint about the incompetent losers running the invasion. “The war’s a mess,” he declared to an entertainment reporter, and then swept away.

There’s zero evidence that he opposed the war before it started and zero evidence that he opposed it during its first year. It wasn’t until November 2004—nearly two years after the war started—that he finally spoke up. “I do not believe that we made the right decision going into Iraq, but, you know, hopefully, we’ll be getting out,” he said on Larry King Live. That was after Fallujah, after Abu Ghraib, and after the growth of the insurgency in Sadr City and Basra. Trump hardly gets any brownie points for turning against the war at that point.

Anyway, that would be a good question to ask Trump at the debate later this month. Where are those 25 stories about how he “fought against going into Iraq”? Where’s even one? Maybe a personal diary? Trump is not a shy man, and it’s hard to believe that he felt so strongly about this but never said anything for two long years. As I recall, there were plenty of opportunities, including one just a few a blocks from his office. Let’s ask him about this.

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Since Donald Trump Brought It Up, Let’s Ask Him Again for Evidence That He "Fought Against Going Into Iraq"

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Fabulous New Blood Test Technology Not Quite as Fabulous as Advertised

Mother Jones

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Last year, when I was getting my blood drawn with dismaying frequency, I sang the praises of Elizabeth Holmes, a young billionaire who founded a company that promises to perform lab tests with only as much blood as you get from a finger prick. That sounded great.

My blood tests have gotten much less frequent these days, and I’ve mostly gotten over my needle phobia anyway,1 so I haven’t paid much attention to Theranos, the Silicon Valley darling Holmes founded. But this morning, John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal reported that Theranos was basically a house of cards. It actually does very little testing using its “Edison” finger-prick technology, and has had trouble getting FDA approval for its tests due to questions about the accuracy of its results.

Tonight, Carreyrou reports that things are even worse than that:

Under pressure from regulators, laboratory firm Theranos Inc. has stopped collecting tiny vials of blood drawn from finger pricks for all but one of its tests….That test detects herpes and was cleared by the FDA in July.

….Theranos has since nearly stopped using the lab instrument, named Edison after the prolific inventor, according to the person familiar with the situation. By the time of the FDA inspection, the company was doing blood tests almost exclusively on traditional lab instruments purchased from diagnostic-equipment makers such as Siemens AG , the person says.

….Most of Theranos’s blood-drawing sites, which it calls “wellness centers,” are located inside Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. drugstores….A blood-drawing technician at a Walgreens in the Phoenix area, reached by phone late Thursday, said Theranos had “temporarily suspended” finger-prick draws and was only drawing blood from patients’ arms with needles at that store.

That doesn’t sound very promising. I have a feeling that Elizabeth Holmes might not make the Forbes list of billionaires next year. She might be lucky if Theranos even still exists.

1So far, the upsides of my chemotherapy have been (1) better hair, (2) weight loss2, (3) less dread of blood draws, (4) forbidden to clean the litter box,3 and (5) the purchase of a powered bed, which is really cool.

2Though, sadly, I’ve gained most it back.

3Though, sadly, I’ve since been given permission to do this again.

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Fabulous New Blood Test Technology Not Quite as Fabulous as Advertised

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Needed: Better Debate Moderators

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore notes this morning that “the media appetite for naming a clear winner has fed a post-debate trend towards labeling HRC as a gigantic, titanic, overwhelming cham-peen.” True enough, and you can blame that on a sort of self-feeding bandwagon loop among the campaign press. Still, in this case I think it’s probably justified. Sure, O’Malley did OK, and so did Sanders, but let’s face it: Nobody cares much about O’Malley, and Sanders probably didn’t change the dynamics of the race in his favor despite a decent performance. What’s more, my own personal reaction is that Sanders made it even clearer than ever that he doesn’t really want to be president. He just wants to move the race to the left.

But the fact that Hillary did well really does matter. She showed Democrats why they’ve always liked her in the past. She showed off her debating skills. She put to rest all the Benghazi/email nonsense. She almost certainly halted her slide in the polls. She basically made herself the inevitable winner yet again. Plus this:

And that leads to the aspect of the debate that struck me apparently more than most observers: the exceptional hostility of the questioning from moderator Anderson Cooper, who seemed to be trying to defy expectations that he’d be less savage than Jake Tapper was in CNN’s GOP debate. Pretty quickly, Cooper became a stand-in for all the media folk trying to make the Democratic contest about emails and Benghazi! and “socialism,” and you got the sense the candidates and the immediate audience united in disdain for the superficiality of where the hosts wanted the discussion to go. The feral roar that greeted Bernie Sanders’ statement that Americans were tired of “hearing about Clinton’s damn emails”—followed by HRC shaking Bernie’s hand—was the signature moment of the night. And this wasn’t just some “gift” from Sanders to Clinton, as it was called by several talking heads last night. It was a party-wide rebuke to the MSM for how they are covering this campaign.

I didn’t get the sense that Cooper was especially hostile. But Kilgore is right that debate moderators generally try to focus on superficial “toughness” instead of asking either genuinely tough questions or genuinely interesting policy questions. In a way, this is justified: you don’t want candidates to get away with just making stump speeches. You want to challenge them. You want to see how they perform under pressure. Unfortunately, when you take this too far it becomes obvious that you’re just desperately trying to gin up controversy for its own sake. Debate moderators need to understand that the show isn’t about them. It’s about genuinely digging out answers from candidates on subjects they might prefer to fudge. That’s genuine toughness. But that takes a deep knowledge of policy and the willingness to engage with it. That’s too often missing from these events.

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Needed: Better Debate Moderators

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Sexual Violence on Campus Is Even Worse Than We Thought

Mother Jones

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The Association of American Universities released findings Monday from one of the largest-ever surveys on college sexual violence—comprising more than 150,000 students across 27 colleges—and they paint a bleak picture of sexual assault on college campuses.

The survey asked students whether they had experienced events ranging from sexual touching to forcible penetration. If they answered affirmatively, they were asked follow-up questions about the circumstances and the event’s aftermath, including whether they reported the incident to law enforcement or a campus authority. Some scenarios that appeared in the survey fit the legal definitions for rape and sexual battery, while others involved incidents that universities typically consider to be sexual misconduct. Other questions measured attitudes toward campus sexual assault and how often students intervened when they observed potentially risky situations.

Here are a few takeaways:

More than 1 in 5 undergraduate women are victims of sexual assault. The AAU’s findings suggest sexual-assault rates are slightly higher than the widely cited yet disputed statistic that 1 in 5 college women are victims of sexual assault. According to the survey, 23 percent of female respondents said they experienced nonconsensual sexual contact due to physical force, under the threat of physical force, or while they were incapacitated by drugs or alcohol. Among seniors nearing graduation, that number rises to 1 in 3.
In the last academic year alone, 11 percent of respondents said they experienced nonconsensual sexual contact. That’s around 16,500 students across the 27 institutions.
First-year students are are the most vulnerable to sexual assault. Sixteen percent of freshman women said they experienced sexual contact under physical force or incapacitation.
The vast majority of students don’t report sexual assault or misconduct. While most victims said they confided in a friend, family member or someone else, only 26 percent of students who experienced forcible penetration filed an official report. More than half of those victims said they didn’t consider the event serious enough to go to the authorities, while one-third of said they were “embarrassed, ashamed, or that it would be too emotionally difficult.” Others said they “did not think anything would be done about it.” Students were much more likely to report certain kinds of events than others, with reports filed by 28 percent of stalking victims but only 5 percent of those who experienced unwanted sexual touching while they were incapacitated by drugs or alcohol.â&#128;&#139;
Transgender and gender-nonconforming students experience sexual assault and misconduct at higher rates than their peers. These students comprised 1.5 percent of survey respondents, but nearly 40 percent of seniors identifying with this group said they had experienced nonconsensual sexual contact in college, compared to a third of senior women. They’re also less likely to believe the university will conduct a fair investigation or take their reports seriously.
Response rates were low. About 19 percent of students across the 27 universities chose to respond to the online survey, which was conducted during a three-week period in April. The survey notes that nonvictims may be less likely to participate, skewing incidence rates slightly upward. Still, final participation rates were well below the the rates of similar studies.

At least 12 of the colleges that released results on Monday are currently facing federal scrutiny from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights for their handling of sexual-assault cases under federal Title IX standards. Several universities on the list have been found in violation of Title IX, including the University of Virginia, Harvard University, Yale University, and Michigan State University.

Given a range of responses across institutions, the study’s authors caution against generalizing the results on a national scale. As Slate points out, the researchers declined to explain the variation in sexual-assault rates or students’ attitudes at different institutions. “The analyses did not find a clear explanation for why there is such wide variation,” the authors write. “Some university characteristics, such as size, were correlated with certain outcomes. But the correlation is not particularly strong.”

This post has been updated.

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Sexual Violence on Campus Is Even Worse Than We Thought

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