The Obama administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is promoting a study that claims 43 percent of college women who date are victims of "dating abuse," a category defined to include behaviors as different as sexual assault and excessive texting.
Earlier this month, the DOJ Office for Violence Against Women launched a website geared toward helping the nation’s colleges address sexual assault on campus, a year and a half after President Obama established the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.
The newly launched DOJ site features links to the "best and most recent research" regarding sexual assault and dating violence.
One of the only seven documents cited, called the "2011 College Dating Violence and Abuse Poll," defines "called and texted my cell phone to check up on me more than 50 times per day" as a form of "dating abuse" via technology.
Any female individual in the study reporting such "dating abuse" was counted among the larger share of victims of dating violence and abuse, yielding the 43 percent figure. Thus individuals encountering constant text messages or phone calls from a partner were counted along with those reporting physical sexual violence.
The researchers conducting the survey interviewed 330 women. As of 2013, there were 9.8 million female undergraduate students in the United States, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.
The issue of sexual assault on campus has received generous attention in the media, attention that has, to some extent, been driven by the White House.
For example, a now-discredited Rolling Stone story about an alleged violent gang rape at the University of Virginia appears to have had its genesis when a UVA employee who also served as an adviser to the White House task force introduced a writer for the magazine to the student who became the subject of the story.
The DOJ website also cites Sen. Claire McCaskill’s (D., Mo.) July 2014 report on campus sexual violence as well as the April 2014 report prepared for the White House sexual assault task force.
The report from McCaskill cites the statistic that one in five undergraduate women has been the victim of sexual assault in college, a figure repeated by the Obama White House that has been widely questioned by critics.
The Obama administration has been diligent in its attention to campus rape, sending guidance to federally funded schools regarding their legal obligations to prevent and combat sexual assault. In September 2014, the White House launched the "It’s on Us" sexual violence awareness campaign, the same month that the administration learned about the now-discredited Rolling Stone rape story, two months before its publication. The administration last month admitted to arranging an interview between the story’s writer and an Education Department official to discuss Title IX.