"The rape epidemic is a fiction."

Over at National Review, Kevin D. Williamson argues that "The rape epidemic is a fiction." From the article:

This is a matter of concern because a comparison between the NIJ's estimates of college-campus rape and the estimates of rape in the general population compiled by the DoJ's National Crime Victimization Survey implies that the rate of rape among college students is more than ten times that of the general population.

It is not impossible that this is the case, but there is significant cause for skepticism. For example, in the general population college-age women have significantly lower rates of sexual assault than do girls twelve to seventeen, while a fifth of all rape victims are younger than twelve. Most of the familiar demographic trends in violent crime are reflected in the rape statistics:

Poor women are sexually assaulted at twice the rate of women in households earning $50,000 a year or more; African American women are victimized at higher rates than are white women, while Native American women are assaulted at twice the rate of white women; divorced and never-married women are assaulted at seven times the rate of married women; women in urban communities are assaulted at higher rates than those in the suburbs, and those in rural areas are assaulted at dramatically higher rates.

And more:

Under the Bureau of Justice Statistics' apples-to-apples year-over-year comparison, sexual assault has declined 64 percent since the Clinton years. That is excellent news, indeed, but it does not feed the rape-epidemic narrative, and so it must be set aside.

Source: National Review.