With the recent emphasis on the prevalence of sexual assaults on college campuses by the White House and Congress, conservatives have pounced on the definition of sexual assault and the statistics cited when discussing the issue.
On Tuesday, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze decided to air a series of pre-recorded skits in order to cast doubt on the statistics cited by the President, that one in five women have been sexually assaulted at college.
The Blaze’s Stu Burguiere claims in a Thursday blog post that the two studies that the Obama administration used for its sexual assault statistic, the Campus Sexual Assault Study and the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, are misleading.
Burguiere spends most of his time trying to debunk the 2010 study, arguing that the questions asked weren’t actually about sexual assault, which in turn led to inflated statistics.
“But, how do you figure out if someone’s been raped? One way would be to ask the person if they have been raped. But, why do that when you can ask misleading questions and try and figure it out for yourself!” he wrote. “The study asked questions like: ‘When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had sex with you?'”
He turns to the “beer commercial” to argue that alcohol does not always lead to sexual assault.
“Newsflash, but it is possible to have consensual sex while drunk or high. Watch any beer commercial. What you will see is a bunch of hot women and good looking dudes drinking beer with the strong insinuation they will soon be hooking up,” he wrote.
And so network radio host Jeff Fisher and a man in a wig act out their interpretations of the questions asked in the survey, labeling each situation as “RAPE!” They use the skits to mock situations in which men coerce or convince women to have sex.
Watch the skits courtesy of Media Matters:
Take a look at the study and the questions researchers asked about rape and intimate partner violence.
