A rape at Stanford University has become the focal point for the national conversation on sexual assault, after former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner received a sentence of six months jail time for a unanimous guilty verdict on three felony counts related to his assault of an unconscious woman outside a frat party.
The incident is unusual for several reasons when compared to available data on sexual assaults, which is collected and structured by the Graphiq network.
Sexual assault on campus — and university responsibility for mediation and punishment — is usually discussed with the attendant assumption that both victim and perpetrator are students of the university. The victim in this case was not a Stanford student, and she and the perpetrator were complete strangers, an anomaly compared to the majority of rape cases.
As the below HealthGrove visualization shows, just 13 percent of rapes are committed by a stranger, compared to 45 percent committed by a current or former intimate partner. Data shows 47 percent of rapes are committed by an acquaintance of the victim.
Compared to other colleges, Stanford has a high rate of reported sexual assaults, according to data collected by StartClass. There were 30 reported incidents of sexual assault at Stanford in 2014 — that’s three times more than the median for all large colleges, and ten times higher than the median for all colleges.
Emily von Hoffmann is a freelancer for Graphiq. Follow her on Twitter at @EmvonHoffmann.
