A Response to Evan J. Worthen

I just came across an attempt by some guy named Evan J. Worthen to “eviscerate” my most recent article published by Public Square Magazine concerning sexual assault at BYU. I will copy and paste his critique and respond to them one at a time. Here it goes:

“The argument is that consent education doesn't work, but byu has figured out the secret to preventing SA, and other schools should be looking to BYU for its example in handling these issues the evidence for the claim that consent education doesn't work comprises two links: one is just a page on http://macrotrends.net about the california rape statistics from 1979-2018??? but california has a lower rate of reported rape than the US as a whole??? and of california's 40mil people, most aren't college students going to consent seminars??? The other is an article from a canadian magazine that summarizes the findings of a survey where the rates of SA at colleges that had consent education were similar to colleges that didn't but the survey it's referencing never defines what consent education is??? We have no idea if these programs were mandatory or voluntary. also, a behavioral science professor who studies sexual violence explained IN THE ARTICLE that it would make sense that some level of consent education increases the level of self-reported SA because victims realize in that education that they've been assaulted. Also the majority of the assaults experienced by the victims in the survey happened before entering college, and the survey didn't ask students if their assaults happened before or after the consent education at their school.”

First, I think Evan is confused about who has the burden of evidence here. If he believes that consent education effectively reduces sexual assault, then the burden of proof is on HIM to show this. He didn’t do that. I only have to show that the evidence is unclear, and the Canadian article I cited did just that. I wasn’t trying to write a takedown of consent education; I wholeheartedly agree with consent education in theory. I was only trying to show that the evidence for it certainly doesn’t match the level of zeal many progressives have toward its implementation. You would think that a program being universally implemented and pushed in so many college campuses would have a better evidence base for it, but it doesn’t. That was the point I was trying to get across. In my criminal justice field, programs designed for crime reduction must be replicated multiple times and subjected to a systematic review or meta-analysis before they are taken seriously as a solution to crime. Since the burden of evidence is on Evan here, I am definitely open to evidence that supports consent education, but he hasn’t provided it thus far.

Second, even if it was true that consent education worked even a little bit (which has yet to be demonstrated), my point was that the church’s teachings on chastity are better than consent education because “while consent programs teach students that they should not initiate sexual activity without the consent of the other person, BYU and its sponsoring organization take self-control to the next level and teaches them that they shouldn’t engage in sexual activity at all until they are married. This removes any ambiguity about what is acceptable regarding sexual initiation during the dating and courting process and can be a protective factor against sexual assault.”

It’s quite simple really. If students at BYU aren’t initiating sexual contact with their dating partners at all during the dating and courting phase, then it would be kind of impossible for them to sexually assault them don’t you think? Now, I’m not arguing that every single BYU student follows the law of chastity to the letter. Still, the data I cited in my article certainly shows that, as a population, they certainly do when compared to their non-LDS peers. This may surprise those who like to hurl accusations of “technical virginity” practices like “soaking” at BYU students (without any hard data to support it). Still, the data overwhelmingly shows that highly religious youth and young adults are generally much less sexually promiscuous than their peers and are more likely to wait until marriage. This applies to highly religious LDS youth and young adults as well.

“NOW onto the claim that byu has fewer SAs than other campuses... i wouldn't be shocked either way by the results of good comparison data when/if we get it, but for now we're not sure about this question. the author, however, would like you to believe that we are…the problem is that the byu campus climate survey is so methodologically different from the meta-analysis cited for the 19-25% number that it actually wouldn't even be included among the surveys reviewed in the analysis. First, byu's survey didn't ask behaviorally specific questions until AFTER a respondent indicated that they'd been assaulted, which was something that the meta-analysis writeup specifically mentioned as a bad methodological practice. Second, byu's survey asked about incidents in the past 12 months, whereas the surveys in the analysis asked participants if they'd been assaulted throughout their entire college experience. Finally, byu's list of acts of sexual contact were narrower in scope compared to the surveys in the analysis — byu's CCS only counted incidents of forcible sexual battery towards the SA total whereas the other studies included incidents of coercion towards their totals.”

If Evan wants to quibble over these methodological problems, I address those here. Still, I just want to make one thing clear. If I believed that the BYU campus climate survey was a perfect apples-to-apples comparison to other campus climate surveys, then I wouldn’t have tried to bolster it with the data on the relationship between alcohol and porn consumption and sexual assault (which are points in my article that Evan completely ignored). When data on an issue is limited, then you have to use multiple converging lines of evidence to support your position, and that is what I did.

For example, I cited mountains of evidence showing that alcohol consumption and college party culture are associated with sexual assault perpetration and victimization. I also cited data from the CDC and multiple literature reviews showing a relationship between porn consumption and sexual aggression/ assault. Since BYU students have been shown to have significantly lower levels of porn and alcohol consumption than their peers, it would make sense why sexual assault is so low. The evidence base for these variables is much stronger than for consent training. Yet, for some weird reason, progressives like Evan get offended when I question the efficacy of consent training and choose to put more emphasis on chastity, alcohol, and porn. Why? Could it be that it isn’t in line with their dogmas? It’s very telling that these are the areas where the evidence for my argument is the strongest. Yet, Evan completely skipped over them and chose to pick apart the more peripheral parts of my article that weren’t as central to my argument.

On a related note, another part of my argument that Evan completely ignored was my citation of the CDC’s list of risk factors that make sexual assault perpetration more likely and how BYU students performed on those factors. I cited my own review of 158 studies that covered numerous mental, social, and economic health variables that significantly overlapped with the CDC’s list of risk factors. Shocker: LDS youth and young adults fare quite well in pretty much all of them (this isn’t just the case for LDS youth though. It’s the case for all highly religious youth and young adults). With all of these converging lines of evidence, Evan’s critiques of BYU’s campus climate surveys look insignificant in comparison, and I still argue that we have good reason to believe that BYU has significantly lower sexual assault rates than other universities. The BYU survey is similar enough to other campus climate surveys and there are enough converging lines of evidence to support my conclusions.

To finish off, I think Evan misunderstood my point about other universities mishandling sexual assault cases. My argument was that because these universities have, in many cases, failed to take action to assist victims of sexual assault, there is good reason to believe that the student body at these universities has no more reason to distrust their administrators than BYU students have to distrust theirs. However, it should be noted that the most recent BYU campus climate survey was administered in 2021 5 years after the most egregious scandal (critics most often cite) took place in 2016. BYU is not unique in this regard. What makes BYU unique is the religious nature of the scandals. Still, they are not unique in that they’ve had scandals that have potentially damaged trust among a significant percentage of the student body. But even still, this completely ignores the fact that at the beginning of the BYU campus climate survey, most respondents indicated that they trusted BYU to handle sexual assault properly, should it occur, and they all mainly agreed that BYU was a safe place. This was true even for the students who reported unwanted sexual contact in the last 12 months. Perhaps BYU students aren’t so distrusting of their administration after all. Evan could claim they're all lying, but that would be gaslighting.

My central argument was this: The BYU survey shows that BYU has significantly lower sexual assault rates than other universities. Don’t believe the survey? Well, here’s a list of risk factors for sexual assault perpetration and victimization from the CDC, and here’s a bunch of studies showing that BYU students perform exceptionally well on those risk factors compared to their peers. Evan tried to attack the survey itself (and honestly tried to make those problems look more damning than they are) but didn’t attack the data I used to support the survey’s findings.