Three Florida high schoolers won this year's Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge with a plan to make a straw that detects date rape drugs. The device would change color when it finds ketamine or GHB in a drink.
The project sounds great. The reporting on the project does not. The practice of slipping date rape drugs into drinks is nowhere near as common as many reporters seem to think.
The Miami Herald claims that using "so-called club drugs to facilitate rape is a decades-old problem that seems to have intensified in recent years." Teen Vogue reported that "one in 13 college students say they have been drugged, or suspect they have been drugged, in the past academic year." The Teen Vogue writer backed up that statistic by pointing to a flimsy study full of caveats published last year in the journal Psychology of Violence.
The study, from a team led by psychologist Suzanne Swan of the University of South Carolina, used data from about 6,000 students at three universities. Early in the paper, the authors admit there are huge issues with estimating the prevalence of "drugging victimization"—that is, having drugs slipped in your drink without your consent. Various drugs, such as Rohypnol and GHB, exit the system at different rates (72 hours and 10 hours, respectively), so toxicological tests don't always yield accurate results. Meanwhile, since the person being drugged is unaware of what's happening, they can only rely on the experienced effects to judge whether their drink has been tainted.
In previous studies, subjects have suspected they've been drugged, but these fears haven't always been accurate. A 2010 study reported that only 49 percent of suspected victims actually returned positive urine test results. In a 2007 study, only 19 percent of suspected drugging and drink-spiking cases tested positive.
So when Swan's team reports that 1 in 13 students "suspected or knew that someone put a drug in their drink without their knowledge," that information could mean almost anything. Suspicion is not always rooted in reality. Sometimes somebody drugged your drink; sometimes you're simply drunk.
The Miami Herald and Teen Vogue pieces also make the mistake of implying that a drugged drink must lead directly to sexual assault. As Swan and her colleagues point out, the current literature suggests the opposite: Somewhere between 12 percent and 33 percent of drugging victims reported resulting rape in the studies they reviewed. In their own study, they found that a little more than five percent of the drugging victims also reported forced sexual intercourse.
So even if the "one in 13" number were true, a much smaller percentage of those victims would also be sexual assault victims, statistically speaking––and that low prevalence remains consistent from study to study. Of course, any sexual assault is awful and traumatic. But it's good news that drugging is less common than many people assume think, and unwanted sexual contact even less so.
Swann and company concede that "research in the area of drugging is nascent" and based "almost exclusively on anecdotal data." Their own effort is no exception.
Stories like these have a lot of appeal. They feed off fears of sexual danger. They reaffirm the belief that drugs only manipulate or harm users. And on the positive side, they show empowered young people taking up broadly palatable causes for the common good. But in the process of doing so, they perpetuate myths about sexual assault and how it's carried out.
In reality, sexual assault is usually committed by acquaintances who manipulate trust. The chief drug involved is alcohol, not GHB or ketamine. And date-rape-drug-detecting straws already exist—they're just rarely used. It's great that these high schoolers see the value in consent, autonomy, and creating a safer world for those around them. But let's think twice before we pretend the problem they're tackling is a common and "intensifying" threat.
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