The basis of Lisak’s 13-year old paper was not his own research but data collected as part of one student’s master’s thesis and three dissertations, none of which were about campus sexual assault.

The most widely quoted figures—that 90 percent of campus rapes are committed by serial offenders and that they average six rapes each—were calculated on a total of 76 non-traditional students who were not living on a college campus, and whose offenses may or may not have happened on or near a college campus, may or may not have been perpetrated on other students, and may have happened at any time in the survey respondents’ adult lives.

In March, when I pointed to the differences between the men in Lisak’s paper and the student population on which his popular campus presentations focus, Lisak responded: “Are you asking if there are comprehensive studies about sexual offenders on traditional college campuses? No, there aren’t.” Yet this is exactly how Lisak’s work has been treated.

Even the serial nature of the assaults reported in Lisak’s paper is speculation, since he did not distinguish between multiple offenses committed against multiple victims and multiple offenses committed against one victim. In fact, when asked about the high number of assaults by individuals who allegedly remained “undetected” by law enforcement, Lisak stated that “a number of these cases were domestic violence,” i.e., ongoing abuse in intimate partnerships, including marriages.

This is an important revelation. Even a single rape is abhorrent. Even one woman, victimized multiple times, endures trauma. But campus training and government policy, citing Lisak, are being built around presumptions of serial, predatory behavior from most campus rapists, a fact not established in the data and potentially contradicted by Lisak’s own characterization of the men included in his paper.