Objecting to a "definitional stretching" of the concept of rape to make it seem a problem "vastly larger than commonly recognized," Dr. Neil Gilbert, a professor of social welfare at the University of California at Berkeley, criticized a widely quoted study—conducted by University of Arizona researcher Dr. Mary P. Koss and published in Ms. magazine—which indicated that more than one in four college women had been victimized by at least one rape or rape attempt. Gilbert compared these findings with a U.S. national crime survey, which put the number somewhere between one in five hundred and one in a thousand. While acknowledging that government rape statistics tend to be notoriously low, Gilbert cited several problems with Koss's methodology:

• Any woman answering "yes" to Koss's question "Have you ever had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?' had been counted as a rape survivor.
• 73 percent of the women classified as having been raped had initially failed to categorize their experience as such.
• Roughly 41 percent of the women classified as having been raped subsequently chose to have sex with their rapists again.

While praising activists for the good job they had done in raising consciousness about rape, Gilbert warned that overzealous "definitional stretching" would ultimately serve to trivialize public perceptions of the true seriousness of the crime.

Despite these disclaimers, Sheila Kuehl, director of the California Women's Law Center, said that she found herself "wishing that Gilbert himself might be raped and ... be told, to his face, it had never happened." Anonymously penned placards reading "Kill Neil Gilbert" appeared throughout the campus, and demonstrators from SOAR (Students Organized Against Rape) gathered in Berkeley's Sproul Square to light candles for rape survivors while rhythmically chanting the suggestion that Gilbert should "cut it out or cut it off."

[Ed.: Koss notes that a frequent obstacle rape researchers often encounter is victims' stubborn insistence on "trying to pass as nonvictimized." "Research designs that depend for participation on a subject's self-identification as a victim," she writes, fail to take into account "the many women who have sustained harm but may not see the injury as unfair."]

†