Missing data

There’s a story by Brittany Keogh at Stuff on misconduct cases at NZ universities (via Nicola Gaston).  The headline example was someone bringing a gun (unloaded, as a film prop). There were 1625 cases of cheating.

As with crime data, there are data collection biases here: whether or not things are reported to the university, and whether the university takes any action, and whether that action ends up as a misconduct record, and how that record is classified.   Notably,

Victoria University of Wellington was the only university that noted disciplinary cases for sexually harmful behaviour, with three incidents reported in 2018. 

The university defined sexually harmful behaviour as “any form of unwelcome sexual advance, request for sexual favours, and any other unwanted behaviour that is sexual in nature”, including sexual harassment or assault.

There’s no way there were only three cases at universities. Or only three cases reported to universities.

The under-reporting is not quite as bad as that: the University of Canterbury reported ‘several’ harassment cases that resulted from a Law Society review into sexual misconduct, so we’ve got a classification problem as well.  Some of the harassment cases at other universities might also be included.  And there’s no data from Otago (which hasn’t responded) or Massey (which refused).

It’s definitely possible to go too far the other way — in the US, Federal law requires reporting and investigation for all incidents, even in the absence of a complaint, which means that a victim who doesn’t want to be put through an investigation is quite limited in who they can talk to.

With these numbers, though, the big story shouldn’t be that someone once brought an unloaded gun to campus with no violent intent; it should be that the universities are managing not to notice sexual harassment and assault.