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Dr David Ellis is Associate Professor of Information systems at Bath University and a member of that university’s Academic Ethics and integrity committee.
The Active Consent Unit has its own section on the NUIG website, and its media page posts inaccurate media coverage of its work without comment. (Update: They appear to have now hidden their media page, but not to worry, I have it archived. Update 2: Since I posted on Twitter that I had the page archived, it seems to have been restored, with some, though not all of the links to false coverage removed.) What appears to be their YouTube account incorrectly claims that the research applies to all students, and posts on their twitter account make the same false claim.
The Active Consent Unit offers on its website ‘workshops’ targeted at second- and third-level students which address the problems their research purports measure. Dr Caroline West offers similar workshops on her personal website. There is no mention of this conflict of interests in the report they published.
The report claims that, of students who have been raped, just 4.5 per cent of female students, and three per cent of men report this to the gardaí. This is not consistent with other research on this topic which suggests that between 36 per cent and 20 per cent of rape victims make a police report.
The report claims that, of the 29 per cent of women and 10 per cent of men, 4.5 per cent and 3 per cent make a garda report, meaning that 1.3 per cent of all female students and 0.3 per cent of all male students report being raped to the gardaí.
With almost 250,000 students in the country (about 5 per cent o the total population, skewing slightly female), if that figure really did apply to all students, there would be more than 2,000 reports of rape by students to the gardaí.
As can be seen in this data from the CSO, the entire population typically reports 1,000 or fewer rapes to the gardaí per year, so this claim is clearly impossible.
Among the more than 95 per cent who the report says did not report being raped to the gardaí, 54 per cent of women are reported to have thought that it was not serious enough, not a crime.
All of these young women are by definition were well educated, so it is startling that an absolute majority of them thought that what happened to them was not a crime or not serious enough to report to gardaí, and this calls into question the definition of rape, and style of questioning used by the Active Consent Unit.
The University of Liverpool states succinctly the principle of Open Research:
What is Open Research? Open Research embodies ideas of best research practice by opening access to results, data, protocols and other aspects of the research process. It is about extending the principles of openness to the whole research cycle. Open Research is an interchangeable term with ‘Open Scholarship’ and ‘Open Science’.
University of Liverpool
This principle is advocated by the Science Foundation of Ireland, and almost every academic body around the world, so it is notable that the Active Consent seems determined to keep its research materials and data secret.
