Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume downplayed the prevalence of campus sexual assaults by misleadingly pointing to a Justice Department study which only surveyed respondents on assaults which occurred per year. Hume's analysis ignored that studies on campus sexual assault consistently find that nearly 20 percent of college-aged women report that they have been assaulted in their lifetime -- a completely different unit of measurement than the Justice Department's study.

During the December 8 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier, Hume highlighted a 2013 study from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that found that “the annual rate of sexual assaults on women in America declined by 58%,” using the report to refute the the often-cited Campus Sexual Assault (CSA) survey used by “activists and President Obama who have been claiming for years that one in every five women will be sexually assaulted while at college,” mocking it for including categories such as “forced kissing.”

But Hume's comparison is flawed. The DOJ report only cites “the estimated annual rate of female rape or sexual assault victimizations,” that occur per year and includes all females age 12 or older. The CSA study specifically surveyed women in college and asked women if they had been assaulted in their lifetime, reporting that “one out of five undergraduate women experience an attempted or completed sexual assault” since entering college.

And studies consistently echoed CSA's findings. A 2010 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that nearly 20 percent of women have been raped in their lifetime:

Nearly 1 in 5 women (18.3%) and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) in the United States have been raped at some time in their lives, including completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration.

The language in this blog has been updated for clarity.