The jury ruled that Erdely acted with actual malice when she published two statements about Eramo, the first being that Eramo discouraged Jackie from reporting her allegations and a reference to Eramo’s “nonreaction” when Jackie first told Eramo about other allegations of gang rape at a fraternity.

“This young woman was very good at telling this story,” Sexton said. “Dean Eramo believed her . . . Yet we are the ones being tried, in a sense, for having believed her.”

An investigation by The Washington Post showed that aspects of Jackie’s account were not true, including that no one in the fraternity matched the name or description she gave for the person who allegedly was the ringleader of her assault. A person she had described to friends at the time as her assailant was complete fiction, according to Eramo’s attorneys, and The Post found that a photo she shared of her alleged attacker was actually of someone she knew from high school and who attended a different school out of state.

Originally hailed as a brave triumph of reporting for its raw accounts of rape and attempts at bringing accountability to a storied public university, the article led to protests of the U-Va. administration, vandalism of a campus fraternity and outrage among activists trying to prevent sexual assault.

But within days of the article’s publication, key elements of the account fell apart under scrutiny, including the narrative’s shocking allegation of a fraternity gang rape

HHS describes it either as “assault-sexual” or “unwanted sexual contact.”

There can be valid reasons for using different terminology in these data collection initiatives, as each targets different populations, uses different methodologies and serves different purposes.

Better data at the federal level will not solve the problem of sexual assault, nor will improving federal reporting requirements produce perfect statistics. Most sexual assaults go unreported, and police departments and college campuses can deliberately manipulate statistics or discourage sexual assault reporting, further limiting the public’s understanding of the problem. However, by improving how federal agencies collect and report data about sexual assault, policymakers can finally make smarter decisions about how to combat it.

The wide variation in reporting can make research about sexual violence unnecessarily difficult, as comparisons between different groups are all but impossible when methodologies differ so greatly, and the lack of clarity about what these different statistics really mean provides fodder for toxic arguments that dismiss the severity of the problem of sexual assault and imply that false reporting of rape is commonplace (it is not).

After reviewing 10 different data collection efforts, GAO found that federal agencies use 23 different terms to describe an incident of sexual violence.

My daughter will be brought up to understand her true value. That’s a promise. As for all the little girls to be born around the world, the creation of these ads is an effort to show how imagination can change the conversation around their lives.