I walked by an anti-rape bulletin board in one of the college residence halls here that had the following statistics on it:
1 out of every 4 women in college will be RAPED. (Emphasis theirs.)
1 in 10 men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.
I really, really, really doubt the first statistic, and I almost want to get in touch with whoever is in charge of these bulletin boards and get that removed. 25% of college females raped? How is this possible?
As to the second one, I also doubt it. It seems a little bit more believable than 25% but still seems high.
What do you all have to say about these statistics?
The 1-in-4 women have been raped claim has been fairly widely debunked, it’s a single-source statistic from a poll that, meaningfully, didn’t actually ask any variant of the question “have you been raped?” The poll takers interpreted a number of questions (including an infamous “have you ever had sex you wouldn’t have had otherwise because of alcohol?” one) as positive for rape. The same women, when asked if they had ever been raped, responsed much at a much lower rate.
It’s REALLY hard to find non-emotional and non-biased cites, but here’s one that’s not too bad: rape research.
It’s too bad this statistic gets reported to often, because it is unbelievable (in part because it’s true only if you really stretch the definition of rape), and it detracts from what really is a very serious problem.
This is widely considered to be a nonsense statistic. IIRC, the survey upon which it is based uses a definition of “rape” that many people believe to be overbroad (and deliberately contrived to inflate the result for political purposes.)
We’ve discussed this issue before. Let me see what I can find.
(Note to mods: I’m deliberately offering no opinion of my own, but I think there’s arguably two factual questions here: “Where does this 25% figure come from?” and "Is this source considered to be a valid scientific study or survey?)
I’ve heard this statistic quoted as high as 1 in 7 males being sexually assaulted, mostly as children.
For females, it’s as high as 1 in 3. I don’t buy that 1 in 4 college women get RAPED, though. In fact, I believe that most of these statistics are wooly at best, outright fabrication at worst.
I don’t know, I’d say a good percentage (more than half) of women I know have been raped as children or adults. Maybe I just hit a cluster or my social circle tends to attract the type, though, but the 25% statistic is believable.
I was just about to post something similar to groman’s post. Most women I get to know fairly well have been raped - could be a statistical skew of some sort, but it sure seems common.
I think the general disbelief that some people have about statistics like that comes from the ones who are the type of people with whom such information is not typically shared. For example, out of the women I know who have been raped, not a single one ever filed any charges. Most have not told their parents. This information gets transmitted to very intimate friends, significant others and occasionally siblings. I frankly understand very well why that is so, and no support group or awareness program will really help with the underreported rapes issue. Some things just require you to move on and not let them affect your life any more than they already will for decades to come.
Perhaps if we didn’t have such stringent non-sexual battery laws, the rape rates would go down. Rapists are often aware of the power they have over their victims and how the chances of the rape being reported to the police are fairly slim. If a rape is not reported to the police, the rapist will most likely go unpunished. Although rapes are typically underreported to authorities, they are typically reported at least to someone. The fear that someone like me would come to your dorm and bash your skull in with a tire iron and then get off with a fine and a week in jail would be a fairly effective deterrant IMO.
Though I can’t for the life of me remember where I saw it, I do remember seeing a poster or something that had as one of its Horrifying Rape Statistics that x% of women who had had a sexual encounter meeting the definition of rape didn’t even think they’d been raped. Their interpretation of this was that these poor, poor women didn’t even know enough to realize they were actually rape victims and needed to be educated. Mine was, “Gee, that definition must kind of suck.”
Looking through the links, it seems that the poster I saw was referencing Mary Koss’s 1987 study, as mentioned by avalongodhere and here.
Myself, I think that equating drunk, unenthusiastic, or somewhat pressured sex with actual rape rape is a terrible idea that’s likely to actually encourage the former. But hey, what do I know?
“Drunk sex” *is[i/] (or at least can be) sexual assault.
Without having seen any of the original research, it is certainly possible that questions were designed to elicit information on whether the subjects were sexually assaulted from a purely legal standpoint.
Mmmm…my understanding of that ruling is that the person has to be pretty far gone for it to count as sexual assault. But it’s fairly common (especially in college) for people to willingly hook up with people they wouldn’t normally hook up with due to alcohol consumption that doesn’t rise to that level.
How do you know which one is “guilty” in such an incident? It’s not only women that make bad sexual decisions when drunk. “Yeah, there’s nothing worse than getting all drunk and waking up the next morning next to a pig, or a big fat elephant.”
Thus the qualification “or can be.” Of course not every bout of drunk sex is going to rise to the level of sexual assault. My point was that it may be possible to reconcile at least some of the instances of “sexual assault” that a survey picks up with the feeling that the reporter doesn’t “feel raped” by determining if the survey itself is designed from a legalistic standpoint.
I think it’s pointless to get too distracted by the numbers or the definitions. As other posters have pointed out, disclosure is extremely constrained on this issue. But in my own experience the accumulated personal testimony of close friends convinces me that an astonishing number of people have had traumatic episodes of coercive sexual contact - 25% seems conservative.
Whatever the source of data that supported the claim in the OPs flyer, the message is not that there is some threshold of violence that constitutes RAPE, it is that any time coertion replaces (sober) consent then it is wrong.
Wow. I had to read that a few times before deciding that you mean this seriously. It’s a good thing that in the entire recorded history of humanity, there has never been a single case of false rape accusation or of mistaken identity, right? :dubious:
Just as a matter of interest: under your proposed system of vigilante justice, what’s the punishment for aggravated assault – with a tire iron – on an innocent party? Because, you know, you might have to consider that before you go around bashing people’s skulls in.
It’s funny that this comes up now (not funny ha-ha). I almost shot someone last week during a similar situation. Girlfriend tells him something bad happened at a party (that part is still in dispute do to changing stories and unreliable testimony). Boyfriend goes to the house breaks in through the front window (otherwise known as a home invasion) with knife in hand. Oops wrong house. Boyfriend tries to leave after scaring nice lady and daughter half to death only to be met by me and my .45. Half and second more of hesitation more before he dropped the knife and he would have been ventilated. Sorry if I don’t agree with your viewpoint groman.
Awhile ago I read through the methodology for one of these studies, and it was atrocious. Essentially, they called female college attendees after their first semester of college and asked them a series of questions about sexual assault and rape during their first semester. They then multiplied their results by eight, since most college students attend eight semesters of school. That’s obviously poor statistics.
As for sexual assault, I think it’s a weird thing to lump all of it together. Does getting your butt grabbed on the subway put you in the same category as having an adult corner you and attempt to rape you? I was groped when I was a child once, by a stranger; it was unpleasant, but not really worse than having a street preacher yell at me. More stratification in the stats would be helpful.
I’d say you lucked out. Sounds like you came within about half a second of, at best, a long entanglement in the court system or, at worst, a long entanglement in jail. :eek: