I was listening to NPR a bit this morning and there was an interview about sexual abuse. One of the risk factors from a sociological perspective is how empowered women are. In societies where women are less empowered, sexual abuse is higher (however I don’t know if this is just sexual abuse of women or sexual abuse of women, men and children).
One of the thing the researcher being interviewed said was that the rates of sexual abuse in societies can vary from rampant to nearly non-existent. So what cultures and societies have virtually no sexual abuse? Seeing how sexual abuse is such a major public health issue, how have some cultures managed to make it rare? Part of me wonders if they were just confusing the rates of reporting sex abuse with the rates of the crime. But that seems like too amateur a mistake to make.
Did anyone hear that story, or have any idea how some cultures do it?
In the US I think only about 5-10% of men have committed rape or child molestation, but despite that something like 20-50% of people have been sexually abused. I think an even smaller subset of that number, maybe 1-2% of men, are serial sex criminals who create about half the victims.
It seems like controlling or persuading that 1-2% would be pretty difficult.
Are you surprised? I suspect many rapists and child molesters and sexual abusers – by no means all, I’m sure! – have a . . . problem with monogamy. It’s really rather embarrassing sometimes. :o
According to Wiki, Japan has an average of 1 rape per 100,000 people, last compiled in 2010. Comparatively, the USA has a rate of 27.3 (also per 100,000, also in 2010), though it seems to have been declining since at least 2003.
It’s my understanding that it’s pretty common for crime to follow that pattern, with a small minority committing a greatly disproportionate share of the crime.
As for how to lower it; I’d say that the key features are be to make it legally & socially unacceptable, to have a society where conformity to those legal and social rules is very entrenched (such as the just mentioned conformist Japan), and where there are alternatives for sexually frustrated people to satiate their urges (like easily available porn). Porn despite feminist/social conservative mythology seems to reduce sex crimes, not encourage them. Probably because rape is usually about amoral people acting out of frustration and lust, not “power” despite the popular dogma on the matter.
It was my understanding that in cultures where sex is considered dirty and shameful, and women are oppressed rape is more common and in cultures where sex is more open and available and women are empowered sexual abuse is less common (I don’t know how that relates to child abuse though, that is just about rape as far as I know).
Which is really not surprising. But again, if 1-2% of men are behind maybe half the sexual abuse in society, how does a society manage to truly have ‘almost no’ sexual abuse like the researcher on NPR was saying? I’ve read a large percent of serial sex predators are sociopaths, so it isn’t like using shame, guilt or a threat of punishment is going to work on them.
If sex is more available then there’s less motive for rape - and an empowered woman can say yes. In a society full of women who can be persuaded to have sex, it makes sense even from a totally amoral perspective to try to find a willing woman rather than risk your life and freedom by attacking one.
And added to that, societies that treat sex as shameful by nature tend to demonize/dehumanize women as the source of that “sinful” temptation. And if women are regarded as evil monsters, the “Daughters of Eve”, the source of all evil in the world, then they aren’t going to get treated very well. And much the same goes for regarding women as basically bipedal animals.
Probably by getting as much as possible of that tiny hard core off the street and into prison. And intimidating the ones you don’t catch enough that they don’t try anything.
Note that places where there’s an attitude that “Group X can do as they please and everyone looks the other way”, you tend to get lots of rape.
I’ve often heard that rape and other abuse is not about the perpetrator wanting sex, but about wanting to exert power, express rage, etc. A rapist may pass by a willing partner or brothel and go terrorize the unwilling.
That’s an idea primarily based on political ideology, not reality. And in reality, rapists tend to be very good at convincing themselves that their victims are willing; the sort who can convince themselves that a woman whom they got to cooperate at knifepoint “really wanted it”. I recall someone a while back posted here a rather creepy list of quotes from convicted violent rapists in that vein.
If anything, power is about rape more often than rape is about power; the powerful want something, they take it, and that’s why they acquired power in the first place. “Rape any woman you can catch” was always a big attraction of war; not to exert power, but because they wanted sex and didn’t care who they hurt in the process. And when allowed, the rich and powerful have historically always taken the attitude that they can grab any woman less powerful and use her as a sex toy.
Maybe all that means is that a rapist doesn’t want to PAY for sex.
But of course you wouldn’t bother to think about something that actually makes sense. It’s much easier to repeat the old idiocy, rather than actually bothering to think.
These results will come as little surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with Japanese culture, which has a tendency to strongly encourage the practice of “going along to get along” to a much greater extent than is seen in most Western societies.
To some extent, an increase sexual assault reported is probably actually correlated with a decrease in rates of sexual assault commission, not an increase.
Hey, it’s not cool to accuse me of not “bothering to think” or of being an idiot.
A simple Google search will lead you to many discussions about the issue and opinions are not uniform. Here’s one example from the University of Minnesota.
Of course you can find other sources that disagree.
To me, the rush to characterize all instances of sexual assault as motivated by any one particular drive or impulse seems comically simpleminded. We acknowledge that there are many motivations behind every other type of antisocial behavior. Why do we single out sex offenses as being any different?
If you were to go by rape statistics women in Columbia are vastly better off than women in Sweden and women in Saudi Arabia are vastly better off than women in the UK and women are twice as likely to get raped in Canada as in the US.
Of course rape is “about sex”. If rape were about power, then why isn’t a rapist forcing people to wash his car or weed his garden? It’s about sex, at least in part, because it involves sex.
I think the whole “rape isn’t about sex” thing is another example of the “sex is bad” and “women who have sex outside of marriage are dirty sluts” mindset. Even though it’s often trotted out by liberal anti-rape activists, I think the unconscious association is still there. They’ve become just evolved enough that they don’t want to sully women with the reputation of having had sex, so they’ve literally tried to remove sex from what happened to her. She isn’t ruined, because it wasn’t about sex, it was about power. Riiiiight.
There was a penis going into my vagina when I was raped, and I wasn’t happy about it. How is that NOT about sex?
IMHO, a lot of the “rape is about power” idea comes from a subculture of the Left that thinks everything is about power. There seems to be a subset of that end of the political spectrum that doesn’t seem willing to acknowledge that bad people can be motivated by appetite or that good people can be motivated by kindness*; everybody is one dimensionally concerned with dominance and submission, everything is about power.
This attitude extends to things that have nothing to do with gender. I’ve seen it from some of the crazier “animal rights” types for example, who refuse to admit that a pet might live with humans because it prefers it that way; it has to be an exploitative relationship, because in their eyes that’s apparently the only kind of relationship there is.
*An example of this kind of thinking would be defining a woman having sex with her boyfriend to cheer him up as “rape” because she’s not in the mood but is just being nice.
I don’t know if you all have noticed, but if there isn’t power involved (he’s stronger than she is) then there is no rape. It might be about sex but it’s really not about sexual attraction, which I think is what some people mean when they say “not about sex”. I’m pretty sure it’s not overpowering sexual lust when some guy rapes a 75 year old woman. It’s about being in control. Power.
That argument redefines pretty much all crime except “victimless crime” as being about power, which is ridiculous. You’re confusing a tactical consideration with motive and agenda.
No, it is about sexual attraction most of the time. It’s really quite obvious; if a ruthless man wants sex and can get away with taking it by force, that’s all the reason he needs. There’s no need to tack some gender politics agenda onto him - the motive doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that of a mugger, “you have it, I want it, I take it”.
Which is why that’s extremely rare compared to younger women being raped.
And rape doesn’t require “overwhelming lust”; for someone sociopathic enough it could be nothing more than casual desire.
Are you a criminologist? Or a psychologist who has spent some time researching the subject of rape? Have you interviewed rapists? Do you even know any rapists? Have you been raped before? These are questions I’ve asked people before in these kinds of discussions, and I’ve never received a yes response, and yet the matter-of-factness keeps a-coming.
I just wonder why any of us are supposed to put any weight in your opinions. There are trained professionals out there that have done a lot of work in this subject and have found that rape is often driven by more than just lust. Not all rape is the same so you can’t reduce all of these acts to the same motivation.
I think what is overlooked in these “its power vs its sex” debates is that for some people, forcing themselves on someone using violence or some other means is a turn on. They get something out of nonconsensual sex that they can’t get out of consensual sex. Which means all the brothels and hot willing sex partners in the world may not satisfy some rapist’s cravings for domination. And really that is what “rape is about power, not sex” is getting at.