There are all kinds of stats on how many people are victims of sex crimes (although they are all estimates, since getting a true count is impossible, and sex crimes are very often unreported,) but are there any stats/estimates on what % of the population is sex offenders?
I would imagine that it would be very difficult to get such a figure because a victim is a victim, but an offender can have multiple victims. So if you have 100 victims in Dade County, that doesn’t tell you how many offenders there are in Dade County. etc. etc.
OK, but I mean an estimate of the true unofficial number, which is always higher than the official known number. Just like how there are always many more victims of rape than the actual official rape-victim stats.
Even those lists can be poor proxies for counting people convicted of sex crimes. States have various requirements for who has to be carried on those lists. Juvenile offenders can be excluded or dropped with time. Some adult offenders can face less than lifetime requirements to register. When California was dropping the lifetime registration requirement for all sex offenders in 2017 they were one of only four states to require lifetime registration.
Sex offender registrations undercount even the total number of convicted sex offenders let alone those that haven’t been convicted.
The whole question is pretty silly. The definition of “sex offender” varies widely from country to country, even between states within a country.
In some states, any sexual activity with a person under age 18 is a sex crime. So I’d estimate that 2/3rds of the high school kids are “sex offenders” (especially on Prom night). In other states or countries, girls can be married off as young as age 12 or 14. But that’s legal, so the ‘husband’ is NOT a “sex offender”.
We’d need a lot more specific conditions to have a reasonable estimate/answer.
Well, some estimates say that 1/3 of all women have been raped at least once.
So, then, what percentage of men are committing these rapes? Is it 1%, where each rapist man managed to rape 33 separate women before finally being imprisoned? Possibly, but this seems less than likely. Is it 10%? If it’s 10%, does society need a lot more prison capacity or what should be done? (I’m not counting statutory rape within a reasonable age range and women who report they were raped at least once probably aren’t counting it either)
It’s fair to exclude consensual sex between minors and adults who fall under the “Romeo and Juliet” provision of laws (i.e., generally, an 18-year old and 17-year old having consensual sex isn’t a crime under such statutes)
So yes, what % of men and women have committed what would be considered “real” sex crimes?
That’s fine. My post was mostly a drunken joke. I know we’re not each other’s biggest fans, but I didn’t mean to imply anything. Not this time, anyway. Sorry if I came across that way. Honestly, I didn’t even realize who I was responding to when I did it.
Thus, we can also pretty safely say that, for all of those who were sexually active before age 18, the vast majority of their sex partners from that time period were technically guilty of sex crimes (in most cases, while they, themselves, were minors, as well).
Also, note that those figures are for sexual intercourse; every teenager who goes to second base or third base with another teenager could also be, theoretically, considered to be guilty of sexual assault.
It’s all good. And while I’m probably not, technically, your biggest fan, I don’t think I’d describe my opinion of you in such a negative tone. I generally find what you post interesting and worth the time to read it.
Isn’t it the case that most of the US states have an age of consent at 16, or 16 when the partner is less than 2 or 3 years older, etc.? That still implies a significant number of “sex offenders” even with that exception.
Broadly, it looks like the age of consent varies from 16 to 18 depending on the state, but many states do indeed have provisions taking into account the age of the other person.
In reading that Wikipedia article, I note that in Wisconsin, where I grew up, the age of consent is 18, and there is no “close-in age exception.” Given that a lot of my classmates in middle school and high school were apparenly becoming sexually active by age 14 or 15, it means that a significant number of my classmates were, by legal standards, sex offenders.
I looked into it years ago. I don’t remember where I saw this statistic, so take what you want from it.
5-8% of men will commit a sex crime over their lives. Most will only have a few or one victims.
1-2% of men (a subset of that 5-8%) are serial sex offenders. That 1-2% of men produce 60%+ of the sex crime victims in society. Think of people like Bill Cosby. If 25% of women have been raped and Bill Cosby raped at least 60, that means in a group of 100+ people you could still have a significant percentage of victims of rape where only 1 man is the offender for all of them.
There also may (or may not) be a lot of overlap with various personality disorders and that 1-2% of men. They are more prone to cluster B issues like narcisissm, sociopathy, borderline personality. But also disorders like avoidant personality disorder. But then again, the studies are contradictory on this.
It would be easy to say the majority of that 1-2% suffer from cluster B personality disorders (mostly narcissism or antisocial), but I don’t know if the stats match that.
Someone like Trump for example is a serial sex offender. Dozens of victims and probably has narcissism.
Right - again, we can exclude “harmless” sex crimes from the thread (“harmless” may be a troublesome term but I’m sure most of us agree that if two teenagers are having consensual sex, that’s usually not harmful even if it technically flouts the law).
We can also exclude things like drunk men peeing on the sidewalk (which isn’t sexual in nature, or not intended to be sexual - it may show lack of common sense, or just being too drunk, but it’s not really what we’re talking about.)
