In other words, different responses are appropriate in different contexts. If the OP had first appeared in the pit, a presumption that the first few responses were deliberately provocative might be reasonable. In GQ, that presumption is unreasonable.
But lets say, in GQ, I asked, “Do 1 in 4 people like chocolate ice cream?” and the responses posted after that were “People lie about liking ice cream.”
How reasonable a response is that to my OP?
Not to trivialize the actual topic that was raised in either thread thus far, but I thought that that some posters had either missed the point or chose to ignore the question.
To put it simply, I think what bothered many people was the implied:
“Some women lie about rape, ergo the stats lie and the actual numbers are FAR, FAR fewer. In fact, there must be enough false reports to skew the statistics. People who don’t report? What the hell’s your problem?”
From my experience in the field, far more cases go unreported than any cases who were based on false accusations. In fact, I’m not surprised you can find information about cases of false accusations online - they’re so few and far between that they “deserve” coverage. You won’t see, however, a list of rapes (documented and reported) in your daily papers.
Take “botched transplants” for example - our newspapers have been plastered with the story of that poor child who underwent that transplant at Duke. How many cases of such malpractice occur, in comparison to successful cases that get no press at all?
I’d be willing to bet the same thing goes for false accusations of rape.
That would depend upon whether there was actually any evidence that people do lie about liking (chocolate) ice cream. If someone responded with “People lie about liking (chocolate) ice cream.” when there was no such evidence, then that answer would be wrong. Not deliberately obtuse or inflamatory, merely wrong.
Sorry, I should have made this clearer I suppose.
Personally, I’m NOT upset/annoyed with anyone actually trying to do some research and coming up with lower figures than the 1/4.
1/12, 1/8, 1/4, 1/3.
Whatever.
It’s still too many.
I said I wouldn’t be SURPRISED if it was as many as 1/4, but that doesn’t mean I’m unwillingly to look at any other statisitcs.
What I WAS upset about were the personal attacks on me, the general “Women lie because they’re brainwashed by Dworkin” attitude of some of the posters, and the usage of “rape”, as if anything except a stranger in an alley with a knife is ok.
I know some women lie.
But some men do to.
And the number of men who rape, and convince themselves somehow that they didn’t must be pretty large.
BTW, I know a lot of people posted the “Castrate 'em and lock 'em up” thing, but the only things that would make me feel better would be if the men who assaulted me realised what they had done to me was wrong, and apologised for it.
I wouldn’t want to lock up someone who still thought he was right, and I wouldn’t want to punish someone who was sorry.
But I’m a soft touch.
This is ground on which I always tread warily, and post with extreme reluctance, since despite having as much obvious sensitivity as a marble statue I don’t really enjoy being flamed to a crisp by outraged women. People’s perceptions of rape vary widely. I once made the mistake of posting on another board in answer to a girl who’d gone around to her ex-SO’s house, got very drunk with him, got into bed with him, and was then horrified the next morning when he said “Thanks for the sex.” Apparently this is rape just the same as if he’d dragged a complete stranger into the bushes and held a rusty knife to her throat. So much the worse for me for daring to post a contrary POV.
It is neither misogyny nor “blaming the victim” to call absurd statistics into question. To doubt whether such a huge proportion of one’s female acquaintances are being raped is not a line adopted solely by grunting sexist Neanderthals but by women too: “If 25 percent of my women friends were really being raped, wouldn’t I know it?” - Katie Roiphe, New York Times article (can’t give you a clearer cite). And it is a fact that there are highly vocal political groups with a vested interest in attributing to men as high a level of rape and other violence as possible. Some of their representatives pilloried Ms Roiphe rather vehemently for the quote above.
The problem with anecdotal information versus statistical accuracy is so obvious that it hardly needs stating, but I’ll dumbly go ahead anyway: An assertion is made that 25% of women are raped. The statistic is called into question. Someone posts an account of her own horrific experience. Very well, let her experience be treated with the reverent sympathy that it deserves. She has neither confirmed nor denied the veracity of the statistical quote. The only way that could be done is with an analysis of the data-gathering methods, or with another survey. A straw-poll of Dopers doesn’t answer the case at all - the reason why, I leave as an exercise for the student - still less a personal testimony or two.
Personally, one thing that makes me feel that this 25% figure has been pulled out of thin air with intent to be emotive is that I have recently seen the exact same figure used in connection with domestic violence (man on woman, naturally). To be specific, I read a claim in the paper that 25% of all women will be horrifically beaten by their partners. The italics are mine.
I’m sorry. Call me a misogynist if you like. Accuse me of complicity in the rape of millions of innocent women if you like. I don’t care. The claim so blatantly insults my intelligence and integrity that I switch off, except when ever more draconian measures are proposed to up the conviction rate in rape trials, and sod the presumption of innocence and rules of evidence. I know I am not a rapist. I intend to bring my son up not to be one. Otherwise, you lost my sympathy (**so far as the statistical argument goes ** some time ago - and I don’t care how much you pity the women in my life, either.
But I wouldn’t be asking is people lie about it.
I don’t think I’m expressing my self well in this thread. I understand what you are saying Desmo, but I don’t agree in your defense of those posters simply because of what forum the OP was in.
I don’t think there’s really a need for an apology on your part irishgirl.
This was (IMHO) just an unfortunate case of misunderstaning all round, and on your part least of all.
I think all people were saying is that there’s a little flexibility to the line that gets drawn. Sure, there’s rape that isn’t stranger-with-a-knife rape. All people were claiming was that certain situations tread a fine line, that it is not the case that all ambiguous events ought necessarily to be classified as rape, though that too was open to debate. Therefore it matters to the statistics where the line is drawn and what’s included.
A knew a girl who worked at the University’s rape awareness and counseling center. She told me that at the center they considered drunken sex rape, and advised the girls who came to them that way, because according to them a drunk girl could not legally give consent. (Never mind that the equally drunk guy therefore couldn’t consent either, so did they rape each other? What if she entirely initiated the contact while he lay there?) Should this count as rape legally? People have different answers. Should it count as rape for statistical purposes? People have different answers.
I didn’t see anyone in that thread claiming that all rapes are stranger-rapes, I think what they were saying is that there’s a little abmiguity still out there about acquiantance rape. As you say, there are probably some women who convince themselves they were raped when they weren’t, and some men who convince themselves it was consensual when it wasn’t. It’s that ambiguity that allows for this thinking. It’s also that ambiguity that makes the definition of rape relevant to a discussion about rape statistics.
The personal attacks on you were unwarranted and in severely poor taste. Everything else in that thread had some legitimate purpose in resolving the issue of fact in question, and thus was IMO acceptable.
I just want to know the reasoning behind using such terms as “absurd”, “inflated”, and “BS.” Apparently high numbers are unbelievable - why?
For anyone fearful of being ‘burned to a crisp’ because of one’s POV: you’re guilty of the same thing but in reverse, don’t you think? I see no cites offered as to how many women really think all sex is potential rape, and a message board experience or what your friend told you in a crisis center is - surprisingly enough - anecdotal evidence.
Just so I can be clear, like irishgirl, I have no problem with questioning the statistics, and in fact the Gary Dotson case in particular is a story I’ve researched for years for writing research and it makes me sick that women lie about rape. I believe that it happens.
What made me sad in that thread was that rather than work on the statistical facts straight off, the first three posters, most notably skateboarder implied, in my reading of their text, that the only reason this stat even existed was because scads and scads of women lie about rape for their FemiNAZI ‘causes’. To which I must ask, is there such a gigantic Pro-Rape lobby that we must pad stats to bolster our ideals? :rolleyes:
I would love to know a perfectly accurate statistic on how often rape occurs amongst men and women, but sadly, it’s such a privately tortuous crime to some that I suspect we can never know it’s frequency.
I never once felt picked on or insulted in that thread, as my rape story is not ‘the norm’, and one that I was able to recover from quite quickly. But when it was suggested that women who don’t report rape deserve no sympathy and are “cowardly”, I knew the whole thing was headed for a big ol’ trainwreck. I was saddened and bothered in a shake your head sort of way.
catsix, get what I want? What, I ask, might that be?
somewhere between “some” and “a lot” of women are raped every year.
So far it has been determined that:
A) It is uncertain how many women don’t report rapes.
B) It is uncertain how many women lie about being raped.
C) It is uncertain how many men rape, either once or repeatedly.
D) It is uncertain just how elastic the definition of rape is. A man with a knife?
Certainly.
Putting “roofies” in someone’s drink?
Absolutely.
And after that it all slides off into shades of grey.
I guess my question would be whether this topic should be declared “out of bounds.”
Before someone’s knee jerk reaction says “no, nothing is out of bounds on the SDMB,” think about it.
We pissed all kinds of people off, hurt the feelings of others, whether intentionally or not, discovered that there are damn few statistics that all can agree on, and last but not least, didn’t even answer the damned question.
Testy
coffeecat:
Then, you and I disagree.
Did I do this? I re-read my post and don’t see any "insist"ing going on.
Truth Seeker:
Guess that would be me. mea culpa.
My last 2 cents: men friends of mine are astonished about rape because they wouldn’t commit it. Naturally they are skeptical about the statistic.
But, if the true number of rapes, by any definition, cannot be measured, how can it be a “statistic” anyway? It can be an estimate, or a WAG, but surely not a statistic.
I’ll go back to my coloring book now. 
Sure I do.
Eugene Williams. A black man sentenced to death for raping a white woman in Alabama in 1931, he was released after 11 years in prison when his accuser recanted her testimony of eleven years prior and admitted the sex was consensual, and she had lied. See Miscarriages of Justice in Potentially Capital Cases by Hugo Adam Bedau in the Stanford Law Review, November, 1987.
- Rick
[nitpick]
Is tortuous the word you want here?
tortuous = full of twists and turns
torturous = of, characterized by, or pertaining to torture
[/nitpick]
sorry. Torturous.
Gosh, that must be terrible.
But I don’t think it’s as terrible as being raped. I don’t even think it’s as terrible as living in fear of being raped.
I’m getting a little tired of this “Oh we poor men have such a burden to bear, what with having to worry about being wrongly accused of rape by crazy women!” business (and you’re far from the worst offender in that regard, Sock Munkey, this post is not just directed at you). I wouldn’t like to have to worry about being falsely accused of rape, but I’d like it a hell of a lot better than having to worry about being raped, or having already been raped, and that is the group many of the female posters here fall into. They are the people who have the real right to claim “gut level defensiveness”, but they’ve behaved much better here and in the other thread than many of the “defensive” men who were actually being offensive.
If one-fourth of all women are raped, does that mean one-fourth of all men are rapists?
Or is there a small fraction of men doing a whole lotta rapin’?
Damn, this makes me extremely regret posting on how I was falsely accused of rape in the other thread- I didn’t mean for it to be any ‘blame the victim’ propiganda or anything. Here I was scanning this thread certain somebody was going to tear into me for my statements…
I do believe, though, that the small minority of people that DO falsely accuse others of rape are making it exponentially harder for actual victims to come forward, and for justice to be served. Before I read these threads, I had no idea how often rapists got away with their crime.