That’s what this report seems to indicate, saying the rape rate higher for non-students than students. Note it does also say that lack of reporting is higher amongst the college age. Which makes it seem like lack of reporting is already accounted for.
Since I mentioned in the Pit my own ideas that college must be higher, I thought this was interesting to post.
The report focuses on ages 18-24, or prime college years. I am going to guess that young adults who spend those years in college have a number of differences (demographic, economic, etc.) than those that do not.
My problem isn’t trying to explain why this would be the case. I know it has to do with age. It’s wondering why there’s such a discrepancy in what we perceive versus reality. Why do we ignore that it is these other factors that make rape more likely?
I mean, I’ve always assumed it would be higher because you have more people in one place than anywhere else, segregated from the rest of society. But, if that’s a factor at all, that seems to be less important than many other factors.
Wealth.
Poor people are more likely to be the victims of almost any crime. Poor people are much less likely to go to college.
Really? I would have guessed it’s just as it is. Among 18-24 year olds, I would guess that college students are more likely to feel like they have something to lose, and thus less likely to commit a crime. I would also guess that they are less likely to seem like an easy or safe target.
Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky published a fascinating collection of papers about that question:Judgment Under Uncertainty
Kahneman has since published a more accessible book on the same subject, which became a NYT best seller: Thinking, Fast and Slow
On a related topic, Apple got a lot of attention for suicides in the Amazonesc factories of their suppliers. Which I hope led to some welcome changes in the working conditions. But the actual numbers seemed very low to me: much less chance that you committed suicide while making iPads than while not making iPads.
I don’t want to excuse the working conditions in large Chinese factories. I think that it does suggest that if you are suicidal, you are more likely to be unemployed, and that if you are unemployed you are more likely to be suicidal.
Unconsciously, I think someone looking for a victim for a crime will choose someone they think has less power to fight back. That might apply to race or socioeconomic status or both.
It would never even occur to me that rape was actually more common at college than elsewhere. All crime that fits certain narratives, demographics etc gets played up. Crime that:
[ul]
[li]affects rich people[/li][li]fits standard narratives (“college kids have indiscriminate sex”)[/li][li]is salacious (“sexy young co-ed gets raped”)[/li][/ul]
gets played up.
You might as well ask why 1 white affluent girl getting kidnapped in the US gets more attention than 100 Africans getting tortured to death.
It’s not that criminals don’t target the wealthy. It’s just that for a whole range of reasons the poor are victims of crime than the wealthy. Geography, vulnerability etc all play their part.
That’s not really how it works, because potential rapists don’t just select a victim at random from the population, they select one that’s available. And the ones that are available are often the ones who don’t have the means to protect themselves.
There are obviously a lot of factors that go into this, but one of the simplest and most obvious ones is that wealthy people who find themselves in unsafe circumstances (say, living in a neighborhood with a bunch of criminals) have the means to get out of those unsafe circumstances, and poor people don’t. The reason that poor neighborhoods have higher crime rates isn’t that poor people are more likely to be criminals, it’s that rich people move the hell away from where the criminals are.
Part of “being poor” is you tend to live in shitty neighborhoods. And by “shitty” I mean objectively measurable statistics like crime rates and economic opportunity.
Economics refers to what is called a “vicious or virtuous circle (or cycle)”. Which is basically a self-reinforcing feedback loop:
Rich people move to nicer towns, they have more income to contribute to the tax base which leads to better schools and infrastructure and attracts businesses which increases demand which increases housing prices which ensures only rich people live there.
Petty criminals, drug addicts, the mentally ill and other unemployables and fuckups tend to not make a lot of money. So they are forced to live in neighborhoods that are less desirable (perhaps due to the larger economic landscape or proximity to NIMBYs). Their presence and lack of ability or desire to contribute to the improvement of that neighborhood continues to make it less desirable. Plus the psychological effects of living in such a neighborhood can turn otherwise normal people into criminals and fuckups.
Are all poor people fuckups and criminals? No. But most poor people tend to find themselves living to live in neighborhoods where a lot of criminals and screw-ups also live.
So IOW, a rapist (or any other criminal) doesn’t say “hmmm…let me go rape some poor person because they would be an easy target”. They just go rape the easiest target which is likely someone where they already live - a poor neighborhood with inadequate law enforcement.
Which is why rapes and other crimes at colleges (or any affluent community for that matter) seem to create a disproportionate response. It’s because the people in those communities spent a lot of money to get away from the sort of places where rapes and other crimes happen on a more frequent basis.
There is also this: if one is planning to commit a crime such as rape, it makes sense to prey upon those who are unlikely to complain, or to be taken seriously by the authorities if they do complain.
Hence, the preference for targeting drug addicts, prostitutes, and the like.
Well, you were in the Pit thread when both I and Spice Weasel said we assumed it was higher.
The Pit thread that made me think that maybe it wasn’t just me.
It seems like the important figure is not what are your chances of getting raped but that, if you do get raped, what are the chances that the appropriate consequences are levied to enact justice while minimizing the number of false positives and false negatives. Much of the criticism around campus rape seem to be centered around the administrative process which is opaque, unresponsive, lacking in due process and all around inept.
You hear horror stories from both side of women who were slut shamed and suppressed when they chose to report and witch hunts with the presumption of guilt from men who were falsely accused.
We all know at this point that momentum from change happens almost entirely from glib, ephemeral public perception, based only loosely on facts. Affecting faux outrage that this process does not produce the absolute optimal outcome seems counterproductive. Campus rape may or may not be more or less of a problem than societal rape but the entire system we have of handling rape in any situation is so broken that I’m just glad there’s some push to reform at least a small part of it and maybe make it a little bit less shitty.