Because of the revisiting of the Cornell rape allegations, a local channel asked local colleges the number of rape incidents that were reported in 2024 and 2025. One went from 6 to 5. One went from 19 to 5. One went from 4 to 161.
I’m sure readers’ eyes bugged out as far as mine did when seeing that number in the headline.
Reading the article tells an entirely different story. Six people reported incidents. Five reported one incident. One reported 156. That was from half of a long-term couple after they broke up, all the incidents reported at one time.
Obviously, the proper number of incidents, reported or not, should be zero. I don’t know what happened in that relationship, and I hope it is being properly investigated.
The reporting of it, though… This is an example of how “technically true” usually means a fact pulled so far out of context that its meaning is reversed. That one college had 161 incidents is true and also wildly irresponsible. If as a parent or a prospective student, I had only read the headline I would be scared out of my mind and certainly from attending.
Please always check what’s behind a raw number. Numbers are facts, not truths.
How they were reported makes a big difference too. Were they reported by the hospital to the police, or were they reported in the counseling services, or any number of other things.
The OP’s general principle of data scrutiny is sound, but the specific exhortation to apply it “especially for rape” lands weird.
No, there is no reason that we should be considering a spurious spike in rape numbers more in need of scrutiny than a similar spurious spike in gun deaths caused by, say, one massively anomalous family shooting spree committed by one mentally disturbed recidivist.
Nobody would have clicked on the topic if I hadn’t included the word rape. Call it clickbait if you want to be scornful, but it’s also basic psychology.
And timely as well as timeless. The article appeared solely because of the Cornell case. People will be extremely sensitized to the subject while it’s in the headlines. Yet, as noted above, reporting of and reporting about rape and other sexual assaults are both fragmentary and overblown simultaneously.
Other topics also are. Probably literally everything is. That is not an excuse to fail to call attention to something that everybody will be talking about in the here and how.