This is a gross distortion of statistics. Most rapes are not monitored by the FBI because most rapes are not reported. Most rapes are not reported because they are traumatic, shame-filled experiences that rarely lead to conviction. We have no idea how many non-reported rapes are false accusations. Furthermore, your 8% figure cannot be translated to the population of all men. In the state of Michigan, according to a recent survey co-sponsored by the FBI, 60% of women anonymously report having been a victim of sexual assault, from unwanted touching to forcible rape, and 20% anonymously report having been raped in their lifetime. Based on general research on the nature of anonymous surveys, people tend to underreport horrible things happening to them, so odds are decent the actual number is higher. Yes you’ll get your cite when I’m off work.
Do you suppose the proportion of men falsely accused of sexual assault is anywhere near 60%? Do you even care? You’d rather burden all these victims with additional shame and misery, you’d rather us expose ourselves and the people we know to continued risk, you’d rather we be silent about our lived experiences, but all of your experiences are valid and we should take your word. What happened to me is unfortunate, you say, but what happened to your friend is a travesty. It’s wrongheaded. Whether your intent or not is to harm women, statistics indicate your position is disproportionately harmful to women, and it codifies inequality.
If someone accused me of stealing, they’d be lying, and people would generally believe me, because I have years of clean living to support that accusation. If I thought they genuinely believed it, I wouldn’t be mad at them for telling people. I’d never think they had an ethical obligation to not tell anyone. If they were lying about me, I’d be furious with them for lying, not for telling.
The thing is, with something like a man grabbing my tits in the copy room, there will never be evidence. Any “investigation” is going to turn up empty. It’s hard to prove assault, and sexual predators are very good any making sure there is no case. So ultimately, there’s not going to be any resolution from my bosses.
And, historically, workplaces don’t do anything to help women in these circumstances. How long am I supposed to wait before I explain myself? How much damage do I have to do to my own career as a flail for excuses for why I can’t work late anymore, or travel for work? Or is the only option the Trump solution, to find another job and not turn over the predator’s apple cart?
Am I really supposed to leave anther woman working late alone with a man I know capable of sexual assault?
I am allowed to speak truth. How does me being silent even help prevent other women from lying?
Eh, sometimes it does. Past history and beliefs/actions on other issues has a direct bearing on the sincerity and depth of current stances.
As a direct example, the world is full of people who choose to argue about Brock Turner as an extension of their ongoing belief that men are the most victimized of the sexes, that most women lie about rape anyway in order to gain power/money over men, etc etc etc.
These folks are everywhere, and are loud, aggressive, and flood the internet with their thinly-backed opinions.
If I’m going to take a position on an issue that aligns with one that that group also promotes, it behooves me to clarify my broader position and clarify the ways in which I am not part of that group. Not because I’m guilty by association, but because I can very easily become indistinguishable from that group if I am not careful. In which case I can hardly expect other debate/discussion participants to take me at face value, knowing that they have heard my words 1000 times before from internet trolls.
It doesn’t make my opinion more correct or incorrect, but it does encourage others to engage with me, and to believe that my intentions are sincere, that I am treating their perspective with consideration and respect, and other things of that nature.
In other news, trying to enforce court-of-law evidence standards on normal human information transfer is still insane.
Humans trade information to keep each other from making huge mistakes or being hurt. And you are still required to look out for the safety of people you are responsible for, failing to do so is still criminal.
On just that point, I think it is more that his statement is incomplete. We had a long discussion on another forum and I reviewed the literature. The average rate I came up with was 8 %… of all reported rapes.
There will be a vast number of unreported sexual assaults, whereas a false allegation that did not get made is, well, nothing at all.
I also expect vast local differences and differences between nations.
And the logical fallacy is so massive here it’s almost indescribable … Because X percent of reported assaults are false, 100 percent of victims of assault—assault they know actually happened—are obligated to put protecting the reputations of their attackers over any other consideration.
I wasn’t going to get into it, because it actually is irrelevant to the rest of the weird conversation about going to an even bolder, shittier place by demanding that even true accusations need to be stifled, but yeah, the canards about false reporting rates are no different from any of the other thousand ways that we culturally excuse sexual assault. There’s no there there.
It’s not even worth arguing about. Someone who has fucked up attitudes about sexual assault to begin with defines a false report as something other than a reasoned finding of actual non-veracity, then does a specious study with a tiny sample size and collates a bunch of findings by a bunch of police officers with their own fucked up notions about sexual assault, and the resulting number is supposed to be indicative of something. And based on those numbers, we have a tempest in a teapot about the scourge of false rape reports, even though we could have just taken the direct route from step one and just said to ourselves “we think mostly we can’t believe people who say men raped them.”
Speaking of which, Slacker is perfectly willing to accept that 8% of rape reports are false. Are 8% of people who report a rape actually prosecuted and found guilty of false reporting, which is a crime? No, obviously they are not. Should be relevant to someone with a pathological obsession with the presumption of innocence and its preservation by slavish devotion to rule of law and due process, even in completely unrelated contexts. Is he actually concerned about the reputational harm and the life-ruining effect of being treated like a liar and a criminal when you haven’t done anything wrong and nobody’s making any effort to prove that you have? Fuck and no.
But how dare you suggest he doesn’t love women more than they love themselves.
Yeah, it really comes across as “Well, rape is no big deal and some women lie about it, so we don’t need to hear about it.”
Which is similar in that last respect to the Trans thread (“we don’t want to hear about it”) and a lot of complaints from racists (“We don’t want to hear about it”) and on and on.
Don’t give a fuck if you don’t want to hear about it. The rest of us are tired of being told to shut up about injustices we can most certainly do something about.
Quite. That study I referred to had the lifetime incidence of rape among women ranging from 10-25%. Michigan has one of the highest rates of rape in the country.
This isn’t the study I want, but I’m staring at an Executive Summary of the 2010 CDC National Intimate Partner and Domestic Violence Survey. Among key findings:
-Nearly one in five women and 1 in 71 men in the United States have been raped at some point in their lives.
-Approximately 1 in 21 men have been made to penetrate someone else (I consider that rape)
-From state to state, lifetime estimates for women ranged from 11.9 to 29.2% for rape and 28.9 to 58% for sexual violence other than rape.
-For men, state to state estimates ranged from 10.8% to to 33.7% for sexual violence other than rape
So yes, significant geographic variation, nonetheless heart-rending stats across the board.
Are you serious with this shit? Whose reputation? The young woman that I have not named, who has never appeared in any media article? Good grief.
Good luck with this. Truly. I really need to get out of this thread because it is so futile, and aggravating. They (some more than others) are operating from the implicit and sometimes even explicit a priori assumption that of course the woman is always telling the truth and the ones who are not are vanishingly rare, and therefore that a woman should simply be able to tell others that a certain man assaulted her, and she should be automatically believed and he be automatically disbelieved, and his career and reputation should be immediately ruined with zero due process. (While at the same time insisting that what actually happens is the opposite–no one, not a single person, except them I guess, cares at all if someone is a rapist.)
Oh, and even if you reiterate over and over that you want many more rapes to be reported to police and properly investigated and prosecuted, you’re actually a misogynist who thinks all women are lying whores and a rape apologist. :dubious:
Fuck them. I’ve had enough of this, as it’s abundantly clear that trying to apply reason, logic, and evidence will accomplish nothing at all.
You’re grossly distorting the words you’re reading in this thread and declaring you’re running away due to stuff that isn’t happening except in your mind.
And of course, Brock Turner was caught in the act. It isn’t like his accuser was lying. This started because Slacker thought that it wasn’t fair that poor Brock’s life was ruined for one bad decision he made at twenty and that people were going to be able to google this forever.