slight hijack/
Years ago, my future ex-girlfriend threw a statistic at me that blank out of 10 men admit they would commit rape if they KNEW they could get away with it. I guess the underlying message was that since I’m probably already a rapist in my secret heart she’s justified in blah blah blah. Anybody familiar with the specific study? I always figured it was part of a larger survey that include shocking answers to how man people would rob a bank if they KNEW they would get away with it, how many women would have a child outside their marriage, or how many mothers would encourage their sons to commit rape if they KNEW it was the only way they’d ever have a grandchild. Can you tell that one always bothered me? Sorry, carry on. /hijack
Nah. She threw it at me because I refused to rape her.
Marriage is a complex arrangement.
Please don’t take this seriously.
outlierrn writes:
> . . . my future ex-girlfriend threw a statistic at me . . .
So you’ve been abused by her then?
My data is somewhat old, but as of about 8 years ago, we were using numbers that indicated that nearly one out of every three women will be assaulted at some time in their life.
I will grant that it a very wide-spread, shotgun statistic, and a lot of the “increase” was simply that the stigma of reporting an assault, especially a sexual assault, was going away, therefore more assaults were being reported. I need to dig current numbers up; I’d be willing to wager that the number is more like 1 in 5 rather than 2 in 5.
ROTFLMAO
In all seriousness, I think it’s human nature to think in terms of us and them.
There’s me and mine who deserve sacrifice and the benefit of the doubt and who are always right and the others who deserve the opposite. I think that’s the default human assumtion, whether us and them is religions, neighborhoods, races, genders, Joes pizza vs Joes garage bowling teams. Since I know I’m right, there’s no need to muddy the water with needless accuracey. I’ll just start with the conclusion that puts me in the best light and work my way back from there. You see it in politicians and lawyers all the time, but it doesn’t really help create a more just social order.
Larry
You misspelled “futile”.
What’s this 1 in 4 rape thing? Is there an old thread on this I could read?
Yeah, I’d like to see more information on this. It’s been my experience that 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 would be fairly accurate among the women I know well enough personally to know such details (a statistically irrelevantly small sample). However, among all the people I know who were raped, none reported it to the police (or told anybody immediately).
Well, the majority of men have had some sort of unpleasant experience with a male, I can guarantee you that. If you’re going to extend ‘abuse’ that far then I’d like to nominate bar fights and soccer riots as ‘psychological rape’.
I think the folks who did this “study” also did the “study” that says 15% of California 11th graders have abused prescription pain killers.
Or the one that says 1,000,000 people (or 20,000,000 or 2,000,000; pick one) died last year from second hand smoke…
Interestingly, one in four widely-touted figures such as this is (are?) yanked out of someone’s ass.
I thought 17.4% of all statistics were made up on the spot.
I wonder what percentage of men were abused by the same definition - whatever it is.
Regards,
Shodan
FWIW, I think hajario hit the nail on the head. The statistic strikes me as a description of what proportion of women have been abused in their lives, as distinguished from how many are being abused at any particular point in time. So construed, I don’t find the statistic hard to believe. Nor do I think much turns on the subtle niceties of defining abuse or the vagaries of reporting reliability.
And if it happens to be a woman’s ass, you’ve just confirmed the abuse figures noted above!
As for your grammatical query: a figure is yanked out of someone’s ass; but it are yanked out of someone’s arse. Parallel construction, y’see.
Was it in self-defense?
I threw my Collins at gramps when he tried to catch me undressing (I had been with my t-shirt half off and my instincts reacted before I could see who was entering). I consider it abusing the poor dictionary, though… no way it counts as abusing the dirty sonabitch.
Talk about throwing the book at him!
King of Soup: sure, but you know how it is; once the sentence starts wandering off the straight and narrow, you find yourself trying to remember whether it’s meant to be “the yolk of eggs is white” or “the yolk of eggs are white”. 
Here is an example of these stories. The link is to Snopes’ discussion of the “more violence against woman on Super Bowl Sunday.” which was completely false.
Here’s a nice article summarizing the debate: John Leo
Here’s a link (warning: PDF) to the DoJ report he mentions - the main portion is on page 18, companion study on pages 20-21: http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/182369.pdf#search=““department%20of%20justice”%201.7%20rape” . One study came up with 1.7%; the other with 0.16
Keep in mind also that nearly 50% of rape claims turn out to be false (http://www.anandaanswers.com/pages/naaFalse.html), and that saying that one was raped over a form/telephone survey is much less of a credibility strain than filing a report. Thus, we could expect some inflation of numbers, even in the DoJ report. Naturally, one must also deal with unreported cases, but the stats for that are much fuzzier.
Wait…sorry for throwing links at y’all. You aren’t going to sue me for abuse, are you?