I have never heard a figure that low. Even the (often criticized) Lisak study came out at 6.5%. Others can go as high as 15%, and that’s not even considering studies elsewhere in the world that can have figures as high as 25% or more.
And that’s just figures for rapists. You then have to factor in the number of victims each rapist can have.
Well, right. The typical rapist/thief/drunk driver commits multiple crimes.
are you saying that 1 in 4 men are rapists?
I’m saying it varies, and there are places where that is the case. Usually active or recent conflict zones but also just crappy places for gender relations. Asia and Africa and South America feature a lot.
If I were to thumbsuck a global average, it would not be 1 in 30, though. More like 1 in 10 at a minimum.
You can find valid research that covers that whole spread, but it’s all very debatable. What I haven’t personally seen is anything as low as 1 in 30, which was why I posted.
What have you personally seen that leads you to calculate any figure?
A bunch of studies.
do you have a link to any?
I’ve already mentioned the Lisak study for the low end. For the highest ends, there’s studies like the UN Asia/Pacific one and South African one. The specific 15% figure I mentioned, I haven’t seen the actual study, it was just mentioned somewhere to contrast the Lisak one, I think the RAINN site or similar.
I find these threads odd because I don’t think of myself as a particularly skittish individual, but growing up (in New York City) when I became old enough to go places alone, I was constantly aware of and considering all of these things (except watching my drink, which was not an issue even as I became of drinking/bar-going age). I was constantly evaluating (and encouraged to evaluate) threats from strangers and to be “constantly vigilant.” – empty streets, subway cars, parking lots, etc. were a constant concern. I’m not sure it was rational (and it certainly lead to a level of instinctive racism that was inappropriate), but it was pressed upon me from a young age that I was constantly at risk of street violence and needed to constantly be aware of these things.
Was it the 70s?
Here’s a link to the actual South African report, not just a secondhand one.
Thanks for that, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised to see massive cultural swings in the rates seeing as what is considered acceptable treatment of women has a huge cultural component to it.
Some swings, yes. South Africa is the rapiest non-active-warzone country in the world. But even European and US studies are not in the 1 in 30 range. Unless college-going men are several orders of magnitude more likely to rape, the only conclusion that satisfies me is that it’s more prevalent than 1 in 30 or even 1 in 20.
And knowing what I know about the under-reporting of rape, and the prevalence of rape culture in general, finding out it’s actually as high as 15% would not exactly surprise me. But I’m happy sticking with 10% as a floor.
mid-to-late 90s. Although my parents moved to NYC in the mid-70s, which may have influenced their view of the city. One thing that I have noticed as a late-30s suburbanite is that I no longer do any of the “high risk” activities – like leave the house at night – and so my view on what those things are like is based on my life 15 years ago.
Weird thing is, I’m a male who has been raped, and I live in World Rape Central (and not too shabby on the armed robbery and violence either) and yet I’ve not had that mindset. I think it’s because here, it’s not really the city that’s that dangerous, it’s the townships.
I fucked that up. I mean several times more likely. I had “an order of magnitude difference” on the brain comparing 1-in-30 and 28%
I’ve had a male friend literally block the door when I was trying to walk the 10 minute route home at 2am on New Year, until I agreed to get driven by another friend (who actually just drove me out of sight and let me out at my request, as I lived in a maze of dead-end roads, but there was a straight footpath).
I was 30 and working as a bouncer at the time.
The same friend, incidentally, had no qualms whatsoever about a guy walking home over an hour away across the city at the end of the previous year’s party.
We’re getting handed it in this very thread. And you’re apparently handing it out in this very post.
You can’t see it?
And while I’m at it:
It would be good to stop telling us stuff that isn’t true, and that if believed screws up our lives.
I proceed to repeat myself:
I wish the people currently calling themselves conservatives would do that in regards to covid-19 and accepting the results of elections.
That’s not entirely a digression; I’ve been running into that ‘liberals don’t want to live in the real world!’ claim for most of my life, while it generally seems to me that it’s liberals who are trying to deal with the real world and most conservatives who keep insisting that the world ought to be a certain way and people should be forced to pretend that it is, that regulations or the lack of them should be designed as if it were, and so on. But this is rather a digression.
I travelled all around the USA, in my twenties, alone; and no I did not carry a gun, and I drank or got stoned if I felt like it. I live alone. I am not going to be required to either stay locked up at home or hire an escort because you happen to think that’s great advice. How about you start advising men to never go out alone instead, telling men in general that they need to bring with them their mothers or daughters or at least someone they trust to stop them from committing rape or assault; and if no such person is handy or feels like going with them then they should just stay home?
And yes, I would have been, and I will be, outraged if I got or get attacked. Because it is outrageous that people do that, and more so when it’s assumed that it’s just something that normally happens; and because it happens more often when people assume that it’s just something that normally happens. It needs to be treated as outrageous behavior, by men as well as by women, by conservatives as well as by liberals.
And yes, I am entirely aware that even if we can get everybody outraged at the rapists and the harassers, at least in their public noises, there will still be rapists and harassers; and that part of the reason I haven’t been raped (I have been harassed) is pure luck. But there won’t be as many rapes, and there’ll be a whole lot less casual harassment, and maybe, just possibly, people will stop telling women we mustn’t step outside the door without an escort.
I don’t know if you’re male; but if what you’re saying is that some men also get these warnings, yes, that’s true. Men living in genuinely hazardous places, and boys living in places that their parents perceive as hazardous even if the places aren’t, may well get them. But there is no general society-wide advice for men to never go outside their homes without a guardian.
Gets dark around here about 4:30 PM, for two months in the winter. Most people can’t even get to and from a standard shift job without leaving the house in the dark.
And while you may not, most people like to occasionally go out to dinner, to a movie, to visit friends in the evening. Or need to be able to take a swing shift or night shift job.
Or just plain like to walk in the dark and look at the sky.
It is difficult to know how to compare national statistics because the classification of crime varies so much.
Sweden has a famously broad definition of sexual assault (this was highlighted by the case against Julian Assange) that suggests the levels of sexual crime are very high. Yet it is a society where social and welfare policy is very high on the political agenda.
In other countries serious cases maybe under recorded.
Given such variations in reporting standards, it is very easy to cherry pick official figures to make any point you wish. The media is also full of surveys of questionable quality that make for shocking headlines.
We get a lot of this in the British media, it is famously sensationalist. But that is often a reflection of the readership who, sitting secure in a comfortable home, like nothing better than the vicarious thrill from stories about a world full of desperate life and death dramas.
Nonetheless, when truly shocking incidents occur, this sometimes leads to long term changes to policies.
Will this rape and murder by a policeman lead to institutional changes and steps to change and unhealthy attitude towards women in the very male dominated police culture? Conservative institutions like the police are usually a generation behind the rest of society.
Will this crime will become a ‘cause celebre’ to encourage systemic change? Maybe. But at the moment the debate is going from attention on the inner workings of the police as an institution to how to deal with the many forms of gender based violence, the law and public safety issues. Lots of agendas and grandstanding a consequent loss of focus.
When the case comes to court and we learn the facts and the story behind this horrible crime, that may change.
I’m not sure I think there is a “general society-wide advice” for women to “never go outside their homes without a guardian.”
But my wonder is that I regularly see in these threads that males are never told to worry about their personal safety or exercise constant vigilance in public (and the post I quoted listed several examples of things that males don’t worry about), and that’s just not my personal experience (as a male) where it was drilled into me and my peers (and where I did, in fact, walk about vigilant and anxious). It doesn’t make the advice better or worse, I’m just surprised that it was apparently unusual.
Well, that example was a little flippant. My point was that the list things that I was supposed to be wary while doing (walking alone on the street at night, walking with others on the street at night, taking public transportation, going to bars, drinking in public places, etc.) aren’t part of my life anymore. But, if asked about them, I would think back to when they were things that I did… which was in a different place at a different time.