The only way that statistic could possibly be true is if we are counting poorly performed sex as rape.
I am quite surprised by the naysayers in this thread. My own personal observations from women I know is that for about 1 in 3, their first “sexual experience” is a rape. Scientifically flawed? No doubt, but the other way, it is way too low.
The stat on false rape claims (that criminal investigatiors were been able to prove were false) is about 8% IIRC which is about twice the level of false victim reporting seen in other felony level crimes. So about 1 out of every 11-12 women that claims to have been raped is lying (and again these are only the ones where the lie can be proved) . Rape is a horrific crime, but some women do take advantage of the power of the accusation to enact revenge or punishment for some perceived non-rape injustice they feel they have suffered, or in some cases to shield themselves from the consequences of having underage or out of wedlock sexual relations.
False accusations are certainly not the norm, but to demand acceptance every claim of rape as legitimate on its face, when 8 out of 100 are lies or misrepresentations is not necessarily the best way to proceed either.
Well, suffice it to say I’d first believe a woman, rather than FIRST assume she’s lying. Especially since 92 out of a 100 won’t be. YMMV.
I’m likewise astonished by the naysaying. Look, RAINN is very clear with what they’re defining as rape:
So, forced penetration, including forced oral sex.
And the stats % they give is talking only about COMPLETED rapes, not attempted rapes or other sexual assaults:
So, even if you lump in attempted rape (which, by its nature, could be much more open to debate), the stats only rise a minuscule amount.
In short: 25% is wrong. But the reality is still pretty f-d up.
toadspittle
But they are fudging their figures. First, their definition of rape includes “psychological coercion,” whatever that means. I’m willing to grant that having sex because of a death threat amounts to rape. However, if this includes giving it up for a whiny, badgering boyfriend, we have a problem. Being pressured to have sex, while wrong, doesn’t amount to rape, at least as most people understand the term.
Second, they use the National Crime Victimization survey statistics. This survey calls up people, asks a whole bunch of questions, and then decides, based on the answers, what crimes have been committed. Remember, these questions are designed to uncover information that fits the definition. So the question wouldn’t be, “Were you raped?” it would be, “Have you ever been pressured to have sex?”
In addition, there statistics are inconsistent.
**
How do you get from an annual rate of 1 victim/ 1000 to a “lifetime” rate of 17.6% for rape and attempted rape?
Finally, what do you make of this?
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Sorry, but I’m going to have to have a lot more information before I’m going to accept this one.
Oh, and by the way, the OP’s original question about 1 in four women being raped probably originally arose from an oft-quoted statistic that one in four college women will experience rape or attempted rape during their college carreer. This originally came from a study in 1985 by a researcher named Mary Koss. Her methodology has been severely critiqued. For example, she counted having sex after drinking alcohol at a party as “rape” on the theory that drunk people can’t give consent.
Here’s the National Crime Victimization Survey:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ncvs1.pdf
(warning - PDF)
Go to page 5. What they asked was “Has anyone attacked or threatened you in any of the following ways?..rape, attempted rape, or other type of sexual attack?..”
According to the site, the rate for rapes and sexual assaults is going up, even as other crime rates go down.
jarbaby, rape is a more political issue than homicide or muggings. On one hand, you have the extremist feminist camps (“All heterosexual sex is rape.”). On the other, you have false reporting for personal gain. On the opposite pole, you have the last remnants of the Neolithic essentially denying that rape exists (“Sex is a husband’s right!”). So getting the terms straight and weeding out the worst of the kooks is essential if we’re going to have anything other than a shouting match.
Nope.
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I agree completely that it must be weeded out and the false reporting must be stopped. It just got my hackles up to see the first response to the op putting ‘raped’ in quotes like it was one of those ‘zany women’s issues’ or whatever…
I don’t know. I can’t express it correctly. Perhaps because I’ve had two very important people in my life NOT believe me, and that colors my perception.
Rape and breast cancer are both serious issues. It is completely untrue that women have a one in nine chance of dying from breast cancer (also widely reported, even by official bodies). It is likely untrue that one in four women are raped, as the term is widely understood. These are both serious issues, and to exaggerate the frequency of these serious problems is to discredit the real and shattering damage suffered by genuine women victims.
A lot of women who have been raped, are not going to go public with the information. I have known several women in my life time that have been forced and I as well was raped.
All I am saying is, that unless you know all these women very deeply they may never tell you about this, just because most rape victums feel a sence of shame associated with this act. That some how they could have controlled the situation and that in some way it was their fault. Don’t discount the information of 1 in 4 because, with the friends that I have known I would say it would be 1 in 3.
TruthSeeker - But you agree the survey didn’t ask, “Were you pressured to have sex?” right?
You’re right about the crime rate - my original link was from 1999, which said that it had goneup since 1995.
OK, so you say ‘one in ten rapes is men,’ but ‘3% of men in their lifetimes’ are at odds. Well, let’s go.
Assume the same number of men and women.
Women are at 17.6% rape or attempted lifetime. Men should be at one-ninth that or thereabouts, is that what you’re saying? So we should expect 1.85%.
But they also say that 3% of men accounts for about 2.78 million men. That only amounts to 100 million men. The population of the US is about 300,000,000.
I’m going to guess that the 1998 study meant adult men, whereas the 1 in 10 figure meant males versus females. The stats page, in fact, says men for the one statistic and males for the other.
I don’t know how to verify this, but I can’t dismiss it out of hand, either, like you can. The studies to back these stats up are linked from the page the stats came from.
Now to the 1 per 1000, but 17.6% lifetime. Assume a lifetime of 80 years. That would lead to 8%. Except:
Go to the report they extracted it from:
http://www.rainn.org/Linked%20files/NCVS%202000.pdf
Go to page 3 - the overall rate for 2000 ( a down year, by the way), was 1.2 per 1000, and it’s only for people 12 or older.
1.2% leads to 9.6%.
15% of rape victims are under 12. So 9.6% is only 85% of the total - that brings the total up to 11.3%.
Not 17.6%, but as you noted, the trend has been downward - down 52% sine 1993.
I don’t think you can throw them out from your armchair.
And neither toad nor I said 1 in 4 was trustworthy - we both concluded it was too high, but 1 in 5 or 6 was defendable.
Hoo boy.
Uhm, yeah. Legally, this is in fact true – drunk people can’t consent to sex (due to being impaired), even if they say yes. Neither can people who are high, children, or people with certain mental/cognitive disabilities.
I’m not going to touch the “psychological coersion isn’t a legitimate form of duress” thing. That’s just inane.
Cite?
My source says it’s less than 5%, or about the same as other violent crimes.
And I suppose all your female friends disclose to you all the intimate, frightening, and shameful details of their lives so that not mentioning a sexual assault would truely be an abberation? Come on. I’m certainly not lacking for good friends, but I can count on one hand the people I’ve even mentioned it to, and two of those were doctors. Just because they don’t choose you to confide in doesn’t mean it’s never happened.
Gah. You people do realize that this blame the victim mentality is the reason why most assaults are never reported, don’t you?
I’d better stop before I get REALLY pissed off.
In some states at least, this matches the legal definition of rape. When I was an undergrad at Villanova, one of the groups on campus handed out copies of the various Pennsylvania sex laws, and in the eyes of those laws, an intoxicated person is not qualified to give consent, and therefore “wining and dining” followed by sex can be prosecuted as rape.
OK, maybe we can start a survey?
I’ve been on this earth 48 years, and I’ve never encountered a person of either sex or any sort who has related to me that he/she has been raped. Anyone else care to add to the database?
The “one in four women” rape statistic is very likely a load of crap put out by some femiNazi organization. I liken it to gay rights organizations claiming that 1 in 10 American men are homosexual. Professional victims are prone to exaggerate their numbers in order to bolster their cause.
Bup
I’ve seen a summary of the results of that study before. However, I’ve never seen the entire study. While I can’t get your link to work, I’m willing to take your word for what that particular question asked. My point is, however, that the data is being compiled by surveyor looking for specific kinds of information and then interpreting that information. This is not to say that this is an invalid research technique. However, you have to be very careful to understand what the data means.
Let’s skip a bit to the core of the problem.
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See, you can’t do this – it’s an utterly false assumption. The risk of rape is not evenly divided over a person’s life span. (Nor, for that matter, is the population evenly distributed over each age range. – This suggests that you ought to look carefully at exactly how the per/1000 statistice was generated. There are lots of opportunities to make either dubious assumptions or outright errors.)
People are most at risk for rape or sexual assault between the ages of 16 and 19. The risk falls off pretty dramatically after that. For example, people between the ages of 35 and 49 are less than 20% as likely to be raped. Moreover, an eighty-year-old person has been alive since 1923. You obviously cannot take the statistic for the year 2000 and apply it retroactively throughout the person’s life.
I’m not going to do the math, but you can see that you can’t simply multiply that an average number for the entire population for a single year by 80 and get a meaningful statistic out of it.
From Kaio
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Goodness! You’re quite right! Indeed, it’s even worse than you admit. If a dating couple go out to a party and then have sex, they are raping each other! Two felons for the price of one! This is truly a crisis and something must be done! Will no one think of the frat boys?
Or what about married couples? The same logic applies to them. So much for drinking wine in the hot tub.
Two drunken, rutting college students may be foolish, even stupid, but they aren’t rapists. They may not be technically capable of giving legal consent, but calling it “rape” trivializes what people who’ve experienced a genuine, violent sexual assault have suffered.
I’m with you on this one, jarbabyj. I am not going to attempt to defend the “1 in 4” numbers … I do think that may be a little high, but not by as much as so many of the respondees to this thread seem to think. I notice that it’s mainly male posters taking a dismissive attitude toward these statistics. I have frequently gotten that kind of skeptical reaction from men when the subject of rape comes up. My subjective experience is that men who don’t behave this way themselves often have no idea how women are treated by some of their less gentlemanly compatriots, and how frequently this type of behavior occurs. By this definition:
I have been sexually assaulted an uncountable number of times, particularly when I was younger, (i.e., in the age ranges given as the highest for rapes and sexual assaults). It’s not likely that very many people who know me, even close friends, are aware of this, because it’s not exactly a popular subject for casual conversation. And it’s even less likely to come up in conversation with my male friends, as I know that this type of thing makes them highly uncomfortable. I’m more likely to discuss it with a female friend who can probably relate, if I discuss it with anyone at all. If I had actually been raped, which I haven’t, I would be even less likely to discuss THAT. It’s naive to think that if a woman you know has at some point been raped, you would know about it. Do you expect rape victims issue a bulletin? Send out a mass e-mail? “Just so everybody knows, I was raped on Thursday. Wouldn’t want to leave anyone in the dark.” :rolleyes:
In response to these, I can only say repeat myself: You probably do know women who have been raped, but have not chosen to disclose that fact to you.
In this case then both parties were raped, because in most cases of people taking someone who is drunk home to fuck them, they are also drunk. So if you are incapable of making a judgement of whether or not to sleep with someone, then you also cannot be held accountable for the decision to take that girl home, because you were also intoxicated.
In otherwords, this logic is fucking idiotic. (I know you were just relating legality)
I can buy the statistics myself. I’d be willing to say that anecdotally 1/10 women I know were raped. If that is 1/10 people who told me they were raped, I’d imagine there is an even larger percentage of women who have never said a word to me.
Erek