Continued from a conversation here.
[QUOTE=Crazyhorse]
The fact is that 1 out of 5 or so of all women will be sexually assaulted and that is staggering. More than half of them will be under the age of 30 and more than half will be victims of someone that they know very well. Another large portion by someone they know at least peripherally.
The odds of any one random woman being in danger of sexual assault by any one random, unknown male who nods politely in passing aren’t 1 in 5 - they are so low as to be practically irrelevant to the discussion.
There’s more than one conversation going here. The very real, very serious problem women face with regard to sexual assault, and another slant on the subject that rationalizes having a suspicion of any unknown male. The latter is not supported by reality. If it’s what someone needs to get through the day more power to them but it shouldn’t be considered necessary or even valid for everyone.
[/QUOTE]
Crazyhorse’ odds are consistent with the CDC National Intimate Partner and Domestic Violence survey, which finds that 40% of women nationwide report (on an anonymous survey) having been sexually assaulted in her lifetime, and 20% report having been raped. Half of those who report sexual assault experienced her first incident before the age of 18. Another large chunk of these rapes occur in domestic violence situations (at the agency where I work, about 40% of domestic violence incidents reported to us include sexual assault or rape.) Those are self-reported statistics and thus likely to be higher in reality, but they are probably as accurate as we are going to get. Those statistics include rapes and sexual assaults that were not reported to police. Only a small percentage of sexual assaults are perpetrated by strangers.
I don’t think we have any great way of measuring how many men actually assault women, but it is probably quite small. The problem is that this small minority of men is prolific; abusers victimize multiple women.
[QUOTE=Slate]
A study published in 2002 by David Lisak and Paul Miller, for which they interviewed college men about their sexual histories, found that only about 6 percent of the men surveyed had attempted or successfully raped someone. While some of them only tried once, most of the rapists were repeat offenders, with each committing an average of 5.8 rapes apiece. The 6 percent of men who were rapists were generally violent men, as well. “The 120 rapists were responsible for 1,225 separate acts of interpersonal violence, including rape, battery, and child physical and sexual abuse,” the researchers write. A single rapist can leave a wake of victims, racking up the numbers rapidly, as the victim surveys are clearly showing.
[/QUOTE]
Keep in mind those are college-age men, where sexual assault is rather prolific. The percentage of non-college-age rapists walking around on the streets is likely smaller. (A rapist is much more likely to rape a date or an aquaintance than a stranger on the street.)
Based on the statistics, I am essentially in agreement with Crazyhorse. I have great empathy for survivors, being one of them myself, but I can’t see how endorsing a general fear of strange men makes any rational sense, or is in any way fair to men. That does not mean men are absolved of responsibility for fighting against the culture that perpetuates violence against women any more than white people are absolved of the responsibility for dismantling racist power dynamics, but this is an element about the dominant narrative about sexual assault that I must reject. We need men as allies, not adversaries.
