.
OK, I don’t know where the 1/4 statistics come from, but…
The math on your link is BS. If there are 14,800 students and 4 reported rapes in 2009, that does not mean that the chance is 1 in 14,800/4 = 3700. At the very least, if we assume that students take an average of 4 years to complete college and the number of students doesn’t change much every year, then the chance is 14,800 / (4*4) or 1 in 925.
Add to that the fact that large numbers of rapes do not get reported because the process of investigation is humiliating to the person reporting it and in many cases results in little more than a slap on the wrist by colleges who don’t want this kind of data published. Add to this that the 1 in 4 statistic also includes incidents that happen in high school and before.
I don’t know if the 1 in 4 statistic is valid or how they come to that, but I *am* sure that I’m not going to trust the statistics of someone who made such fundamental math errrors right up front. It seems likely that there’s significant cherry picking going on, too.
“it seems likely that there’s significant cherry picking”
Choice of words…
67% of all statistics are made up
I guess, this is why facebook had to ban this…
hahaha too soon, too soon.
Here is one piece analyzing (and challenging). the “1 in 4” narrative. It dates back to a survey done last year.
take it easy rahul
let’s stop all the rape posts! rape is wrong 99% of time okay. that we can all agree on!
100% of the time… by definition.
Agree on stopping the posts
by contstantly throwing around the word like it’s no big deal, you devalue a truly traumatic experience that changes people’s lives forever. not cool (aside: same thing goes for the term racist)
questioning the approach to dealing with on-campus sexual assault is wrong is a different story.
Wait. Am I throwing the term around?
.
no…just saying in general.
Yeah, unfortunately, describing sexual assault in very highlighted terms ends up having a trivializing effect on the whole issue. People get groped at a college party and say they are “sexual assault survivors”. This desensitizes people and makes them belittle more serious cases.
Why stop posts? It’s not ok to discuss statistics on some sort of crime? This attitude basically says “I don’t care what you think, I have authority, this is my issue only”. This only disconnects people further and makes them even less sympathetic towards the issue.
So who is throwing the term around like it’s no big deal?
1 in 925 is still alarmingly high in my opinion. It’s not 1/4, but a horrifying number none the less.
The number of women I’ve been friends with and/or talked to who have eventually opened up about having been coerced into sex is alarmingly high. I don’t know if it reaches 25% of all women, but it is very easy for me to believe that rates of 10-15% or even 20% are common, and that’s still pretty darned high. And of course there are presumably a lot of women I know who haven’t felt comfortable sharing a history like that.
I’m not talking about having been groped in a subway or something like that (which is bad enough, but not the same level of trauma). I mean penetrated without consent. Most of it seems to happen when girls are young, 14-24 or so, or even younger, and it’s mostly by people they are acquainted with already.
Part of the challenge of coming forward and reporting something like that is that the victims can expect to have to endure ongoing contact with the aggressor, so if they tell and are not believed, there is ample room for various forms of retaliation. Add to the fact that many institutions and families would be gravely embarrased to have something like that happen, so it’s often a choice between institutional/family pride and the protection of one individual, and in that case, often pride wins out and even if the person is believed, little happens. Thus, often the best course of action is just to keep quiet until you can get away, meanwhile doing one’s best to avoid that person if you can.
It’s true that sometimes rape and things like unwanted touches that don’t actually involve penetration or nakedness get lumped together, and while both are clearly bad, there is a qualitative difference in how bad rape is vs groping. That said, when someone is groped, it’s not at all clear that it’s going to end there, so the fact that groping raises the fear of it escalating to soemthing worse does mean that groping has an effect