Trigger Warning: May contain facts.
You’ve come a long way, baby. You’ve got the right to vote. You’ve got the right to keep working even if you get married. You’ve got the right to go on maternity leave─for 39 weeks at up to 90% of your salary in England.
But now young feminists want the right to do something that is physically impossible: go back in time and erase their mistakes.
Well, you can’t have that right, and not just because Albert Einstein was male.
I recently called drunken hook-ups that girls regret afterwards─but usually not immediately afterwards─“mistake sex.” That prompted some 220 Princeton professors to write a letter to the Daily Princetonian newspaper reminding students who aced their verbal SATs that rape is bad.
The word “rape” has a power to turn even Princeton scholars’ minds off. When a rape occurs, it is common to hear people say that the suspect─suspect, mind you, not perpetrator─should have his neck stretched at the nearest tree. We’re not so rash or bloodthirsty even when it comes to murder, which apparently is a less egregious crime.
Universities, like people, also react emotionally and strongly when it comes to rape, especially in light of the rape epidemic sweeping college campuses (according to the White House), with the #YesAllWomen campaign calling all men weapons of mass destruction.
You’ve heard the statistics: one in four women will be raped in college. Or is it “during her lifetime”? Or is it “sexually assaulted or almost sexually assaulted”? Or is it “nearly one in five”? Or “one in six”? Obviously all these stats can’t be true. Somebody is doctoring the books. They are attempting to change the definition of “rape.”
According to the FBI, “[t]he rate of forcible rapes in 2012 was estimated at 52.9 per 100,000 female inhabitants.” (We don’t know if this includes “male inhabitants who think they are female inhabitants.”)
Assuming that all American women are uniformly at risk, this means the average American woman has a 0.0529% chance of being raped each year, or a 99.9471% chance of not being raped each year. Since the average American woman lives till 81, even assuming she is in danger of being raped every year of her life, including infancy, that means the probability she is never raped is 95.8% (0.999471 raised to the power 81). Of course, the U.S. Department of Justice reported in 2013 only “10 or fewer sample cases” of “sexual assault victimizations” for women 65 or older between 2005 and 2010, and its report only dealt with females 12 or older, with 70% of the victimizations occurring for women under 34, so it makes sense to use, say, a 50-year timespan: then the probability of never being raped is 97.4%. Over 4 years of college, it is 99.8%.
Thus the probability that an American woman is raped in her lifetime is 2.6% and in college 0.2%, 5 to 100 times less than the estimates broadcast by the media and public officials. Gee, and I never would have thought that politicians would lie.
Of course, the rape-statistic apologists will say that rape is massively underreported. Only 5% of the rapes or attempted rapes in a U.S. Department of Justice paper were reported to the police. But why is that? The idea that women are too frail to repeat their story to police or too sensitive to risk not being believed is nothing short of Msogyny.
Regarding unreported rapes, scholars Tjaden and Thoennes (with last names like that, no first names are necessary) say that 17.7% of the women who did not file a report thought the rape was a “[m]inor incident; not a crime or police matter.”
A 2013 Department of Justice report estimates that 64% of “rape and sexual assault victimizations against females” went unreported between 2005 and 2010, with 8% of women saying they did not report it because it was “[n]ot important enough,” 7% saying they “[d]id not want to get offender in trouble with law,” 13% calling it a “[p]ersonal matter,” and 30% responding, “Other/unknown/not one most important reason.”
The website Feminist.com cites different figures, without a clear source: “The FBI estimates that only 46% of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to the police. U.S. Justice Department statistics are even lower, with only 26% of all rapes or attempted rapes being reported to law enforcement officials.” Comparing the 64% of the previous paragraph with the unsourced 54% and 74% here, one sees that estimates of the rate of reporting vary significantly. Regardless, they are less than 99%, the most relevant figure, since the current campaigns are based on the threat to college students while at college.
Where does the “one in four” statistic come from? The organization One in Four USA cites Tjaden and Thoennes, “Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence against Women: Findings from the National Violence against Women Survey.” If one looks at the 2006 report those authors published under the auspices of the Department of Justice, one finds (besides a “one in six” figure!) that their results are based on a 1995-1996 telephone survey of 8,000 men and 8,000 women, and the admission that “only 24 women and 8 men reported during their interviews that they had been raped in the 12 months preceding the survey….” That’s an annual risk of 0.3% each year. This yields a 50-year risk of 13.9%, which is still significantly less than 25%.
The Ms. Magazine report I Never Called It Rape cites a survey of 930 women and concludes that 44% of them said they were victims of rape or attempted rape. In defense of Ms., the actual study said that only “22% of the 930 respondents disclosed experiences of completed and/or attempted rape in answer to the one question that used the word rape.” The researcher, Diana Russell, doubled the figure.
22% is close enough to one-in-four for government work, but the woman supervising the Ms. Magazine survey, Ellen Sweet, conceded that “1 in 4 or 5 women are the victims of rape or attempted rape, according to the legal definition, but only 1 in 4 of those women identifies her experience as rape.” In other words, the real rape/attempted rape statistic is one-in-sixteen or one-in-twenty─5%.
Putting it in a way that non-STEM majors can understand: most girls have more sense than the aforementioned 220 Princeton professors. They do not regard mistake sex as rape.
Further exacerbating the confusion over rape statistics, the Department of Justice counts “verbal threats” as “sexual violence.” The Department of Justice report “The Sexual Victimization of College Women”─which includes as victimization “general sexist remarks [made] in front of you” (grow a thick skin, girls)─says that 48.8% of the women who were raped said that what happened to them was not rape, with another 4.7% saying they didn’t know if it was rape or not. (Didn’t know?) In other words, the rape researchers, and not the police, were the ones telling the purported victims, “I don’t believe you.”
To underscore this, I Never Called It Rape states in Chapter 4 that 42% of rape victims had sex again with their rapists. The National Violence against Women study says that the average female victim was raped 2.9 times in the preceding year. Since the non-mustard seed-related dictionary definition of “rape” does not describe an experience one would want to have twice, one infers that the “rape” victims were using a different definition of “rape” than the researchers.
By contrast, the U.S. Department of Justice reports that men were more likely to be assaulted than women in 2009, with a 1.56% chance of being assaulted each year, bringing the probability of being assaulted over 50 years to 54.4%, with the uniformity assumption. That is, it is more likely than not that an American man will be assaulted. It is unknown whether male victims of assault have their own hashtag.
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A shorter version of this appeared in The Baltimore Sun newspaper. -Eds
