In my previous post about the real incidence of rape (it is in massive decline! contrary to the claims of the campus rape industry), I said there was a discrepancy in the National Crime Victimization Survey statistics about its prevalence in the past several years. Steven Pinker writes that it was at 50/100,000 in 2008, whereas the only data I was able to access showed it to be at about 94/100,000 in 2011. Since it’s rather unlikely that the incidence of rape has doubled in the past three years, I suggested that either Pinker made a mistake or the NCVS has changed its definitions.
I was pleased to receive a reply from Steven Pinker on this and it seems that the second option is the likely one. The first one is certainly wrong, because he attached a spreadsheet showing the NCVS figures on rape for 1973-2008, and they do indeed show it declining from around 250/100,000 in the 1970’s to just 50/100,000 in recent years.
On the basis of that data I made the following telling chart.
It shows that a generation ago there really was something of a “rape culture” in that your average rape was very unlikely to be reported to police. Ironically, it was at precisely the time in history that reports of rape to police started to converge with the number of people who said they were raped in that year that all this rape culture rigmarole got going.
But as we can see, by that point the train had long departed. With reported rapes drawing close to the anonymously reported general incidence of rape*, plus the inherent ambiguity and fluidity around what actually constitutes rape, it is practically impossible to continue to imagine in good faith that a large number of innocent men aren’t getting tangled up in the narrow space between those two converging lines.
(Finally, even within just the modern US, there will be significant differences in rape prevalence between different regions and socio-economic groups. For instance, “rape culture” is considered by feminists to be more prevalent on the nation’s campuses. But considering that the average college student is one S.D. higher in IQ than the national average, and the close correlation between IQ and crime rates, it is in fact quite likely that modern US college towns are some of the very safest places for women in history. Then again it’s much safer to rant about “campus rape culture” from an actual campus than from within some inner city ghetto).
That is why I think that the higher-end (i.e. 25%+) estimates for false rape accusations, far from being the products of MRM chauvinist hysteria, are in fact the most credible ones today.
PS. Here is Steven Pinker’s reply in full:
The rape statistics come from
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2009. National Crime Victimization Survey Spreadsheet.http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/sheets/viortrd.csv.
which I attach (accessed 2010/5/3). Unfortunately that URL now redirects tohttp://www.bjs.gov/glance_redirect.cfm which apologizes for a BoJ Web site redesign rendering the file unavailable until this summer.
You’ll see in a comment line within the spreadsheet that the survey methodology changed at least twice during the 1973-2008 interval, though the numbers reported in it have been adjusted to make (except for one year) commensurable with one another.
It’s not certain why the numbers you found for 2011 are so out of whack with those in this dataset, and it would take some digging to resolve the discrepancy. But the warning in this spreadsheet about previous methodology changes suggests a likely answer. Under pressure from activist groups, common definitions of “rape” and “sexual assault” have recently been broadened to include, for example, a man verbally pressuring a woman into sex, and a man getting a woman drunk and having sex with her; even, in some surveys, sex that the woman regrets afterwards. These expansive definitions are the source of some of the incredible claims such as that one in every four female college students has been raped. I doubt that the NCVS uses such a definition which is quite that expansive, but if the question asked in the past few years differs from those asked in 1973-2008, we would have an explanation for the discrepancy. And you may be correct that the restrictive and expansive definitions correspond to “rape” and “sexual assault,” respectively, but it would take some digging into the recent survey methodology to verify this.
* These two measures aren’t strictly comparable, because one person can report multiple instances of rape to police, whereas in any one year someone can only either be raped or not raped in the NCVS statistics. Nonetheless, one would imagine that the percentage of (very unfortunate) people experienced two or more cases of rape per year and reporting them to police would be very low.
Strange, I was just ranting about this last night. My argument was more from a comparative stance: Suggesting that a rape culture in the west exists is to completely trivialize the terror that some women (and men) live through in other parts of the world. For example bride kidnappings, which are still prevalent in a handful of countries and often ignored by law. Or the South Africa epidemic wherein 25% of men admit to having raped a woman (and 10% of men claim to have been raped by other men). Anyone who speaks of our society in the same breath as the aforementioned is no doubt living in a bubble.
Exactly! That is statistically correct.
And yet most of those PC-ists are likewise hardened supporters of multi-culturalism.
I once engaged in an Internet discussion with a (perhaps common?) acquaintance who seriously argued that Egyptian/Pakistani statistics showing that they have a zero rate of rape, and that Sweden is the society with the most rapes in the world, are accurate.
“considering that the average college student is one S.D. higher in IQ than the national average”
was?
“In 1992 then-Ontario Minister of Women’s Rights Marion Boyd claimed that “research” showed that one man in five, or about 20%, admit to using violence against the women they live with. Presumably the rest of us deny it.
Actually the number Boyd should have quoted was 12%, as revealed by a study by University of Calgary sociologist Dr. Eugen Lupri in the Statistics Canada publication {Canadian Social Trends}.
Dr. Lupri found that 12% of men interviewed admitted that they had pushed, grabbed or shoved their partners at least once in the preceding year.
The study was based on questionnaires distributed to 471 men and 652 women but Stats Can chose to publish only the numbers on male violence. For the record, here are some of the numbers contained in the full report.
— 9.1% of husbands had threatened to hit or to throw something at their mates in the previous year, and 15.9% of wives had done the same.
— 11.9% of husbands and 13.1% of wives had pushed, grabbed or shoved their mates, 5% of husbands and 7.6% of wives had slapped, 5.4% of husbands and 7.6% of wives had hit or tried to hit, 6.4% of husbands and 6.3% of women had kicked, bit or hit with a fist, 2.5% of men and 6.2% of women had physically beaten up a partner
— 2.1% of men and 3.6% of women had threatened their partner with a knife or a gun. One half of one per-cent of men and 0.8% of women had actually used a weapon.
-The Hate Mongers from The Cassandra Papers
similar thing for ‘rape’
http://feck-blog.blogspot.in/2011/05/predictors-of-sexual-coercion-against.html
I read several studies about the prevalence of rape on college campuses. None of these studies defined rape differently than how the law defines rape. Having sex with an incapacitated person (drunk or otherwise under the influence) is against the law, because that person can’t consent to sex. None of these studies included sex that was later regretted by either party. These were studies conducted by the National Institute of Justice and the CDC, reputable organizations. And yet these studies found that about 20% of women graduating from college had been victims of rape or attempted rape, either before college or during college or both. These statistics are indeed alarming, and it’s not surprising that people would have trouble believing them and would not want to believe them. But even if they are off by a factor of two, and the rate is “only” 10%, it is still unconscionably high. Please reread these studies and check to see if I am correct, rather than repeating the canard that “regretted sex” is counted as rape.