What is the MRAs incentive to downplay rape rates?

Samurai007_ · 2014-05-11T02:07:34+00:00

Because definitions matter. If you say that a woman who has has 1 beer and then has sex has been "raped" because she was not 100% sober, you could ruin a man's life, as well as make that woman think she was a victim when she wasn't. If you say that a woman can change her mind and revoke consent after the sex, you'll also ruin a man's life unfairly. There are hundreds of other situations that I could name that are NOT rape but in an effort to inflate the numbers is being called "rape" or "sexual assault" when it isn't. Men are being kicked out of school or going to prison because of these claims, and it isn't right.

Men should not be trying to play the same game ("I had a beer before we had sex so I wasn't capable of giving consent, you raped me, woman!"), both because it'd be laughed out of court, and most importantly, because it's WRONG. So, while saying "that wasn't rape" is certainly going to piss some feminists off and be falsely labelled as "defending and denying rapes", we should stand up for the right thing, not play their game.

WomenAreAlwaysRigh · 2014-05-11T05:41:43+00:00

..OK so the original post for this thread states, "One in three girls, one in six boys are allegedly sexually abused in Australia..." and included a link to the following .pdf:

http://www.casa.org.au/casa_pdf.php?document=statistics

... which indeed does include the following quote, "1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men will be sexually abused before the age of 16 (Fergusson & Mullen, 1999)"

However, a quick internet search of Fergusson & Mullen, 1999 leads to notes from their book from Fergusson & Mullen from 1999, from a rather ridiculous sounding website, which I quote as follows:

"A review of about 30 studies of community and convenience samples found widely varying estimates of the prevalence of CSA. Estimates ranged from 3% to 30% for males and from 6% to 62% for females. "

http://www.mhamic.org/sources/fergusson&mullen.htm

Another recounting of the same book is as follows:

"Doyle Peters, Wyatt and Finkelhor (1985) carried out a review consolidating the evidence of several smaller-scale international surveys, and found a range of between 6 and 62 per cent of females and 3 and 31 per cent of males were victims of child sexual abuse, depending on definitions, measures and data collection methods used. Fergusson and Mullen (1999) confirmed this range in an updated review, and stressed that the majority of studies suggested prevalence somewhere in the interval of between 15 and 30 per cent for females, and between 3 and 15 per cent for males."

http://www.aifs.gov.au/acssa/pubs/wrap/w1.html

... so here we have some dumb flier from some advocacy group or another that somehow converts "between 15 and 30 per cent" to 33% and " between 3 and 15 per cent" to 16.7 %.

.. so once again I say WTF. Can these people be trusted with anything?

Eulabeia · 2014-05-11T02:24:54+00:00

The better question is why feminists try to exaggerate rape so much.

How often does the one in six stat get brought up? Rarely. It's almost always about often women get raped. How rape is so rampant and women should be afraid of men because of this. Feminists go on about rape so much so they can stir up fear and hatred of men.

iwasnotshadowbanned · 2014-05-11T02:06:22+00:00

The incentive to downplay rape is that those numbers are objectively wrong.

xNOM · 2014-05-11T02:01:00+00:00

Who's talking about downplaying anything? How about just trying to measure it accurately, instead of constantly making up stuff.

I find your question highly emo and disturbing.

saint2e · 2014-05-11T02:11:33+00:00

[permanently deleted]

Samurai007_ · 2014-05-11T04:23:13+00:00

Ok, if you want hard facts about the number of rapes, here you go:

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-1

FBI Statistics say there were 83,425 forcible rapes in 2011. You'll notice that the number has actually been falling year after year, from a high of 109,000 back in 1992 when we also had a smaller population. That figure gives us a 2011 rate of 26.8 rapes per 100,000 people, or 1 in 3,731, NOT 1 in 3 or 5 or anywhere close to that.

1 in 3,731.

Since it sounds like you are in Australia, let's look at their figures:

http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=35086

That site lists Australia's rate at 30 per 100,000

Here are other rates for around the world:

http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Rapes/Per-capita

Lesotho has the highest rate in the world by far, at 84.4 per 100,000. New Zealand is 2nd with 31.5 per 100,000.

So, now you have some actual data, and it proves the outlandish claims of 1 in 3 are totally false, and off by a factor of more than 1,200x the real rate. Unless you're going to claim that for every forcible rape reported to the police over 1,200 are not reported (which is insane and totally unrealistic), you now have better data to work with.

Ding_batman · 2014-05-11T02:32:57+00:00

You are conflating two separate issues.

Child abuse and rape stats are two separate issues. I have seen people argue here argue against terms such as 'Rape Culture' and the assumption all men are potential rapists. There is a also a lot of debate regarding misleading statistics, where researchers decide that women have been raped when they themselves hadn't thought so.

MRAs are not blocking the conversation, they are trying to open it up, so it is no longer dominated by a particular ideology.

PeteTheFirst · 2014-05-11T03:55:51+00:00

A lot of us disagree about the definition of rape. Rape is sex in the absence of consent. It is not, for example:

When two underaged teens have consensual sex and the boy is automatically held to be the "attacker"
When two people are drunk and have sex, even when the woman is the one who initiates it, and the man is for some reason deemed to be the one who "should have done the right thing", with no mention of the woman's responsibility even though she was the initiator.
When two people have consensual sex and one of them later wishes they hadn't / gets caught cheating and panics / has an argument with the person they had sex with and decides to get some sick revenge / etc

If we're talking about rape in terms of sex without consent, I would have no sympathy whatsoever for the rapists and would be disgusted at anyone trying to genuinely downplay those stats. But as someone once said on this matter, "Not many people have an issue with 'no means no', it's when you claim that 'yes can mean no' that the problem arises".

Nomenimion · 2014-05-11T05:04:37+00:00

Common sense tells me those numbers are grotesquely exaggerated.

ThePigmanAgain · 2014-05-11T03:31:16+00:00

We don't downplay the rate of actual rapes, only the rate of so-called rapes. You know the ones -- girl feels bad about last night, shouts rape.

Samurai007_ · 2014-05-11T04:51:08+00:00

Why does it matter so much what the incidence is exactly?

I think any time you send out a bunch of paper surveys to people and ask them to fill out a bunch of bubbles with absolutely no repercussions for telling the truth or lying, you are pretty much obliged to question whether the results are accurate. This is polling, not science.

Moreover, I think there is a lot of debate about what counts as sexual assault, when a person is self-intoxicated by alcohol and willfully engages in sexual activity. Most of the statistics play fast-and-loose with those definitions.

Finally, I take issue with the logic that proceeds from a statement about the alleged incidence of sexual assault, then goes from there to suggesting that this is a reason why definitional and evidenciary standards for the crime must be changed. For example, some people suggesting that the burden of proof be overturned, so that a rapist must prove his innocence rather than a prosecutor prove his guilt (guilty until proven innocent). Nonsense.

womblefish · 2014-05-11T06:07:06+00:00

I'm curious, what do you think of the methodology used in the research that produced those numbers? Do you actually have any idea what the methodology was, how the studies were performed, and the accuracy of the results?

Or have you just found something called a "Fact Sheet", and assumed that everything on it must be an indisputable Fact?

If you want to know why we're skeptical, feminist groups routinely use incredibly dodgy methodology to produce meaningless numbers.

Not too long ago major newspapers in the UK published the front page headline that "1 in 4 women are abused by their husbands!". They obtained those results by doing a phone survey of people who had called a domestic violence helpline..... Let that sink in for a moment.....

I'll reiterate that, Published on the Front Page of National newspapers as FACT!

That's the equivalent asking people their favorite sports team, but doing it in Yankee Stadium, then declaring that 90% of the population are Yankees fans.

A Canadian organisation recently had an advert about rape, then used the phrase "1 in 2 women will be abused in their lifetime". To get that number they used a self-reporting* survey* that included everything from being spanked by your mother as a child, through to having someone raise their voice, in their definition of "abuse".

The context they used implied that the statistic applied to rape.

*Self-reporting surveys are known to produce misleading results.

I wish these sort of "studies" were uncommon, but they're not, they're pretty much standard practice for most feminist advocacy groups.

So you question isn't why are we downplaying rape rate, it's why do we want to know the truth!

2014-05-11T10:18:28+00:00

Ladies and gentlemen of the 86+ responses, please repeat after me:

"I shall not reply to loaded questions, they are a load of fucking bullshit."

dejour · 2014-05-11T01:54:53+00:00

[permanently deleted]

Title	What is the MRAs incentive to downplay rape rates?
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	0
Comments	84
Date	May 11, 2014 1:42 AM UTC (12 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/25910g/what_is_the_mras_incentive_to_downplay_rape_rates/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/what-is-the-mras-incentive-to-downplay-rape-rates.1000806 https://theredarchive.com/post/1000806

Comments