The NISVS responds on the female rape perpetrator figures

Number357 · 2013-12-05T16:41:35+00:00

[permanently deleted]

Jacksambuck · 2013-12-05T15:09:11+00:00

http://np.reddit.com/r/Feminism/comments/1s5fdr/nisvss_response_to_mra_female_rapists/

Thought you'd want to see this.

First off, they don't back down from their ridiculously anti-egalitarian classification of made-to-penetrate as "not rape", and don't offer any explanation either (other than they used "experts in the field").

Then they start to nitpick (although technically, they are mostly correct; but anyone with half a brain knew our numbers are just an approximation based on reasonable assumptions)

A. We ignored the lifetime prevalence in favour of the 12-month numbers. We made this abundantly clear. Then we used the lifetime perpetrator figures instead of 12-month perpetrator figures because those were the only one present in the report. There's no reason to assume they would differ significantly from one another. They could, but again it's an approximation based on what numbers are at our disposal.

B and C: We made another justifiable assumption about male and female rapists having similar "multiple rape" quotients.

D and E: We, like the report, mostly ignored rape in institutions.

edit: added np.

Transcript

"Thank you for your inquiry regarding the NISVS data and for providing the background information pertaining to your question. It appears that the math used to derive an estimated percentage of female rapists that you found at the various websites you forwarded to us is flawed. First, we will summarize the assertion and what we perceive to be the basis for the assertion. According to the web links, the “40% of rapists were women” was derived from these two steps:

1) Combining the estimated number of female rape victims with the estimated number of being-made-to-penetrate male victims in the 12 months prior to the survey to conclude that about 50% of the rape or being-made-to-penetrate victims were males;

2) Multiplying the estimated percentage (79%) of male being-made-to-penetrate victims who reported having had female perpetrators in these victims’ lifetime with the 50% obtained in step 1 to claim that 40% of perpetrators of rape or being-made-to-penetrate were women.

None of these calculations should be used nor can these conclusions be correctly drawn from these calculations.

To explain, in NISVS we define rape as “any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes times when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.”

We defined sexual violence other than rape to include being made to penetrate someone else, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and non-contact unwanted sexual experiences. Made to penetrate is defined as including “times when the victim was made to, or there was an attempt to make them, sexually penetrate someone without the victim’s consent because the victim was physically forced (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threatened with physical harm, or when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.” The difference between “rape” and “being made to penetrate” is that in the definition of rape the victim is penetrated; “made to penetrate” by definition refers to cases where the victim penetrated someone else. While there are multiple definitions of rape and sexual violence used in the field, CDC, with the help of experts in the field, has developed these specific definitions of rape and other forms of sexual violence (such as made to penetrate, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and non-contact unwanted sexual experiences). We use these definitions to help guide our analytical decisions. Regarding the specific assertion in question, several aspects of mistreatments of the data and the published estimates occurred in the above derivation:

A. While the percentage of female rape victims and the percentage of male being-made-to-penetrate victims were inferred from the past 12-month estimates by combining two forms of violence, the percentage of perpetrator by sex was taken from reported estimates for males for lifetime. This mismatch of timeframes is incorrect because the past 12-month victimization cannot be stretched to equate with lifetime victimization. In fact, Tables 2.1 and 2.2 of the NISVS 2010 Summary Report clearly report that lifetime rape victimization of females (estimated at 21,840,000) and lifetime being-made-to-penetrate victimization of males (estimated at 1,581,000) have very different relative magnitudes.

B. An arithmetic confusion appears when multiplying the two percentages together to conclude that the product is a percentage of all the “rapists”, an undefined perpetrator population. Multiplying the percentage of male victims (as derived in step 1) above) to the percentage of male victims who had female perpetrators cannot give a percentage of perpetrators mathematically because to get a percentage of female rape perpetrators, one must have the total rape perpetrators (the denominator), and the number of female perpetrators of this specific violence (the numerator). Here, neither the numerator nor the denominator was available.

C. Data collected and analyzed for the NISVS 2010 have a “one-to-multiple” structure (where the “one” refers to one victim and the “multiple” refers to multiple perpetrators). While not collected, it is conceivable that any perpetrator could have multiple victims. These multiplicities hinder any attempt to get a percentage of perpetrators such as the one described in steps 1) and 2), and nullify the reverse calculation for obtaining a percent of perpetrators. For example, consider an example in which a girl has eight red apples while a boy has two green apples.

Here, 50% of the children are boys and another 50% are girls. It is not valid to multiply 50% (boy) with 100% (boy’s green apples) to conclude that “50% of all the apples combined are green”. It is clear that only 20% of all the apples are green (two out of 10 apples) when one combines the red and green apples together. Part of the mistake in the deriving of the “50%” stems from a negligence to take into account the inherent multiplicity: a child can have multiple apples (just as a victim can have multiple perpetrators).

D. As the study population is U.S. adults in non-institutional settings, the sample was designed to be representative of the study population, not the perpetrator population (therefore no sampling or weighting is done for the undefined universe of perpetrators). Hence, while the data can be analyzed to make statistical inferences about the victimization of U.S. adults residing in non-institutional settings, the NISVS data are incapable of lending support to any national estimates of the perpetrator population, let alone estimates of perpetrators of a specific form of violence (say, rape or being-made-to-penetrate).

E. Combining the estimated past 12-month female rape victims with the estimated past 12-month being-made-to-penetrate male victims cannot give an accurate number of all victims who were either raped or being-made-to-penetrate, even if this combination is consistent with CDC’s definition. Besides a disagreement with the definitions of the various forms of violence given in the NISVS 2010 Summary Report, this approach of combining the 12-month estimated number of female rape victims with the 12-month estimated number of male victims misses victims in the cells where reliable estimates were not reported due to small cell counts failing to meet statistical reliability criteria. For any combined form of violence, the correct analytical approach for obtaining a national estimate is to start at the raw data level of analysis, if such a creation of a combined construct is established.

We hope that this explanation is helpful and addresses your questions. Thank you for your interest in NISVS.

The NISVS Team"

Celda · 2013-12-05T16:03:29+00:00

There is no proof that email is real.

There is some proof it's fake:

Report clearly report that lifetime rape victimization of females (estimated at 21,840,000) and lifetime being-made-to-penetrate victimization of males (estimated at 1,581,000) have very different relative magnitudes.

In fact that is quite false, the correct number is over 5 million, you can see it at the study yourself.

DavidByron · 2013-12-06T18:00:13+00:00

LMAO. This from an organisation so bigoted they pretend men can't be raped by women. Hysterically this bigoted definition of rape is their "defence" in many cases in this reply, when they should be utterly ashamed of it. I wont bother dealing with those aspects of their argument that are based on outrageous bigotry. The best response there is simply to point out their bigotry, and their total lack of shame for it.

It comes down to two arguments they make. Both rather silly.

(1) While it is true that the survey doesn't claim that 40% of rapists are women that is because it doesn't say anything at all about what proportion of rapists are men or women. It does however allow a rough estimate and that's what "media has reported" (my ass - what media is that then?)

It could be far more than 40% of rapists are women. I have always pointed that out. The 40% figure is simply a plausible number to throw around based on the fact that 40% of people raped said they were raped by a woman. Now that's totally different from saying 40% of rapists are women isn't it? How could anyone get from one to the other I don't know.

Why is it different? because the same victim could be raped many times, or just once, and the same rapist could rape a lot of people or only one. It may be that female rapists rape more people than male rapists, in which case there'd be fewer of them for the same number of rapes, or vice versa.

They repeat this argument in a few different ways I guess to make it look like more than one argument.

(2) They say that the proportion of perps that are women (79.2%) is taken from the lifetime figures, and then combines with the sex ratio of victims from the 12 month figures. That's true but the problem with arguing that way is (1) why would the ratio be any different? Are they saying that in the last year the ration of women raping men to men raping men changed? And (2) since they actually have that data available, but just never published it, and haven't seen fit to publish it now, I rather suspect that the data says no difference is perceived between the lifetime and 12-month figures for what proportion of men were raped by women. In effect they are saying the ratio could be totally different for some bizarre reason, but then refusing to release the data that would show if it in fact was. Suspicious?

(3) They point out that there could be multiple rapist attackers. In the case of male victims this could be a significant number. This is something else I have always pointed out about these factoids. However the problem for them is that by assuming ONLY 79.2% of attackers are female when the survey said 79.2% are SOLE female attackers, you are actually low balling the percentage of female rapists. So I agree with the inaccuracy that the NISVS points out here and it says that the 40% female rapists number is likely TOO LOW. As a result I didn't even count this as an argument they made against the rape figure.

(4) they point out that some figures were below the threshold for reporting and therefore were not taken into account in the 40% figure. This is again something I have often pointed out because it again is in the favour of MRAs to point it out. The figure they are talking about, (they don't name it) is the number of male victims of rape by their sexist definition over 12 months. The "made to penetrate" and female rape figures were listed as 1.1% per year. The rate for men raped as if they were women is not recorded but based on other surveys we can guess it is about 0.1 to 0.3% which should be added to the rate of 1.1% to make more men raped than women. This would mean instead of a figure of 40% you'd get maybe 50% of rapists women using that flawed but best-we-have estimate. Again this is helping the MRA figure not hurting it so i dont include this observation as a criticism.

c0mputar · 2013-12-05T19:42:19+00:00

It's a dumb fucking retort. If you consider MTP to be rape, the following 2 statements are accurate:

Men and women were raped at relatively equal rates during 2010.
37% of rapes during 2010 were perpetrated by women.

Those 2 statements are factually accurate. That e-mail doesn't debunk those 2 statements. Instead, it creates straw mans and debunks inaccurately written conclusions from some methods for calculating the results.

Technically, you cannot say that "40% of rapists are women" from the survey because they didn't keep track of perpetrator identity. Nevertheless, we can say that ~40% of rapes during 2010 were committed by women, if you consider MTP to be rape. It's a minor change to the statement that doesn't change the meaning of it whatsoever and is the bases for the entire retort from the NISVS. It's a sham, a smoke-screen, to lead readers away from the truth, that the study found that women committed a lot of the rapes during 2010.

Title	The NISVS responds on the female rape perpetrator figures
Author	Jacksambuck
Upvotes	44
Comments	48
Date	December 5, 2013 2:37 PM UTC (12 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1s5u7f/the_nisvs_responds_on_the_female_rape_perpetrator/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/the-nisvs-responds-on-the-female-rape-perpetrator.1156986 https://theredarchive.com/post/1156986

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