An interesting pattern in the data for sexual violence. The rates for victimization come close between men and women when data is collected for 12 month prevalence compared to lifetime prevalence.

63daddy · 2025-02-13T18:26:59+00:00

This isn’t crime data, it’s survey information about experiences people have had as asked by the surveyors and interpreted by the surveyors as constituting victimization. In addition to being subjective, it’s problematic to compare surveys asking different questions and interpreted differently.
Note that at least one of the surveyors asked men and women were asked different questions, again making it problematic when comparing results.

To illustrate, giving examples imagine three different surveys studying how often battery occurs, each asking the following questions:

Have you ever been pushed, slapped, shoved or in any way struck against your will. (Counting all affirmative answers battery).
Have you ever been struck forcibly enough to constitute the crime of battery in your opinion? (counting yes responses as battery).
Have you ever reported to the police that you were a victim of battery?

Each of these survey questions will yield very different incident rates of battery. Similarly consider the Koss survey which counted any sex after drinking as sexual assault. That’s the problem with these types of surveys.

Vegetable_Ad1732 · 2025-02-14T04:18:38+00:00

" We need more research into this."

Not really, it already exists.

why the CDC 12-month data seems to regularlydeviate from the lifetime data. Hines ( 2007) said “Results showed that the relativestatus of women at each site predicted significant differences in levels of sexual vic-timization for men, in that the greater the status of women, the higher the level offorced sex against men.” Could it be that over the course of people’s lives (during thelast century), the status of women increased enough to raise the level of the sexualvictimization of men significantly?

Ahola (2012) gives us another possible reason why 12-month data seems to devi-ate from lifetime data. Ahola says that over increasing time, witnesses judge femaleperpetrators less harshly than male perpetrators. This effect increases over time. “Thefinding is in line with the theory mentioned in the Introduction, fuzzy-trace theory,according to which people, with decreasing memory, tend to rely on the stereotypi -cal picture they have.” The relevant stereotype being women commit less crime thanmen, especially less sexual crime. While the study is talking about witnesses, weposit that this effect might just as well hold for victims, especially if the incident fliesso fully in the face of stereotypes as a woman sexually coercing a man. For those whowould say “If I were raped, I would remember the event vividly for the rest of mylife” we point out that studies such as Krahé et al. (2003) state the most common waywomen sexually coerce men is taking advantage of the incapacitated, doubtlesslycausing copious fuzzy memories of the event. Since 80% of “made to penetrates” aredone by women, this could cause an undercount of “made to penetrates” in the life -time data, relative to the 12-month data. Obviously, such ideas suggest more researchcould be done to test these ideas. If these ideas are actually true, the 12-month datamight actually be more reliable than the lifetime data.

(PDF) Reply to “Distorted Reality: A Commentary on DiMarco et al. (2022) and the Question of Male Sexual Victimization”

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