/u/oneirosgrip has asked me (while attacking my integrity) to make a post about a matter which has been the subject of some debate recently.

The issue surrounds this infographic. I seem to recall someone mentioning that they were working on an updated version which is more accurate in keeping with the point I'm about to make, but I haven't seen it and I don't remember who said it.

The issue is with the claim that the CDC supports the claim that 40% of rapists outside of prison are women if you include forced or coerced envelopment in your definition of rape. The problem is that this study only counted victims, not perpetrators. If existing studies1 are to be leaved, repeat rape offense is quite common among men. It is then quite possible that repeat offense is also common among female offenders. However, the 40% claim relies on an assumption that male and female offenders each commit the same average number of offenses. Since no data is put forth to support this assumption, the number of female offenders cannot be determined with the study presented. All we know is that 40% of such offenses are committed by women (before taking underreporting into account, though the study did take some measures to correct for this). I don't know of any other studies that could be used to support such a claim, but if they exist than they certainly may be a valid way to extend the reasoning.

oneirosgrip has claimed that an equal number of perpetrations would imply an equal number of perpetrators. She further claims (repeatedly) that to suggest that repeat offense rates differ would be to suggest that different victims from the survey had the same perpetrator.

In order to clarify the point I'm making, I made this example scenario:

Let's suppose that rapists of Gender A individually commit 10 times as many rapes as rapists of Gender B, but Gender B has 10 times as many rapists. Then there are an equal number of victims who were raped by each gender. Then, barring reporting differences, your survey is going to find as many victims who were raped by gender A as by gender B.

This scenario would be indistinguishable from total parity in offenses between the genders under the methods of the study being cited, because both scenarios have the same number of victims and the study only counted victims. The closest thing to the argument presented that could rightly be assumed is that if once gender has a higher repeat offender rate, victims of a larger proportion of the offenders would be found in such a survey.

For some reason this reasoning, which I was not the first to put forth, has been perceived by many as an attack or brigade against the movement. This seems particularly odd to me as much of the discussion has been of the opinion that there is probably less repeat offense among women due to societal factors, meaning there would be more female perpetrators than was originally claimed.

I am so adamant about getting this right because I think it's important that the truth be known and that conclusions should not be drawn without sufficient basis. It is also certainly true that any claim we make must be ironclad or it will be held against us later on. I also think there is danger in the departure from consideration of dissenting opinions and ad hominem attacks that have occurred in prior discussions on this matter.

1) http://www.wcsap.org/sites/www.wcsap.org/files/uploads/webinars/SV%20on%20Campus/Repeat%20Rape.pdf

A majority of these undetected rapists were repeat rapists, ... The repeat rapists averaged 5.8 rapes each.

http://www.musc.edu/vawprevention/research/sa.shtml

the average number of different victims per rapist was seven (Abel et al., 1987).

I recognize that there may be bias in these studies and do not claim that they are accurate. Regardless, repeat offense stands as a real consideration.