If you're going to rubbish that figure (and I wouldn't) you need to be a little more precise than I have seen people being about it. First of all there appear to be two femstats walking about with a "one-in-five" and I am talking about the one that is usually stated as this:

One in five women will be raped in their lifetime

and not the one about women in college, which states something like one-in-five women in college will be raped. In fact it doesn't take a genius at math to spot that these two femstats contradict each others claims.

But the one-in-five over a life time comes from (misquoting) the NISVS which is not only the gold standard of surveys on rape but also the same survey that tells us that men are raped as often or maybe more often than women in the USA. So maybe think twice before rubbishing that result, OK?

http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_executive_summary-a.pdf

Now in fact the first thing we can see upon glancing at the NISVS summary there is that the most common quote is actually in some respect under representing the size of the problem by quite a lot, while in other respects over counting.

It doesn't say one-in-five (actually 18.3%) women will be raped in their life time it says 18.3% have already been raped in their life so far. But they aren't dead yet the people asked in the survey. That means on average they have about another 50% of their lifetimes to go, or 50% of their adult lifetimes so you might say if you wanted to guess at the rate over their entire lifetime it would be around double that rate, or rather less if they're interviewing adults but also asking about rapes as a child, and less again because there's not an even distribution of chance of getting raped with age (more likely to be raped when you're young).

Second major thing is that it specifies that the 18.3% includes rape, attempted rape and drunk sex, but when you look at the split down for those numbers (moving from the summary to the full report now),

http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a.pdf

Removing the attempted rape and the drunk sex figures only reduces that 18.3% figure down to 12.3% (table 2 page 18). Again these figures are not for the lifetime of a woman, but the lifetime that the woman had lived so far at the time of the interview. Plus some are bound to have forgotten incidents in the same way that men tend to bury these incidents or think of them as something else, although the whole point of these new types of survey are to minimize that error.

12.3% of women answering yes to a pretty straight forward definition of forced sex that any sensible person would say was rape. So what about that other six percent is it mostly attempted rape or mostly drunk sex? That isn't recorded in the results but either way the results are NOT a result of counting anyone having sex while drunk as raped in some sense. If that had been the way the women responded to the survey we'd expect a huge amount of respondents, but in fact fewer women said they'd had drunk sex than forced sex (for the lifetime stat that is; for the last 12 months those numbers reversed probably because people tend to forget those less serious incidents faster).

These numbers are NOT coming from an inflated definition of rape that includes anyone who had a few drinks and then had consensual sex. My guess is most of the women reporting drunk sex really meant something most people would be happy to call rape, but we don't need to assume that here because even completely disregarding attempted rape and drunk sex we have a solid 12.3% respondent rate.

So maybe "one in eight" might be better than "one-in-five" but again these numbers are not lifetime figures as they are usually presented.

Another reason to accept the 18.3% "lifetime" figure is because we don't have any comparable figures for men that includes "made to penetrate" that is split by attempted rape or drunk sex. For men we only have the figure that compares to the total of all three and which the CDC has chosen to collectively submit as the figure for rape.

Given that a direct comparison is only possible with the overall figures totaling all forms of rape, and on that basis men appear to be raped a little more than women or at least as often as women in the USA, I think it's better to put that figure out there as the main response to feminists "one-in-five" slogan, rather than quibble over figures which are more or less genuine.

The NISVS is a good survey.

Except for the feminist insistence that raped men should be fraudulently misclassified as not raped it's a great survey. It is the gold standard. That bullshit about "made to penetrate" is a problem with the summary of the data not the methodology. Nobody actually used the words "rape" or "made to penetrate" with the people being surveyed they just use genuinely gender neutral language. That's why this survey found so many male victims that other surveys have missed.

Yeah the fraudulent misclassification is bullshit, but even that works against feminists when people get told what is really going on. When you tell people what's going on feminists look like assholes.

So here's what i suggest as a better set of talking points to feminists saying 1-in-5.

  • the NISVS is the gold standard for rape surveys
  • yes it found (close to) 1-in-5 women raped
  • it also found the same rate of men raped as women
  • it's the first survey to bother to ask men
  • but feminists deliberately buried that amazing result which ought to have been headline news
  • they literally are defending a position that says women cannot rape men
  • but they are not doing it honestly; they published figures for men raped as if they were using the normal legal definition of forced sex, and quietly erased the vast majority of male victims
  • ask yourself why you have never heard that men are raped as often as women from any feminist
  • it's the same pattern of deceit and fraud that had feminists hiding male victims of domestic violence for decades
  • yes the CDC based its fraudulent definition of men as not counting as raped on feminist experts who demand that women cannot rape men
  • yes the great majority of feminists support this erasure of male victims -- look how feminists uniformly supported and support the Violence Against Women Act which erased male victims and even made it illegal to help them.

Basically attack the feminists as liars who hate men, and don't attack the NISVS data, but certainly attack the morals of the feminists who published deceitful summaries of that data.