Jezebel commentator debunks rape statistic claiming men are raped almost as much as women

Number357 · 2014-05-01T12:36:11+00:00

As a general rule, 12-month figures are more reliable than lifetime figures for most things. Think about it, your asking somebody to remember something that happened decades ago. Remember that in the 80s, a man who was raped would have just been told to man up and forget about it. There are a ton of problems with using lifetime figures. This breakdown of the CDC figures includes a study that found only 16% of men with a history a childhood sex abuse reported it on a survey, compared to 64% of women. In other words, women who are victims of sex crimes when they're children are four times more likely to report this on a survey looking for lifetime figures. This likely has to do with a host of issues such as the pressures men face to just toughen up and get over it, and the fact that society is reluctant to acknowledge male victims as being victims. In addition, when we talk about the prevalence of rape, we want to know how often it's occurring today. So numbers from several decades ago are pretty irrelevant.

As to her point about there not being enough data, that's a problem of sample size. And the reason the sample size is too small is because the CDC doesn't give two shits about male rape victims. Maybe if feminists stopped insisting that we use unreliable lifetime figures, and maybe if feminists stopped insisted male rape is a non-issue that doesn't need to be studied, the CDC (which consults with feminist researchers on their studies) would feel more compelled to get adequate data on male rape victims.

As an added note, neither feminists nor the CDC can really come up with a good argument for why a woman forcing a man to have sex should not be considered rape. I think they just thought everybody else would be as bigoted as they are, and now have no response to people wanting a more progressive definition of rape so they try to avoid the larger issue: The fact that the CDC and feminist scholars think that a man can only be raped if he's sodomized.

girlwriteswhat · 2014-05-01T15:07:53+00:00

Oh boy, not this again. The correct data to use to compare the incidence of rape for women and men is the lifetime statistics, unless you're saying that the rape of children or teenagers shouldn't count (since the methods for that study say that all participants had to be over 18).

There is a reason that studies relying on the self-reporting of events by people recalling said events employ both lifetime and previous-12 or previous-6 month data. It is because the more recent data is always the more reliable. Memory is malleable, and over time it can and often will adjust itself to comply with/conform to dominant cultural narratives. Events will sometimes be forgotten altogether or rationalized away, or reinterpreted for the sake of being able to get on with life.

One study found that when people witnessed an act of violence, their memories of that violence were less extreme after days than minutes--IF the violent perpetrator was female. Another study found that only 16% of men who had a documented history of child sexual abuse disclosed that abuse in a survey specifically designed to capture victims of child sexual abuse. (The percentage for women was 64%, so still not great.)

Rape and sexual violence perpetrated against men is terrible and important to talk about, but it is not factually true to say that rape is equally likely to happen to men and women.

It this true?

By definition, no. If the report we are discussing is the CDC's NISVS, and if the statistics we are discussing are "rape" and "made to penetrate", then the report clearly shows that right now, prevalence of forced/nonconsensual sexual intercourse perpetrated on men and women is virtually identical. Even setting aside the issues with memory retention and veracity over longer periods of time, what happened in the past is not necessarily a reflection of what is happening NOW.

Consider the argument from the position of the percentage of female CEOs. It is low right now, but many women who are 50 or older (the typical age at which a man becomes CEO) lack the credentials to do so because of the opportunities available (and taken) 30 years ago. A much higher percentage of women graduating from universities today than 30 years ago will have credentials that will put them on the CEO track, if they so choose, but there is necessarily a delay of 20-30 years in effect.

Right NOW, as many men are currently being raped as women (if one employs a gender-neutral definition of rape). While this may be an anomaly that only existed in 2009 (the year prior to the 2010 NISVS), I don't think so.

The study specifically counts "forced to penetrate" as a category of sexual violence, and it asks about experiences, not whether the person would be legally labeled a victim or not. It also asks the same subjects for their 12 month and lifetime experience, so it doesn't really make sense that they would underreport their lifetime sexual violence while accurately reporting their 12 month sexual violence because they didn't consider themselves to be victims. That bias would affect both time periods.

Can anyone factually verify this as correct or false?

This person needs to explain why it doesn't make sense. If these men do not consider themselves to be victims, they have no pressing reason to hold onto the memories of their victimization over a long period of time. The questions were not presented in a victim/perpetrator context, but in a "has this ever happened to you" context. Given the huge disparity between adult men and women reporting their childhood experience of sexual abuse, I would expect that over time, men are more likely to rationalize away, reinterpret or simply forget such incidents.

I find it strange that this person doesn't explore the possibilities in both directions--that in fact, men may be underreporting both their lifetime and their previous-year victimization. Wouldn't that be an interesting thing to explore?

This person also lacks the perspective to consider that the relaxing of gender roles, along with an increasing destigmatization of disclosing sexual abuse (especially for boys/men, given the Catholic priest/altar boy scandals and other high profile cases), and more progressive cultural ideas about consent, may actually mean that the men most at risk of having been recently sexually assaulted (those in the age 16-24 category, since this is the age where both men and women are at highest risk) would be less likely to rationalize their experiences away, or reinterpret them as consensual, than, say, men in their 40s, 50s or 60s, who were at highest risk when the "coyote ugly, just chew your arm off and rub a little dirt in it" mentality prevailed.

I also find it very interesting that the CDC disclosed the gender of the perpetrator for men's lifetime experiences of "made to penetrate" (79% women) but did not disclose this for the more reliable previous-12 month reports.

This "debunking" is about as deep as a puddle, and does nothing more than perpetuate the traditional cultural narrative that men rape and women are raped, men have sex and women have sex done to them.

Feminism: patriarchy in lipstick.

rabbitspade · 2014-05-01T12:15:32+00:00

The problem is the definition of rape. If you define it in rigid terms, you don't get enough reports. If you define it very loosely, you are overwhelmed with reports.

I think the incidents of rape against men and women is probably lower than reported for both genders.

The problem is, they use different definitions for women than they do men. This is the MRM's problem with the whole thing. If you use the same definition and it still comes out with more women being raped than men, then I doubt anyone here would have a problem with that.

The problem is - the research and studies we have are all flawed. Because they come from the realm of social science, which does not follow correct scientific method or procedures. But despite this, people still put all their faith in these studies - like the one from Mary Koss, where she deliberately sought to increase the number of rapes by skewing her questioning and omitting other questions that would change the outcome of whether an encounter was a rape or not.

indpndnt · 2014-05-01T13:21:30+00:00

See this article for some information to help you out.

12 month data are generally better due to a lack of time passing to hide/rationalize traumatic experiences. Other commenters have talked about this, and the link I gave above does the same.

The lady replied with:

That bias would affect both time periods

Which is clearly not true, based on the link I give, and other people's links. She needs to provide evidence for that assumption. Here is a quote from the article I linked that disagrees with your interlocutor:

16% of men with documented cases of sexual abuse considered their early childhood experiences sexual abuse, compared with 64% of women with documented cases of sexual abuse. These gender differences may reflect inadequate measurement techniques or an unwillingness on the part of men to disclose this information (Widom and Morris 1997).

typhonblue · 2014-05-01T15:55:40+00:00

The correct data to use to compare the incidence of rape for women and men is the lifetime statistics

Nope. Memory error increases with recall window (this is simple common sense) so the most accurate statistic on relative prevalence between men and women will be last year.

if the researchers had picked another year, they might have seen a very different trend.

Every time researchers use the 12-month window they see the same "trend": men are proportionately more victims.

it doesn't really make sense that they would underreport their lifetime sexual violence

Yes it does. The two questions are:

1) Were you forced into sex in the last year?

2) Were you forced into sex in your lifetime?

Memory recall errors increase over time. This argument is essentially saying that if a person can accurately remember an event that happened six months ago, they can accurately remember it if it happened six years ago or sixty years ago.

No. That's not how memory works. Over time it has been proven to conform to social stereotypes.

The other issue is that without survivor services many male victims are likely to become marginal as homeless or institutionalized. In order to even take the survey men have to be able to keep a roof over their head and have reasonable access to a phone.

Male survivors are probably less likely to have that over time than female and the further back you look, the more male survivors have slipped through the cracks.

sillymod · 2014-05-01T12:41:18+00:00

These are the same issues that are present when polling women about their experiences of rape.

If you neglect the male data, then you need to neglect the female data at the same time for the same reasons.

nigglereddit · 2014-05-01T12:04:15+00:00

There are numerous serious problems with the CDC's data and agenda but unfortunately a deeply flawed and biased source is still all we have.

The first problem is the CDC doesn't really believe men can be raped, and they try to erase those cases by reimagining them as a special kind of sexual assault.

The second is that as your commentator points out there is a serious discrepancy between the 12 month and lifetime figures. But she gets them back to front: the 12 month figure is assaults on men which definitely happened, the lifetime is an extrapolation not a measurement. Extrapolations are not better than measurements; it's far more likely that the lifetime figure is wrong based on the what we definitely know from the 12 month. If the commentator believes that the single year measured was somehow an anomaly and the rest of the time men are not assaulted this way, she must provide support for that claim.

BlackMRA-edtastic · 2014-05-01T17:31:15+00:00

The simplest way to debunk this nonsense is to assert 12 month statistics track current trends while lifetime statistics do not.

Feminists are busy trying to protect their victim privilege by rigging the means of assessing who qualifies as a victim. They aren't interested in helping 'victims' so much as empowering themselves to play the victim more effectively than men.

guywithaccount · 2014-05-01T14:04:58+00:00

The reason that the 12 month data looks so dramatically different is that you're taken a much smaller subset of the full data- if the researchers had picked another year, they might have seen a very different trend.

This assumes that the amount of sexual violence fluctuates wildly from year to year, which doesn't seem likely.

TracyMorganFreeman · 2014-05-01T16:36:36+00:00

Correct one is lifetime? Only if men and women characterize their abuse over their lifetime upon being interviewed the same way.

Unfortunately they don't. On my phone so can't link the source but a study looked into adults with documented child abuse. When interviewed 64% of women and 16% of men characterized it as abuse.

By a staggering coincidence the ratio of female to male lifetime statistics is also 4:1.

MRSPArchiver · 2014-05-01T10:30:52+00:00

Post text automatically copied here. (Why?) (Report a problem.)

Jacobtk · 2014-05-02T03:46:52+00:00

I do truly hate lazy logic:

The correct data to use to compare the incidence of rape for women and men is the lifetime statistics

There is no "correct" data to use. The 12-month numbers are included in the lifetime numbers. The purpose of splitting the results is to show the potential rate of sexual violence in the most recent year. The commenter is correct that the rates could vary depending on the selected year (although the smaller subset of respondents should not affect the rate this much). However, we do not have that data. The data we do have shows that men reported a higher rate sexual victimization in 2010 compared to their lifetime experiences. That should raise eyebrows because one would not expect to see such a dramatic difference in the rates.

unless you're saying that the rape of children or teenagers shouldn't count As far as I can tell, the researchers did not count those acts as rape per se. In most states, any sexual intercourse with a child under 12 counts as rape, but the researchers did not use that definition.

You'll notice it isn't even enough data to show that penetrative rape even exists for men- which obviously it does, when you include the full lifetime data (for 1, 581, 000 men).

The commenter should also have noticed that the researchers did not include the reported number of penetrative rapes for men during the 12-month at all. The researchers withheld that information, and they did not state what criteria they used to decide what counted as too few reports. It could be dozens, hundreds, or thousands.

If you subset your data and find 1) a wildly different trend and 2) it isn't capable of picking up trends you know are there from your full dataset, then the subset is not as "correct" as the full dataset.

That would make sense if we were not dealing with a crime we know men are less likely to report even on anonymous studies. We know that older men are less likely to discuss their abuse. We also know that most of the respondents were older men, mostly in the 30s and 40s. This is the very group who are less likely to report abuse. We also know that younger men are more likely to come forward. That would be consistent with the results for the 12-month period.

Ironically, the 12-month dataset is consistent for women. It matches the lifetime results. So the issue is less likely that 12-month results for men are wrong. It is more likely that they reflect the way men report their abuse.

Rape and sexual violence perpetrated against men is terrible and important to talk about, but it is not factually true to say that rape is equally likely to happen to men and women.

Except the 12-month results state the opposite. According to them, in 2010 men were raped as often as women were, if one counts being forced to penetrate as rape. That is an uncomfortable fact for feminists, but it is nevertheless a fact in the results of a feminist-created study.

The study specifically counts "forced to penetrate" as a category of sexual violence, and it asks about experiences, not whether the person would be legally labeled a victim or not.

The study specifically excludes "being forced to penetrate" as rape despite it being counted as rape in most states. The researchers actually gave their reason for the exclusion:

"As an example of prevalence differences between the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey and other surveys, the lifetime prevalence estimate of rape for men in this report is lower than what has been reported in other surveys (e.g., for forced sex more broadly) (Basile, Chen, Black, & Saltzman, 2007). This could be due in part to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey making a distinction between rape and being made to penetrate someone else. Being made to penetrate is a form of sexual victimization distinct from rape that is particularly unique to males and, to our knowledge, has not been explicitly measured in previous national studies. It is possible that rape questions in prior studies captured the experience of being made to penetrate someone else, resulting in higher prevalence estimates for male rape in those studies." That quote shows that the researchers were aware that a) being forced to penetrate legally counts as rape, b) that other researchers count as rape, and c) that excluding it from rape would drastically lower their study's resulting prevalence figures.

It also asks the same subjects for their 12 month and lifetime experience, so it doesn't really make sense that they would underreport their lifetime sexual violence while accurately reporting their 12 month sexual violence because they didn't consider themselves to be victims. That bias would affect both time periods.

Written like one who does not know male survivors. I have met plenty of men who saw more recent assaults as rape but did not see earlier assaults as rape. There are many reasons for that, ranging from the sex of the rapist to the circumstances of the assault to the degree of violence used. It is inaccurate to claim that a person will view all acts committed against them in the same light.

dejour · 2014-05-01T17:34:34+00:00

I think that the other commenters have an important point when they are talking about memory becoming less reliable for longer durations.

That said, I think the Jezebel commenter has a point that from a statistical point of view, the lifetime numbers are more reliable.

If you took stats class, the standard error for the estimate of p is sqrt(p(1-p)/n). (with a binomial distribution)

p is the probability of someone being a victim (1-p) is the probability of someone not being a victim and n is the number of people asked

95% confidence intervals for p would be p +/- 1.96 x sqrt(p x (1-p)/n)

eg. Assume that n=1000, p=1.1%

There's a 95% chance the true value of p is between 0.45% and 1.75%.

For lifetime data, take n=1000, p=4.8%

There's a 95% chance that the true value of p is between 3.48% and 6.12%.

So you can see from this that there is a decent chance that the true value of p is only 41% as high as reported in the 1-year data. But the lower limit for p is 72% of our estimate for the lifetime data.

Beyond that, you have to consider that people sometimes lie on surveys. Suppose 1% of people screw around with surveys and the other 99% answer as best as they can.

If you are asking "Are you male or female?", you'd expect to see a number close to 50%. Suppose 1% of people lie. You might end up with 49% or 51% but you'd still get pretty close to 50%.

The impact of lies becomes more dramatic the closer you get to 0 or 100%. Suppose that 1% of people lie and that the question is "Are you in the richest 1% of people?". Well, you're probably going to get an answer close to 2% because most of the liars won't be in the top 1%. And the difference between the true number of 1% and the survey answer of 2% is kind of big, proportionally.

On the other hand if the question was , "Are you in the top 5%", and 1% of people lied, you'd get an answer of 0.99x0.05+0.01x0.95 = 5.9%. 5.9% is different than 5% but it's not a horrible estimate.

My belief is that men's victimization is significantly higher than what you see in the lifetime figures. But that the 1-year data is uncertain enough that you can't conclusively say that men are victimized almost as much as women. Hopefully with all this attention, more research will be conducted on male victims of women, and we'll have a better grasp on the answer in the next few years.

StrawRedditor · 2014-05-01T19:07:17+00:00

Let's compare it to average salaries.

Let's say men and women were surveyed, and asked what their average salary was in the last 30 years. Now for the sake of simplicity, let's say women only entered the work force 15 years ago.

So a womans answer to the question would be $0 for 15 years, and then from year 16-30, and on average let's say they started at $20,000 a year and went up another $2000 a year until they made $50,000 a year.

When when were asked, let's say they started at $35,000 a year and went up $500 a year until they made $50,000.

Now, the average salary per year for each gender:

Men: $42,500
Women: $17,500

The last 12-month rate:

Men: $50,000
Women: $50,000

Now, the averaged salary per year (multiply by 30 if you want total lifetime earnings) would be equivalent to the lifetime rate of rape.

The last 12-months rate of pay would be equivalent to the 12-month rate of rape.

If you were trying to decide whether genders were paid equally, and you needed this information to try and make a decision about what to do in the future... which numbers do you think are more relevant?

HTARCADE · 2014-05-01T20:21:39+00:00

Thank you everyone for the responses I'm very grateful. I didn't have knowledge to properly argue her but I knew her argument sounded wrong but couldn't pinpoint why exactly. As opposed to making a emotional argument I wanted to challenge her points logically and rationally, thank you all again.

Viewers Note: this is the original article and this comment was in the comments below.

http://powderroom.jezebel.com/the-study-specifically-counts-forced-to-penetrate-as-1570169765

DavidByron2 · 2014-05-01T20:56:34+00:00

Here's a big clue: if someone only says something on a board that censors, then they know they have no real case.

Well it looks like plenty of other people have answered so I'll just check that nothing was missed out. But the bottom line is that to get to the bottom of this stuff you need people on both sides to put their criticisism directly to their opponent. Feminists will never do that.

I will say one thing which I bet others here missed which is that the NISVS figures were not without precedent by any means. This isn't as new as you might think. "New" meaning it's not just since December 2010 when that survey came out. It's just become increasing hard for the feminists to bury this data recently.

It is however true that we need more data really. Yes the data could be off. maybe men are raped two or three times more often than women. Maybe the reverse. All we know for sure is that all the old data the feminists used mean nothing because nobody bothered to ask men if they were raped before fairly recently. You can't claim women are raped more based on figures where you ignore male victims.

timoppenheimer · 2014-05-02T20:04:59+00:00

The person, in discounting the 12 month data, is essentially saying that the variance from the numbers are too great from year to year for the numbers of a given year to be accurate. From this data, there is no way to know if this is correct or incorrect. There are other ways to tell, however. The answer has to do with the standard deviation.

If I were to try to determine whether standard deviation is enough of a variable from year to year to explain this spike in 2010 (I'll just let you know, before I continue, that this explanation is false), I would pick a similar, related stat that I can find from year to year, like female rape. Then I would take, say, 20 years' annual rape stats and find the standard deviation on these numbers. Then I would find the statistical probability of a...

Actually, this person is claiming that rape of MEN shows high variability from year to year. There's no way to know without numbers going back further for men. Proving low variability in rape of women doesn't show the same for men.

So here's what I think: 1.1 percent of women experienced rape in the last 12 months (2009) and 1.1 percent of men were forced to penetrate in the last 12 months (2009). The lifetime data is that 4.8% of men were forced to penetrate (raped) and 18.4% of women were raped.

So over the course of a lifetime, the total rapes of women are x18, which tells me that the time we're summing over is around 18 years. if the female values are assumed to be true, then there are around 18 years of someone reporting "I was raped" between when a person is raped and when that person dies and leaves the stats (we're assuming people report for the entirety of their lifetime and that the only reason to not have reporting in a given year is that the rape victim is dead or the rape victim hasn't been raped yet).

Are you with me? the average length of time over which a person reports his/her rape is 18 years if that person reports for the entirety of his or her lifetime.

So here are those calculations for men:

18 x 1.1%=18.8% (which we'll call 18.4% because that's what it actually turned into for women). The actual number for men is 4.8%.

18.4-4.8=13.6. We'll round down to 13 years to give this feminist the benefit of the doubt.

So that means that if this person's explanation is true, the following statement is true, on average, over a lifetime:

In a man's lifetime, there are ~4 years like 2009 in terms of men getting forced to penetrate, followed by more than 13 years of 0 men being forced to penetrate on average.

Another way this could play out:

After 2009, the rate of men raped per year falls to (4.8-1.1)/17=0.2% of men being raped per year for the next 17 years after 2009. In other words, 2009 had 5 times as many female-on-male rapes as any of the years before or after it.

There could also be some combination of the two, where some years had 0 men forced to penetrate, another year might have had 0.4% of all men forced to penetrate... The point is that no year for the 17 years around 2009 (before or after) would have anywhere near 1.1% of men being raped.

Do you see my math? And do you see how ridiculous it is as an explanation to say that, with no further explanation, this was just a really bad year for female sexual aggression against men? What happened?

The Jezebel comment also opens up the possibility that its just men raping men in a given year. Actually, this is unlikely to account for the discrepancy seen because (1) male-on-male rape is rarely men forcing other men to penetrate the rapist and (2) that doesn't explain why the numbers would be so much higher in a given year and then drop off for lifetime.

The model I propose is that men feel shame at getting raped by women and they can't talk to anyone, so after a while they stop thinking of what happened as rape because it is painful and doesn't result in men being helped, in general, by society in the way that women are. we all seem to agree that we should help when a man rapes another man, so that doesn't explain the disappearance of the rape victims. Only the model of men ashamed of their female rapists explains all of the possibilities.

Thoughts?

CaptainAirstripOne · 2014-05-01T21:16:04+00:00

These fights over which is more prevalent are stupid. If men are raped in fewer numbers, does that make male rape less important? What about the reverse?

When feminists are so adamant that rape is a horrible and traumatic experience (some seem to think it's worse than murder), then you'd think they wouldn't give two shits about demographic numbers.

Juan_Golt · 2014-05-01T22:02:56+00:00

The correct answer is that this level of statistical quibbling doesn't matter. It doubly doesn't matter who comes in 'first' in the sexual assault category.

We shouldn't be trying to argue who is 'more victimised'. Simply that male victims do exist, and in non-trivial numbers. That regardless of who is in the 'lead' it doesn't justify any of the gender based services/protection/prosecution.

Title	Jezebel commentator debunks rape statistic claiming men are raped almost as much as women
Author	HTARCADE
Upvotes	42
Comments	32
Date	May 1, 2014 10:30 AM UTC (12 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/mensrights/comments/24g1wh/jezebel-commentator-debunks-rape-statistic-/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/jezebel-commentator-debunks-rape-statistic.1616784 https://theredarchive.com/post/1616784

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