This past weekend, my girlfriend and I went to see the new Barbie movie. I had heard the movie was a new battle in the culture war, so I was going into the theater with trepidation. My girlfriend is woke-adjacent, so navigating these culture war topics with her can feel like the glass bridge in Squid Game. I will spare you commentary on the movie, since I’m sure most people here are already familiar with the details.
Fast forward to our discussion of the movie afterward. My overall opinion was the movie was an extremely inaccurate portrayal of reality, exaggerated to such a degree as to make the modern world unrecognizable. My girlfriend thought it was brilliant, and a searing indictment of patriarchy. I was navigating the glass bridge as well as I could, until I said I thought the scene was unrealistic where Barbie was sexually assaulted in broad daylight next to her boyfriend 5 minutes into their entry into the real world. Cue glass shattering and me plunging onto the concrete. This led to a fight about the state of women in the US in 2023, with the frequency of sexual assault coming up. My girlfriend stated 1 in 4 women experienced sexual assault in their lifetime and I needed to “educate myself”. We did talk things through and ended with a better understanding of each other’s views.
Not having too much familiarity with sexual assault stats, I couldn’t comment on it at the time, except for having a slight bias to thinking that was exaggerated. Either in terms of including a whole bucket of actions we wouldn’t consider sexual assault, or activist data cleaning and feature engineering.
Today I started investigating and found one of the luminaries on the subject, RAINN. RAINN has detailed statistics with citations. According to their victims of sexual violence statistics page, 1 in 6 women are victims of rape or completed rape. We aren’t talking catcalling on the street here, or clumsy come-ons in the workplace.
Fortunately, they posted their citations in detail. Chief among them is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). From the “Understanding RAINN’s Statistics” section:
Sexual violence is notoriously difficult to measure, and there is no single source of data that provides a complete picture of the crime. On RAINN’s website, we have tried to select the most reliable source of statistics for each topic. The primary data source we use is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which is an annual study conducted by the Justice Department. To conduct NCVS, researchers interview tens of thousands of Americans each year to learn about crimes that they’ve experienced. Based on those interviews, the study provides estimates of the total number of crimes, including those that were not reported to police. While NCVS has a number of limitations (most importantly, children under age 12 are not included), overall, it is the most reliable source of crime statistics in the U.S.>
Fantastic, let’s take a look at what the NCVS says. Zooming in on the sexual assault statistics in particular reveals some incredible details.
Table 1: Number and rate of violent victimizations by type of crime, 2015-2019 (only including Rape/sexual assault for brevity)
Year | Number | Rate per 1,000
2015 | 431,840 | 1.6
2016 | 298,410 | 1.1
2017 | 393,980 | 1.4
2018 | 734,630 | 2.7
2019 | 459,310 | 1.7
Note: this table includes completed, attempted, and threatened occurrences of those crimes.
First impression is 2018 as a massive statistical outlier. My instinct is this was caused my me-too rather than reflecting an underlying increase in violence. It could be either it’s become more normalized to speak up against sexual violence, people more likely to identity threats of sexual assault, and/or participate in a social movement.
In terms of the rates themselves, about 90% of sexual assault victims are women, so let’s adjust these rates. Just some back of the envelope math, but (rate per 1,000) * (proportion of women SA victims) * (adjusting rate to only include women) = 1.6 * .9 * 2 = 2.88. So about 2.88 women per 1,000 are victims of sexual assault.
So how do we get to the lifetime figure? Well, just multiply the figure by average life expectancy! 2.88 * 80 = 230.4 and there you go! 1 in 4 women experience sexual assault in their lifetime.
Of course we need to factor in revictimization and then disinter threatened from committed/attempted. Let’s look at the second first.
Table 21: Number and percent of persons who were victims of serious crime, 2015-2019 (only including Rape/sexual assault excluding threats and no-force contact for brevity)
Year | Number | Percent of persons
2015 | 164,880 | .06%
2016 | 131,760 | .05%
2017 | 144,280 | .05%
2018 | 254,320 | .09%
2019 | 168,860 | .06%
Note: Excludes threatened rape or sexual assault, and unwanted sexual contact (not rape) without force.
Adjusted percent would be 0.108%. Multiply by average life expectancy, and you get 8.6%. So if we completely ignore revictimization, then you are looking at an absolute upper bound of 8%.
This is the most favorable possible analysis I could give, and I can’t get anywhere near that 1 in 4 to 1 in 6 level. You would need to have some inflation factor based on lying on survey responses. Maybe 90s crime boom would factor in as well to get you there.
Given what we know about crime clustering, I wouldn’t be surprised if revictimization rates dropped the figure closer to 1%.
p
Imagination, truth is your creation
This past weekend, my girlfriend and I went to see the new Barbie movie. I had heard the movie was a new battle in the culture war, so I was going into the theater with trepidation. My girlfriend is woke-adjacent, so navigating these culture war topics with her can feel like the glass bridge in Squid Game. I will spare you commentary on the movie, since I’m sure most people here are already familiar with the details.
Fast forward to our discussion of the movie afterward. My overall opinion was the movie was an extremely inaccurate portrayal of reality, exaggerated to such a degree as to make the modern world unrecognizable. My girlfriend thought it was brilliant, and a searing indictment of patriarchy. I was navigating the glass bridge as well as I could, until I said I thought the scene was unrealistic where Barbie was sexually assaulted in broad daylight next to her boyfriend 5 minutes into their entry into the real world. Cue glass shattering and me plunging onto the concrete. This led to a fight about the state of women in the US in 2023, with the frequency of sexual assault coming up. My girlfriend stated 1 in 4 women experienced sexual assault in their lifetime and I needed to “educate myself”. We did talk things through and ended with a better understanding of each other’s views.
Not having too much familiarity with sexual assault stats, I couldn’t comment on it at the time, except for having a slight bias to thinking that was exaggerated. Either in terms of including a whole bucket of actions we wouldn’t consider sexual assault, or activist data cleaning and feature engineering.
Today I started investigating and found one of the luminaries on the subject, RAINN. RAINN has detailed statistics with citations. According to their victims of sexual violence statistics page, 1 in 6 women are victims of rape or completed rape. We aren’t talking catcalling on the street here, or clumsy come-ons in the workplace.
Fortunately, they posted their citations in detail. Chief among them is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). From the “Understanding RAINN’s Statistics” section:
Fantastic, let’s take a look at what the NCVS says. Zooming in on the sexual assault statistics in particular reveals some incredible details.
Table 1: Number and rate of violent victimizations by type of crime, 2015-2019 (only including Rape/sexual assault for brevity)
Year | Number | Rate per 1,000
2015 | 431,840 | 1.6
2016 | 298,410 | 1.1
2017 | 393,980 | 1.4
2018 | 734,630 | 2.7
2019 | 459,310 | 1.7
Note: this table includes completed, attempted, and threatened occurrences of those crimes.
First impression is 2018 as a massive statistical outlier. My instinct is this was caused my me-too rather than reflecting an underlying increase in violence. It could be either it’s become more normalized to speak up against sexual violence, people more likely to identity threats of sexual assault, and/or participate in a social movement.
In terms of the rates themselves, about 90% of sexual assault victims are women, so let’s adjust these rates. Just some back of the envelope math, but (rate per 1,000) * (proportion of women SA victims) * (adjusting rate to only include women) = 1.6 * .9 * 2 = 2.88. So about 2.88 women per 1,000 are victims of sexual assault.
So how do we get to the lifetime figure? Well, just multiply the figure by average life expectancy! 2.88 * 80 = 230.4 and there you go! 1 in 4 women experience sexual assault in their lifetime.
Of course we need to factor in revictimization and then disinter threatened from committed/attempted. Let’s look at the second first.
Table 21: Number and percent of persons who were victims of serious crime, 2015-2019 (only including Rape/sexual assault excluding threats and no-force contact for brevity)
Year | Number | Percent of persons
2015 | 164,880 | .06%
2016 | 131,760 | .05%
2017 | 144,280 | .05%
2018 | 254,320 | .09%
2019 | 168,860 | .06%
Note: Excludes threatened rape or sexual assault, and unwanted sexual contact (not rape) without force.
Adjusted percent would be 0.108%. Multiply by average life expectancy, and you get 8.6%. So if we completely ignore revictimization, then you are looking at an absolute upper bound of 8%.
This is the most favorable possible analysis I could give, and I can’t get anywhere near that 1 in 4 to 1 in 6 level. You would need to have some inflation factor based on lying on survey responses. Maybe 90s crime boom would factor in as well to get you there.
Given what we know about crime clustering, I wouldn’t be surprised if revictimization rates dropped the figure closer to 1%.
What are your thoughts?
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