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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?
There are a lot of writeups on the "1 in 4" claim. Here is a particularly critical one which concludes:
Most of the time when I have pointed this out to someone touting "1 in 4," they've been pretty quick to retreat to the rhetoric of "even one is one too many." Women have a lot more to fear from men, than vice versa, and very nearly all women have a story they can tell you about sexual mistreatment (that may or may not rise to the level of "assault"). So it is perhaps understandable why people might be susceptible to exaggerated claims on the matter--but also, the pattern is common across a variety of objectionable activity; police brutality is also far less common than people tend to believe, for example.
This is pretty much where I am regarding these figures. Just about all women have stories of being cat called, groped, had guys act menacing when turned down, or the like. I'm also at the point of believing women when they point out that some unassuming dude in our social network has a rep for being creepy with their DM's or behaviour towards women when no other guys are around (in a real sense like leering at, touching, or hitting on another guy's girlfriend for instance). I remember a socially awkward friend of mine that I had to tell off for leering when my girlfriend at the time complained. To his credit he pulled his head in and changed his behaviour.
But that's about it. I consider most of Feminism's claims to be deliberately misinterpreted statistics like the above for the purpose of reaching their political goals.
I've been in situations at a club or a party where a guy has tried to lift my shirt or grab my ass when I've made it clear that I'm straight. It's not fun and made me genuinely upset when it's happened, but its not rape and didn't warrant filing a police report of all things.
I think there needs to be a distinction between boorish behavior and sexual assault. We should condemn the boorish behavior but it is different in kind; not just degree from sexual assault. Feminism has sought to blur the distinction.
Agreed. There's political value in equivocating statistics like that. Same deal with gun death statistics being used by gun control advocates, but avoiding mention that some may be suicides. Or defining both slapping with an open hand and beating someone with a baseball bat as 'assault'.
Boorish behaviour and groping isn't rape. It's bad and should be stamped out, but its not on the same level.
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