Is the Western World anti-man?

Kev W wrote: »

Why are you comparing statistics for childless women to statistics for men? I'm not disputing your numbers (though a source would be nice), it just feels like an odd discrepancy. If both groups are with or without children does that effect the statistics?

I gave a source, try clicking on the word Source. Here it is again.. That's from the National Women's council of Ireland's report BTW.

As for the vague statistics on rape you dismissed, do you have a source on which to base your dismissal? I can only assume that you're claiming that whatever the actual statistics are are incorrect. What do you base that on?

The Koss study(and I use the term broadly) was the one that kicked this "one in four" stuff off back in the 1980's and the methodology was so full of holes it would pass fair muster as a colander. It has since been repeated so often it has become a "fact", even a meme.

US gov led studies(PDF) into the reported incidence of sexual violence* in the wider US shows at worst 5 in a 1000 women in 1995(the rates of what they term "completed rape" actually dropped from nearly 4 to under 2 per 1000 women from 1995-2010). These are averages taken over two year periods. So how do we get that figure up to one of 250 per 1000 women? Unless we want to believe that US colleges are rape centers of a level that would suggest sending in the national guard to control it. Interestingly, the colleges themselves by law have to compile and provide reported crime stats on campus - Example 1/Example 2 - and their stats reflect the wider national stats the government study found, not within an asses roar of "one in four".

Let's take another government study(PDF) that seems to back the high figure up. As an exercise take out all other criteria of sexual victimisation and just look at the stats for completed rapes. This comes to just under 2% of those surveyed. 2% is still far too many BTW.

However even looking at that 2% of would be defined in the common mind as "obvious rape" the report states;

"In each incident report, respondents were asked, “Do you consider this incident to be a rape?”. For the 86 incidents categorized as a completed rape, 46.5 percent (n = 40) of the women answered “yes,” 48.8 percent (n = 42) answered “no,” and 4.7 percent (n = 4) answered “don’t know.”".

So of the women in the study whose experience was considered to be clear cut, no question rape, nearly half of them didn't consider it to be. Now of course sexual assault is a minefield of horrible emotional upset and people can easily blot out an incident or pass it off at the time, but when half of a survey of people who apparently fit the bill of full on rape state that they don't consider it such other questions have to be asked. In the original "1 in 4" Koss study this figure was even higher. 73% of those women didn't consider it rape(and 40 odd per cent of them continued sleeping with the same guy).

Overall the stats for the USA where most of this stuff originates and is repeated verbatim as "the Truth(™)" elsewhere and especially among your third wave feminists show a figure far more in keeping with at the extreme 1 in 30, which is too damned high, but an asses roar away from 1 in 3/4/5/6. Oh and rape stats have been consistently dropping in the US of A in the last decades(DNA and the like making if far easier to trace and convict).

Now when this gets debated the response of the naysayers to hard stats usually runs along the lines of 1) one rape is too many. No really? You don't say? 2) What number would you think acceptable? Passive aggressive nonsense designed to deflect and of course avoid comment on their skewed makeyuppy stats, 3) Sexism!!, great argument, not. I've even seen "rape enabler". Yep. 4) That's only reported crimes. Yep it is but they're the only reliable statistics we can hope to run with, otherwise we're just pulling figures out of the air for emotional effect.