Rape Victims Don't Know They Were Raped

[CBL4]

Nearly 10 percent of the female students surveyed at Washington State University reported they had been victims of attempted rape, and 8.5 percent said they had been raped while enrolled at the Pullman school, a new study found.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2002757854_webwsu23.html

If this were real it would be horrible but of course it is a lie:

In the study, only 24.7 percent of the females and 12.5 percent of the males who experienced forced sex labeled it as rape, said the report authored by Thomas Brigham, Gretal Liebniz and Samantha Swindell of WSU.

In other words Brigham, Liebniz and Swindell had an agenda and decided that they knew better than the victims whether a rape had actually occur.

I do not mean to downplay the fact that about 2.5% percent of the students were raped. This is horrible. But by pretending the other women are too stupid to know if they were raped, this study trivialized the real rapes.

BTW, the real percentages are probably much lower still. The authors contacted 7000 students but only 2500 responded. This is a notoriously bad method of getting accurate results.

CBL

 

[Art Vandelay]

Nearly 10 percent of the female students surveyed at Washington State University reported they had been victims of attempted rape, and 8.5 percent said they had been raped while enrolled at the Pullman school, a new study found.

Apparently, by "surveyed", they really mean "answered". And by "said", they mean "were interpreted as saying". If they didn't label it as rape, how could they say that it's rape?

I do not mean to downplay the fact that about 2.5% percent of the students were raped.

Or at least, reported they were raped. Now that the question of whether "rape" actually means "rape" has been raised, do we know that those that claimed to be raped were? Perhaps they, like those in charge of the survey, are playing with the truth. That's the trouble with radical feminists. They cast everything into doubt.

 

[Kiless]

That's the trouble with radical feminists. They cast everything into doubt.

Why 'radical feminists'?

 

[Art Vandelay]

Because I don't think all feminists do this. Some are honest, but the radical ones give them a bad name.

 

[Mycroft]

When I was in college there was a radical feminist organization that floated a pamphlet to "educate" people about rape, and it essentially said that if a guy didn't stop and verbally ask permission before holding a girl’s hand, putting his arm around her, or kissing her, that he was guilty of rape. Heck, even then you could be guilty if she had a drink or something.

 

[Dancing David]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2002757854_webwsu23.html

I do not mean to downplay the fact that about 2.5% percent of the students were raped. This is horrible. But by pretending the other women are too stupid to know if they were raped, this study trivialized the real rapes.

CBL

Ah, nothing like rape revisionism in the morning!

I take it that for some reason you could not find how they defined rape or you chose not to lists that.
And of course you use a word like strupid because you are objective and unbiased?

The issue of rape is that it is non-consesual sex, it does not have to be forced by physical violence, but it can be non-consensual for a wide variety of reasons that a victim might not label as rape. Given that american culture acts like having testicles allows you to demand sex from unwilling partners, how often do you think a victim might not call rape as rape?

And for the statistics, well this is part of crime reporting by all sorts of victims but don't let that deter you from being a sceptic and touting 'sceince' when it suits your political agenda.

 

[Dancing David]

That's the trouble with radical feminists. They cast everything into doubt.

And the problem with our society that labels date rape as consensual, marital rape as sanctioned by god and child rape as acceptable partenting. Not to mention the use of alcohol and having non-consensual sex with people who are passed out and calling it something other than rape.

You haven't presented evidence that the authors of the study altered the data or used a higher standard of rape than non-consensual sex, so where is your evidence that they are radical feminists?

 

[Dancing David]

These sure are the articles I would expect a radical feminist to publish!

Lindemann, D., Brigham, T.A., Harbke, C. and Alexander, T. (2005) Toward Errorless Condom Use: A Comparison of Two Courses to Improve Condom Use Skills. AIDS and Behavior 18, 35-42

Brigham, T.A., Donahoe, P., Gilbert, B., Thomas, N., Zemke, S., Koonce, D., and Horn, P. (2002) Psychology and AIDS education: Reducing high risk sexual behavior. Behavior and Social Issues, 12, 10-18.

Lindemann, D. and Brigham, T. A. (2002). A Guttman scale to assess condom use skills among college students. AIDS and Behavior, 15, 23-28.

Godat, L., and Brigham, T.A.(1999).The effects of self-management training program on employees of a mid-sized organization. Journal of Organizational Behavior,19, 65-83.

Peeler, C., Far, J., Miller, J. and Brigham, T.A.(2000). An analysis of the effects of a program to reduce heavy drinking among college students. Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education, 39-54

Brigham, T.A. (1989). Self-management for Adolescents. New York: Guilford Press.

Brigham, T.A. (2005). Psychology Applied to Daily Living: Dealing with friends, school, alcohol, and sex 2nd edition. Boston: Pearson Publishers.

I will look up the other two after work, since they aren't listed on the faculty directory I am assuming they are graduate student.

 

[aerocontrols]

And the problem with our society that labels date rape as consensual, marital rape as sanctioned by god and child rape as acceptable partenting. Not to mention the use of alcohol and having non-consensual sex with people who are passed out and calling it something other than rape.

Your bias is showing.

 

[aerocontrols]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2002757854_webwsu23.html

If this were real it would be horrible but of course it is a lie:
In other words Brigham, Liebniz and Swindell had an agenda and decided that they knew better than the victims whether a rape had actually occur.

I do not mean to downplay the fact that about 2.5% percent of the students were raped. This is horrible. But by pretending the other women are too stupid to know if they were raped, this study trivialized the real rapes.

BTW, the real percentages are probably much lower still. The authors contacted 7000 students but only 2500 responded. This is a notoriously bad method of getting accurate results.

CBL

I'm not following your math. If 8.5% reported they had been victims of an attempted rape, and 25% of those labelled their forced sex experience as rape, then isn't the article saying that about 35% of these women experienced forced sex?

 

[C.J.]

I do not mean to downplay the fact that about 2.5% percent of the students were raped. This is horrible. But by pretending the other women are too stupid to know if they were raped, this study trivialized the real rapes.

First thing: where did you get the 2.5%? The figures I read were 8.5% for women, 1.8% for men.

Secondly, as someone familiar with research on prevalence of sexual assault, I can speak to your concern. Let's say there are two questions that are part of a survey. One asks: "Have you ever had sex with someone when you didn't want to because they threatened to use physical force against you?" Another question is "Have you ever been raped?" It is possible to answer these two questions differently, and when there are differences the only data I've ever seen show women answering "yes" to the first question and "no" to the second. This group has been referred to as "unacknowledged rape victims" because they report experiencing an event that meets legal definitions of rape (the first question), but do not identify it as such (the second question).

Why this occurs is an open question. Many explanations I've read suggest that it's a self-definitional thing on the woman's part; she only sees rapes as being perpetrated by strangers, for example, so she doesn't define what her husband or boyfriend did as rape. Another explanation involves a self-defensive mechanism, wherein a woman doesn't want to identify as being a rape victim because of the stigma attached to it.

In any case, the implication that the lack of willingness to acknowledge one's status as a rape victim somehow trivializes "real" rape victims is a significant misconception; unacknowledged victims are as "real" rape victims as anyone else. From my perspective, I might argue that your argument trivializes the real rape experiences of unacknowledged victims.

BTW, the real percentages are probably much lower still. The authors contacted 7000 students but only 2500 responded. This is a notoriously bad method of getting accurate results.

Not really, no. It's entirely possible there is a response bias, but that's inherent in the method of distributing the survey, not in the response rate. A sample size of 2500 for a single-site internet survey isn't bad.

 

[Jekyll]

I'm not following your math. If 8.5% reported they had been victims of an attempted rape, and 25% of those labelled their forced sex experience as rape, then isn't the article saying that about 35% of these women experienced forced sex?

No, because you multiply, rather than add, the probabilities as you are talking about 24% of 8% of the whole population.

so 8.5% *24.7% =2.1% of women say they have been raped.

Which is still a scarily high number.

In the study, only 24.7 percent of the females and 12.5 percent of the males who experienced forced sex labeled it as rape

In the category of sexual coercion, 8.5 percent of females and 1.8 percent of males reported they suffered forced sexual penetration

 

[C.J.]

In other words Brigham, Liebniz and Swindell had an agenda and decided that they knew better than the victims whether a rape had actually occur.

Thought this deserved a separate mention. Most researchers in the area sexual assault use legal definitions of rape to set their criteria for inclusion into groups of victims and non-victims. Assuming (and it is an assumption, since I haven't read the original study) that Brigham et al. are following the conventions in psychological studies, they are probably closer to being agendaless than anything else. Unless you want to argue that legal definitions of rape in Washington state are based on some kind of agenda....

 

[Mercutio]

C.J.'s analysis of the questions that might have been asked is spot on.

One can think of this, if it is less inflammatory, not as a matter of bias but as a matter of competing operational definitions. In any scientific investigation, the researchers must operationally define their variables, and there is no one perfect way to operationalize any construct. In sex research in particular, self-report data can be wildly different depending on definitions; for this reason, it is imperative that multiple different operational definitions are used. (one survey famously showed that the majority of American adolescents did not define oral or anal sex as sex, so could be very experienced and yet call themselves virgins.)

In the study of rape, many studies have shown that men can engage in an activity that satisfies both the experimental operationalization of rape, and the legal definition of rape, and yet honestly believe that they have not raped. Is this feminism tainting research results? No, of course not. It is the normal practice of science. We disagree on operationalizations all the time, and we (usually) emerge with a consensus, or perhaps a meta-analysis that shows the effect of the different operationalizations on our obtained results.

Separate issue--there is often a rather substantial difference between what the researchers conclude, and what a newspaper article says that they conclude.

 

[C.J.]

No, because you multiply, rather than add, the probabilities as you are talking about 24% of 8% of the whole population.

so 8.5% *24.7% =2.1% of women say they have been raped.

Which is still a scarily high number.

Ah! This must be where the 2.5% number came from. Still, this quote from the newspaper article

In the category of sexual coercion, 8.5 percent of females and 1.8 percent of males reported they suffered forced sexual penetration (italics added)

indicates that while 2.1% of women say they were raped, 8.5% of women had an experience that meets legal criteria for rape, likely for rape in the first degree in Washington state (assuming "force" in the question tracks onto "forcible compulsion" in the statute).

 

[Kiless]

Thanks Merc and C.J. I was getting a little worried if this was turning into a thread I usually avoid.

 

[aerocontrols]

No, because you multiply, rather than add, the probabilities as you are talking about 24% of 8% of the whole population.

so 8.5% *24.7% =2.1% of women say they have been raped.

Which is still a scarily high number.

I wasn't adding.

24.7 percent of the females... who experienced forced sex labeled it as rape

So, there were X% of females who experienced forced sex, and a quarter of them labelled it as rape.

And from his original post:

8.5 percent [of female students] said they had been raped while enrolled at the Pullman school, a new study found.

If 8.5% say "I was raped" and only about 25% of the women who experienced rape labelled it as such, then 8.5% * 4 = 34% of them experienced it.

The more precise wording you quoted from later in the article clears up my issue, of course.

A correct version of the end of the lead paragraph would be written as:

and 8.5 percent said they had suffered forced sexual penetration while enrolled at the Pullman school, a new study found.

which agrees with the wording later in the article.

 

[Jekyll]

I wasn't adding.

You know how it is....I always assume the most stupid mistake is the most likely .

I still want to know what definition of 'forced' is being used.

 

[Beerina]

Physical rape, or coercion? Remember "Rather, sexual pressure ushers, guides or shepherds the process of sexual awakening."

 

[Ladewig]

And the problem with our society that labels date rape as consensual, marital rape as sanctioned by god and child rape as acceptable partenting.

I read of rape perps claiming the first two items on your list, but I have never heard of the third. Do you have a citation for anyone claiming that?