Enormous and acrimonious rape thread

[hodgy]

So it's a bit hard to make sex the primary motivation, when those people ARE getting plenty.

Fallacy surely?

Your position is like saying an alcoholic would not steal a bottle of vodka just because they want a drink, given that they are already consuming plenty.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Fallacy surely?

Your position is like saying an alcoholic would not steal a bottle of vodka just because they want a drink, given that they are already consuming plenty.

I agree, I think the assumption that because a person is sexually active, even more sexually active than average, then it follows that they are sexually satisfied is not a safe one. Particularly if that person is a sex offender who may be atypical of the general population.

 

[HansMustermann]

Err, okaaay, since everyone is apparently too busy disbelieving and suspecting foul play to actually look for some publicly available numbers, let me do that for you:

According to this study which explicitly requires penetration to qualify as rape, so we can hopefully ditch the pretense that it's just some lesser crimes that are unreported:

http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/172837.pdf

0.3 percent said they
experienced a completed or attempted rape
in the previous 12 months​

Which incidentally means that the number of rapes must be necessarily a little higher, as some will draw the short straw and be raped more than once in a year. But let's go with 0.3% as the minimum figure we do know.

Now if we look at the rape statistics, e.g., from here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics

For the USA, the number for 2009 is 25.6 reported rapes per 100,000 inhabitants, which means 0.0256%

Which would mean that 0.0256 * 100 / 0.3 = 8.5% of rapes are actually reported. Less if the actual number of rapes is, as I was saying, actually higher than those 0.3% because a few will be raped more than once in a year. And even less if some of the reports are false, as then the actual reported rapes are less, which makes the 0.0256 number above the fraction line lower.

Even assuming that less men than women report a rape and correcting the number accordingly, we still have a figure that's in the ballpark of those 10%.

There, it wasn't that hard, was it? Funny what kind of wonders some elementary arithmetic can do

 

[HansMustermann]

Fallacy surely?

Your position is like saying an alcoholic would not steal a bottle of vodka just because they want a drink, given that they are already consuming plenty.

The point still is that if said alcoholic has the means to get his vodka legally and in fact has plenty of vodka at home, but chooses to steal a bottle anyway, we can still look for why did they make that choice. Saying that he wants a drink is uninformative. Sure he does. But why does he choose to steal it, when it's not necessary for him to get it that way?

There are plenty of alcoholics who don't steal a bottle of booze from the supermarket. In fact, the vast majority of them. So it seems to me still valid to wonder WTH did make someone take the illegal route, unlike the others who didn't. Reducing it to "he wanted a drink" is wrong, because it obscures an essential difference: so did a hundred other guys in that supermarket who didn't steal booze.

 

[Drachasor]

There you go - good job some people are not so lazy*


http://www.broken-rainbow.org.uk/research/Dv crime survey.pdf



*Actually I am really lazy, I'm just doing this to procrastinate from doing something else...

More helpfully:

Seven per cent of women had suffered a serious sexual assault at least once in their lifetime (five per cent of women had been raped and three per cent had suffered another type of serious sexual assault involving penetration of the body). The equivalent figures for such assaults since 16 were five per cent, four per cent and two per cent.

Overall, 1.5 per cent of men had suff e red a serious sexual assault at some point in their lives with 0.9 per cent re p o rting rape. The equivalent figures since 16 were 0.5 per cent and 0.4 per cent.

Also:

The rapist was an intimate in 54 per cent of (worst) cases suff e red since the age of 16, being a husband or partner in 45 per cent and former husband or partner in 9 per cent. A further 29 per cent of the rapists were known to the woman, while only 17 per cent were strangers. Only four per cent were cases of date rape.

However, there might be some concerns on the accuracy of self-reported statistics like this.

 

[timhau]

OK, the 10% figure seems to be a supportable number.

However, there might be some concerns on the accuracy of self-reported statistics like this.

Yeah, there's always that, but in this case, I'd like to see evidence for why we shouldn't trust them. The police do occasionally have to deal with false reports of rape, and there are a number of reasons for why someone would file one. I can't really think of a compelling reason for a false report of rape in a survey questionnaire.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I think consensus about point #4 is now achieved to the satisfaction of all - hurrah!

Any progress on points #1 to #3?

 

[HansMustermann]

Actually, assuming that the roughly same percentage would lie in an anonymous survey as in reports to the police, then that wouldn't move that number I calculated. In effect, by putting them into the same equation as they are, that already implicitly assumes that the same correction factor is to be applied to both, so it evens out.

In practice actually going into that makes it worse.

We already have some idea of how people lie in surveys, because polling companies have to deal with that every time and anthropology actually studies that too. Mostly, people DO actually give wrong answers in surveys, but in the direction of making themselves more socially acceptable. E.g., people from a religious community overstate how often they go to church.

It's not clear at all why someone would feel more socially acceptable if they had been raped recently. In fact, given the prevalence of blaming the victim, it ought to be more socially acceptable to NOT have been raped. See why it's that underreported to the police in the first place.

So actually one would expect it to also be under-reported in surveys. Because, again, people tend to skew the answers away from what gives them some blame, even if it's an anonymous survey.

Which actually would make the actual number of rapes higher, and thus the reported percentage even lower.

But since we don't know by how much, well, let's go with the numbers we do have.

 

[HansMustermann]

I'll ignore your tone and focus on the data... so this all comes down to one guy's opinion, published in 1979? That's a small peg to hang a big claim on.

I said it started from there, so now pretending that ALL the data is that, is frankly stupid. If you want to ask for more data, ask for more data, don't do such distortions.

Are you aware of more modern data which is also not a super secret including scientific studies of sexual responses which indicate that rapists prefer consensual sex to rape? That's more recent, more scientific and frankly makes more sense.

Making more sense to a layman with an agenda is hardly the criterion to choose studies.

But the more important aspect is that actually you have exactly one study, and for "scientific", let's just say it's based on the long debunked penile plethysmography. Basically let's just say that among its chief problems, it also measures anxiety, rather than just sexual preferences. And failure to distinguish between the two is hardly making the case you think it does in a rape study. See, http://www.skepdic.com/penilep.html

That looks like a dodge to me. Feel free to pick on any aspect that suits you and show us the evidence. If you can't do that even given total freedom to choose the topic, I'll take it that you can't do it at all.

Ah, obvious troll is obvious. Sorry, just trying to incite lots of responses is the definition of trolling.

Again: if you want to discuss a certain aspect or idea, say which, rather than just implying that some grouping makes a difference.

Again, that looks like a dodge to me. Feel free to pick on any aspect that suits you and show us the evidence. If you can't do that even given total freedom to choose the topic, I'll take it that you can't do it at all.

And again obvious troll is obvious.

The rule is your claim, your burden of proof. Not your question, your burden of proof. If you don't hold any of the claims that I am questioning to be true then feel free to move along to some other thread. If you do and you don't have evidence for them, then you've got some irrational beliefs there whether or not I come along to poke them with a stick.

However your implications about intent to overcut other explanations, and that such vague groupings as "feminist ideas" make a difference, and whatnot, are your own claims. Nobody owes you to disprove those, sorry. If you don't want to have a burden of proof there, don't make them.

ETA: Mind you, not that it matters as such. I just found it funny that the kind of person who'd start the thread with such self-flattering trolling as "My million dollar challenge prediction: Attempts to shift the burden of proof in the first ten posts. Go!" is himself making a bunch of implicit claims he seems to have no intention of meeting the burden of proof for.

 

[hodgy]

The point still is that if said alcoholic has the means to get his vodka legally and in fact has plenty of vodka at home, but chooses to steal a bottle anyway, we can still look for why did they make that choice. Saying that he wants a drink is uninformative. Sure he does. But why does he choose to steal it, when it's not necessary for him to get it that way?

There are plenty of alcoholics who don't steal a bottle of booze from the supermarket. In fact, the vast majority of them. So it seems to me still valid to wonder WTH did make someone take the illegal route, unlike the others who didn't. Reducing it to "he wanted a drink" is wrong, because it obscures an essential difference: so did a hundred other guys in that supermarket who didn't steal booze.

Sorry - I still don't buy it (no pun intended). Suppose our alcoholic is poor and spends all his available money on alcohol. At some point he runs out of money and steals a bottle of vodka (because he wants a drink). When the giro comes in he'll be back to buying again but today he has no money.

The fact that the thieving alcoholic regularly consumes more alcohol than the general population does not make him less likely to steal the bottle of vodka to satisfy his desire for drink.

You are saying that because X has more of A than the general population has of A, therefore X must not want additional A. This is clearly wrong - take money and investors as another example.... In fact, in many cases the opposite would be the logical conclusion.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I said it started from there, so now pretending that ALL the data is that, is frankly stupid. If you want to ask for more data, ask for more data, don't do such distortions.

You seem to be trying to pick a fight rather than have an intelligent conversation. If you have more data to present, present it.

Making more sense to a layman with an agenda is hardly the criterion to choose studies.

Please cease the personal attacks.

But the more important aspect is that actually you have exactly one study, and for "scientific", let's just say it's based on the long debunked penile plethysmography. Basically let's just say that among its chief problems, it also measures anxiety, rather than just sexual preferences. And failure to distinguish between the two is hardly making the case you think it does in a rape study. See, http://www.skepdic.com/penilep.html

You might want to reread that link I gave you, because accidentally or otherwise you seem to be replying only to the very last sentence of the paragraph, which was indeed about the one plethysmograph study. You seem to have missed the seven other studies also linked in that exact same paragraph.

Let's agree to drop the plethysmograph study, even though its results are completely consistent with the seven other studies as far as I can tell from that page.

Ah, obvious troll is obvious. Sorry, just trying to incite lots of responses is the definition of trolling.

Again: if you want to discuss a certain aspect or idea, say which, rather than just implying that some grouping makes a difference.

Look, if you have any relevant data that speaks to any part of the question you are completely free to present it. If you have no data that speaks to any part of the question you are free to say that too.

And again obvious troll is obvious.

It seems to me that you are using accusations of trolling and of having a secret agenda to try to get out of presenting evidence.

Do you or do you not have any more evidence that speaks to the three questions in the OP?

 

[timhau]

Actually, assuming that the roughly same percentage would lie in an anonymous survey as in reports to the police, then that wouldn't move that number I calculated.

Yes -- assuming that false reports (that are known to be false) are included in the number of reported crimes. I have no idea whether that is the case, but to me it would seem like a strange way of doing the statistics.

We already have some idea of how people lie in surveys, because polling companies have to deal with that every time and anthropology actually studies that too. Mostly, people DO actually give wrong answers in surveys, but in the direction of making themselves more socially acceptable. E.g., people from a religious community overstate how often they go to church.

It's not clear at all why someone would feel more socially acceptable if they had been raped recently. In fact, given the prevalence of blaming the victim, it ought to be more socially acceptable to NOT have been raped. See why it's that underreported to the police in the first place.

So actually one would expect it to also be under-reported in surveys. Because, again, people tend to skew the answers away from what gives them some blame, even if it's an anonymous survey.

That would also mean that e.g. drunken sexual encounters that one regrets on the next day might get reported as rapes, doesn't it?

 

[HansMustermann]

That would also mean that e.g. drunken sexual encounters that one regrets on the next day might get reported as rapes, doesn't it?

I suppose some of them would, and then again some actual rapes wouldn't. Hard to say which would win.

But as I was saying, the number I calculated already allows for more false rape reports than false "it wasn't rape" reports, by roughly the same percentage as whatever the false reports to the police are. So we'd need a pretty hefty over-reporting in the study to actually raise the final number.

I doubt that drunken encounters would move the numbers that much, though, since most rapes in the survey were done by already intimate partners. There is no stigma attached to giving one's husband some sex, so at least those probably wouldn't get converted to rapes. If someone came home drunk and said "yes" to the husband or wife, it would probably take some very unusual circumstances to have to present that as rape.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Yes -- assuming that false reports (that are known to be false) are included in the number of reported crimes. I have no idea whether that is the case, but to me it would seem like a strange way of doing the statistics.

That would also mean that e.g. drunken sexual encounters that one regrets on the next day might get reported as rapes, doesn't it?

The drunken sexual encounter that gets reported as a rape the next day is an interesting topic in itself, since it's frequently referenced by critics of existing sexual assault laws but I've never seen any evidence about the actual prevalence of such incidents.

However it does bring up an important point with regard to Groth's opinion on rape, which HansMustermann still takes to be authoritative: Groth was forming his opinion in the seventies, and the modern definition of rape is much broader than it was thirty years ago (and a very good thing too).

I'm pretty sure that you can't simultaneously argue that "date rape is rape" and also "rape is about power, not about sex". The two simply contradict each other. My preference is to accept the first claim and amend the second to fit with more modern data.

 

[HansMustermann]

Sorry - I still don't buy it (no pun intended). Suppose our alcoholic is poor and spends all his available money on alcohol. At some point he runs out of money and steals a bottle of vodka (because he wants a drink). When the giro comes in he'll be back to buying again but today he has no money.

The fact that the thieving alcoholic regularly consumes more alcohol than the general population does not make him less likely to steal the bottle of vodka to satisfy his desire for drink.

Maybe, but at that point you're extending the analogy in a direction which isn't analogous to what it's supposed to illustrate any more. The whole point was that those people hadn't run out of pussy, much less out of sex (in as much as that's even possible without losing the use of both hands), so analogies with an alcoholic who's run out of means to get booze are not just distorted analogies but actually polar opposites to what they're supposed to illustrate.

Plus, alcohol withdrawal is a physiological addiction which has actual nasty side effects that can even kill you, whereas I've never heard of anyone who died when their balls exploded for lack of sex. And generally, unlike delirium tremens, blue balls isn't a harmful medical condition. We all refrain for sex with a few hours without getting the jitters, or you'd see half the company at work shaking and hallucinating by 4 PM

Plus alcohol withdrawal can't be solved with a few pictures of people drinking and, umm, taking the matter in one's own hands whereas sex withdrawal can. In fact the body even has its own means to periodically dump the excess sperm produced. If alcohol withdrawal could be solved as easily, then we wouldn't feel much sympathy for the guy stealing the bottle of vodka in your example either.

So on the whole it's not a very useful analogy.

You are saying that because X has more of A than the general population has of A, therefore X must not want additional A. This is clearly wrong - take money and investors as another example.... In fact, in many cases the opposite would be the logical conclusion.

In fact that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that if X has a legal means to get A and does get plenty of A that way, yet they choose to do it by illegal means, then simplifying it to just "they wanted some A" is over-simplifying and obscuring some relevant details.

 

[Professor Yaffle]

I'm pretty sure that you can't simultaneously argue that "date rape is rape" and also "rape is about power, not about sex". The two simply contradict each other.

Explain?

 

[HansMustermann]

I'm pretty sure that you can't simultaneously argue that "date rape is rape" and also "rape is about power, not about sex". The two simply contradict each other. My preference is to accept the first claim and amend the second to fit with more modern data.

I'm pretty sure that the way "date rape" is defined, it includes pretty much all rapes by acquaintances and/or new acquaintances, regardless of whether it was a date or not, and regardless of whether alcohol was involved or not. Skipping from consensual drunken encounters to date rape as if they're even connected, is at best misleading.

If you also look at the legal definitions (e.g., http://definitions.uslegal.com/d/date-rape/ ), you'll notice that "I was a little drunk so 'yes' shouldn't have really counted as a 'yes'" is generally not actually defined as a date rape. For it to count as rape, either force or threat must be involved, or the victim must be so disabled (for whatever reason) as to be unable to give consent or even to not be aware that sexual intercourse is happening.

Either way, I'm curious what difference does it make.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Explain?

If we count as rape (as I think we definitely should) cases like a couple having consensual sex until one partner calls a halt, and the other partner continues regardless, then the claim that rape is all about power and nothing to do with sex looks prima facie nonsensical.

Similarly if we count as rape (as I think we definitely should) cases where someone is non-violently pressured to have sex when they don't want to, and gives in, the claim that rape is all about power and nothing to do with sex fits very uneasily at best with calling such scenarios rape.

I think it's a huge step in the right direction that rapes other than Groth's categorisations of "anger rape", "power rape" and "sadistic rape" have been recognised as rape, because the previous idea that it couldn't have been rape unless it was a violent attack allowed some rapists to get away with their crimes, trivialised the suffering of victims and had all sorts of other bad effects.

 

[HansMustermann]

1. At least the latter is generally not considered rape. If there was no threat involved and both people involved did explicitly consent (and are at an age and mental state that allows informed consent) it may count as sexual harrassment if certain other pressures were involved, but I don't really see why it would count as rape.

So I'm a bit unsure why would that count at all for the classification of actual rapes. It's a bit like saying that we can't define cars as having wheels, if we include hoverboats as cars. Well, since they aren't included, then we can move on.

2. Feeling or showing one's power over another takes all sorts of forms. E.g., a couple of berks a couple of years ago showed their awesomeness and might by pissing on someone unconscious who was dying.

Far from making the case that it's not about power, being able to persuade or coerce someone to do what you want IS power. It's not illegal, and it may not be unwelcome or malicious, but it IS power, and millions go into management every year for exactly that kind of power.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

1. At least the latter is generally not considered rape. If there was no threat involved and both people involved did explicitly consent (and are at an age and mental state that allows informed consent) it may count as sexual harrassment if certain other pressures were involved, but I don't really see why it would count as rape.

Consent obtained by coercion doesn't count as consent to my mind, although your mileage may vary.