you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]SparkandFire -1 points0 points ago


I think that rape is usually defined as sex without consent, so women can rape with blackmail and such.

[–]ibm2431 5 points6 points ago


It's how we would define rape, yeah. The point I was getting at is that definitions of rape by law enforcement (at least in the US) don't necessarily align with that. So when you say things like "most people who do X are Y" and maybe point to crime reporting or studies, you have to ask if the way you define X excludes everyone but Y.

For example, up until January of this year, the FBI defined the crime of rape as "the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will." So if you looked at reported victims of rape, you'll obviously see that women are the majority of victims. Because, well, women are the only people who can actually be victims by the definition.

The question of the definition is valid even with the change ten months ago. Men can now be considered victims of rape, but rape is still defined as forcibly penetrating someone. In other words, at least according to the federal agency of criminal investigation, rape isn't rape if it's done with a vagina.

We consider it rape, but crime statistics don't. Because of that, it's quite easy to grab such statistics and make statements like "most rapists are men" when the evidence is inherently biased.

Now, this is not a claim that women would become the majority of rapists if "rape" was defined the way we commonly consider it. It's merely a note that you can't take raw crime statistics at face value.

To illustrate the point: In their 2010 study of intimate partner violence, the CDC compiled numbers on rape victims as typically defined by law enforcement - female victims forcibly penetrated - and victims that would be considered as such under our definition - male victims forced to penetrate their attacker.

The commonly quoted statistic from the report is "Nearly 1 in 5 women have been raped in their lifetime while 1 in 71 men have been raped in their lifetime." So one can use that statistic to say that women are the vast majority of rape victims, and from that, the majority of rapists are men. But hold on a second.

If you look a bit deeper and keep in mind how definitions can 'skew' evidence, you'll find, at least in the past 12 months, that if you use our definition of rape which includes being 'forced to penetrate', the number of female and male victims are roughly equal. (You can find these charts starting at page 17 of the full report).

Now at this point you can still get into a pedantic argument that "majority" means 50% + 1. However, at that point, it's no longer simply pointing out that some vast majority of victims and attackers are female and male respectively, but arguing over definitions to show that the original statement is technically correct.