Also, I’d like it if an MRA

I am not. But I think I will be able to shed some light on this rather disgusting article all the same

or someone who has a good grasp of the statistics behind this article could analyse it. I am not an MRA and I am not good with maths. I am no help in this area, but this is something that the MRAs really need to check out and see whether it is true. My post is a linguistic analysis to call out on some bullshit, not a mathematical one.

The math, which is called bad here, is actually math I have done myself before. It wasn’t explained any further in the article and I feel like for a proper understanding of the thought process, I should first quote myself here.

Now go to page 18 and 19 (total pages 28/29). If you ignore the pretty buzzwords and take a closer look at the tables below, specifically the last 12 months, you will soon realize that there isn’t really that much of a gap.

7.9 million women were victims to sexual violence whereas the same is true for 6 million men. The likelyhood is weighed at 6.7% and 5.6% percent.

1,270,000 women had been victims of rape
1,267,000 men had been victims of rape (forced to penetrate)
The study weighs both at 1.1%.

The reason we are specifically looking at the last 12 months table is because a lifetime table largely includes cases of child molestation. You cannot make a child penetrate you and the statistics become vague in the lifetime period due to men being socially conditioned to rationalize their experience. Men will, after an extended perior of time, not consider themselves victims of rape anymore even if they have been legall confirmed.

Some of their key findings support this and the following way of thinking:

More than 1 in 3 women (35.6%) and more than 1 in 4 men (28.5%) in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.

If you include strangers it becomes

Nearly 1 in 2 women (44.6%) and 1 in 5 men (22.2%) experienced sexual violence victimization other than rape at some point in their lives

For the sake of simplicity, let’s now say 50% of all rape victims prior to the last 12 months of the study are men and 50% are women. Since both are weighed at 1.1% by the study I feel I am not doing any wrong by ignoring the 3000 in a range of 1.3million.

Now on to page 24, which displays a perpetrator distribution in the above tables.

For female rape victims, 98.1% reported only male perpetrators.

The majority of male rape victims (93.3%) reported only male perpetrators. For three of the other forms of sexual violence, a majority of male victims reported only female perpetrators: being made to penetrate (79.2%) […]

You may realize that the study is onconclusive here. Suddenly men can be raped by women again? I will have to work with what I’m given.

Female victims were 1,270,000. Which means we have 1,245,870 male penetrators so far. Of the 1,270,000 male rape victims, 20.8% fell victim to male penetrators. Another 264,160 male perpetrators.
This adds our numbers to a total of 1,510,030 male perpetrators.

Which essentially leaves us with 1,510,030 male out of 2,540,000 perpetrators. This is exactly 59,45%.

Which leaves us with 40.55% of female perpetrators.

But hold up! How do 6.7% of men who reported to have been raped by women (or rather not only men) factor into this? There is currently no way to factor this in without committing statistical fraud and making broad assumptions, because the study does not report the amount of men who have been victims of rape (by the study’s own definition) in the last 12 months.

Now let me adress the NISVS makes one by one:

1) Combining the estimated number of female rape victims with the estimated number of being-made-to-penetrate male victims in the 12 months prior to the survey to conclude that about 50% of the rape or being-made-to-penetrate victims were males;

My answer to this is straight up: No. Frankly, I fail to understand what their point is. The study states that so few women were made to penetrate, that no data could be published. In fact, 100% of the made to penetrate victims were male, if anybody was to work with the study’s numbers. I don’t doubt that there are female victims, but I am almost certain every instance of F>F rape is included in the numbers of female rape victims.
The 50% in the last 12 months is referring to men making up 50% of rape victims. Clearly not by their definition, but by the definition of most sane human beings.

2) Multiplying the estimated percentage (79%) of male being-made-to-penetrate victims who reported having had female perpetrators in these victims’ lifetime with the 50% obtained in step 1 to claim that 40% of perpetrators of rape or being-made-to-penetrate were women.

None of these calculations should be used nor can these conclusions be correctly drawn from these calculations.

There is some valid critcism here, in the sense that you should not look at lifetime numbers of perpetrators and assume they also apply to lifetime occurences. But since the CDC refused to release the latter numbers, this is the closest to them, we can come. With the numbers not available, one might even get the idea that they didn’t differ from lifetime numbers enough to mention it throughout the study. Nor does the study specifically state that the data on perpetrators was gathered in either 12 months or lifetime.
Since the article goes into more detail on the second point, I will have to do the same.

This mismatch of timeframes is incorrect because the past 12-month victimization cannot be stretched to equate with lifetime victimization. In fact, Table 2.1 and 2.2 of the NISVS 2010 Summary Report clearly report that lifetime rape victimization of females (estimated at 21,840,000) is about 4 times the number of lifetime being made-to-penetrate of males (estimated at 5,451,000).

True, the timeframes are mismatched, very valid critcism. But has anybody asked themselves why the the gender disparity between male and female rape victims jumped from 1:1 to 1:4 (that’s 50/50 and 20/80) when looking at the lifetime numbers? Participants in the study had to be over 18 and we know that kids are unlikely to be made to penetrate.
So while the last 12 months didn’t, the lifetime numbers now include childhood occurences of rape. Therefore female perpetrators either only target grown men, or girls under 18 have an insanely high victimization rate so that when they are included in the statistics, female victims, LARGELY outnumber male victims. Neither of these theories is really sound, because neither explains how we can go from 1.3 million male victims in a single year to barely 5.5 million over a whole man’s lifespan.
The actual answer to this is as simple as it is sad.

16% of men with documented cases of sexual abuse considered their early childhood experiences sexual abuse, compared with 64% of women with documented cases of sexual abuse. These gender differences may reflect inadequate measurement techniques or an unwillingness on the part of men to disclose this information (Widom and Morris 1997).

Unlike with very recent events (like those that happend within 12 months prior to the study), men rationalize and justify the abused that happend to them. This has, from the beginning, been the very justification to ignore the lifetime numbers. However, if we are told lifetime numbers being vastly different from recent numbers is an indicator that perpetrator numbers might differ (how?), and we are able to provide counter evidence on the latter, I would say it is safe to, at least for demonstration purposes, use lifetime perpetrator numbers with recent victimization numbers.
Again: The assumption here is that victimization numbers aren’t actually any different recently and during a lifetime. Purely statistically seen, this is not okay. However, it is the closest we can get to the actual numbers, because the CDC/NVSIS did not release detailed enough information to draw an honest conclusion.
Generally, when looking at them from a logical point of view, the numbers become very confusing and seem as if they don’t quite add up. So the same survey in 2000 found 0.3% of women and 0.1% of men victims of penetration, yet did not include victims of penetration during 2010 at all. Where did these people go? Where did they come from?
[Point B is partly adressed in the above and Point C is straight up valid, in my opinion]

The ongoing points question the validity of the whole study. If we cannot assume their numbers are representative [Point D and E], the study becomes useless to cite altogether. Frankly, I fail to understand why they included this at all.

Reading this whole article, it feels the main problem the NVSIS has with the interpetration of the data here is that the conclusion is “40% of perpetrators are female” as opposed to “40% of perpetrators of being-made-to-penetrate-sexual-violence in the last 12 months prior to the study in an estimated number of a specific sample group were female”. If the same critcism was applied to the “male side” of the study, I could effectively claim that male perpetrator numbers of female victims are neither representative nor reliable.

For a valid critcism of the study click here

MRA Male Rape Statistics are Wrong?

Stocking Paradise