Carrie Lukas attempts to count up the victims:
One in four women is the victim of rape or attempted rape.
This familiar statistic comes to mind as the rape indictment of two Duke University lacrosse players dominates national news. It may be a fitting backdrop for this scandal, not just because the statistic reminds us that all women are vulnerable to this terrible crime, but also because the evidence behind the number is dubious.
“One in four” has been repeated so often on college campuses and in the media that many people accept it without question. Few know how it was calculated. Few ask, because asking implies questioning its veracity, and, in this post-feminist era, it’s taboo to question sex-crime data or the claims of any alleged rape victim.
Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute delved into these uncomfortable waters in Who Stole Feminism. The one-in-four statistic, she found, was derived from a survey of 3,000 college women in 1982. Researchers used three questions to determine if respondents had been raped: Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs? Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man threatened or used some degree of physical force… to make you? And, have you had sexual acts…when you didn’t want to because a man threatened to use some degree of physical force… to make you?
Based on women’s responses, researchers concluded that 15 percent of women surveyed had been raped and 12 percent had experienced an attempted rape. Therefore, 27 percent of women — more than one in four — were either the victims of rape or attempted rape. This is the origin of the one-in-four statistic.
27 percent. Or 3 percent. Why not just announce that there is no such thing as rape, ergo, problem solved. Zero is within the range of error, after all.
As regulars know, I find the constant fixation on rape as the evil of all evils to be tremendously amusing. This is not because it’s usually an uncrime, which is to say, the supposedly criminal act is based solely on the self-proclaimed victim’s feelings, but because a) rape has seldom been less common than it is in the modern United States, and, b) its frequency, whatever the actual rate might be, is largely thanks to those very women who are loudly screaming their heads off about their right to do whatever they want wherever they want, and to do it unarmed.
Right. Try dressing like a Jew in Saudi Arabia and let us know how that goes…. Oh, but that’s not a modern and enlightened Western culture. Okay, then, try it in Londonistan or Amstarabia, then. Now you’re just blaming the victim!
The childishness of the female perspective on rape, even on the part of the less silly commentators, can be summarized in the following statement: “Regardless of the exact figure, rape is a terrible crime too prevalent in our society.” Such outrage, such soaring rhetoric, how very lovely, Miss Lukas. Now, do try naming a historical society where it has been significantly less prevalent… and please delineate three primary differences between those societies and our own.
And then there’s this gem: “It certainly is possible that this revised estimate understates the frequency of rape — women may be reluctant to admit having been violated even in an anonymous survey.” Or maybe they are too eager to admit it, given how often they are proven to recant. Picking a number out of the air would be as meaningful, that certainly seemed to work for the author of the “women beaten on Super Bowl Sunday” fiction.
Fortunately, our ever-doughty feminists have provided us with solution to ending this terrible crime once and for all. As a potential rapist myself, I can do no less than my part in bringing this terrible scourge on our society to an end:
If you have the opportunity and ability to rape a woman, just don’t do it!
That should take care of that! Because, as everyone knows, the only reason people do bad things is because no one ever told them not to. If 50 years of murderous and totalitarian government couldn’t eliminate guns in Communist China, what are the odds that a country that can’t locate 12 million people who can’t even speak English can Take Back the Night on behalf of drunk and stupid college girls?