Comments Elsewhere

1. 65% is not a “guesstimation.” It is the outcome of calculating the conjoint probability of 12 independent events each of which has a 1/12 probability of occurring (= (1/12)¹²), then subtracting the result from 1. If you choose any one man at random then 1 time out of 12 that man will be someone who committed rape. But if you choose a group of 12 men at random, then about 65% of the time, at least one man in that group of 12 men will be a man who committed rape. I showed you how this percentage is calculated already. If you don’t understand what that means, fine, but quit trying to bust my chops about something you clearly don’t understand. As for why it matters: most women know at least 12 men. That means the chances are they know some men who have already committed rape and some who will in the future. This is a simple and horrible fact that women have to deal with every day and it is a basic touchstone of a lot of feminist politics. For good reason. Because it’s a response to a simple and horrible reality.

2. Koss’s work is not a quote-study-unquote. It’s a study. One which is highly regarded in the literature by professional psychologists and sociologists who study sexual assault and which has had its findings confirmed by several later studies, such as the CDCP/NIJ’s National Violence Against Women study and the NIJ’s Sexual Victimization of College Women study. Again, there’s nothing wrong with not knowing the literature on this topic but there is something wrong with lecturing feminists about getting their facts straight and accusing people of uttering “bullshit” or being dishonest when you haven’t spent the time finding out whether what you’re saying is true or not.

So why did you and everyone else fail to bring up that the 1 out of 4 and 1 out of 12 statistics involve a study of college students? Because you’re intentionally being misleading.

This is simply a defamatory lie. You owe me an apology and you ought to be embarassed that you have stooped to it. Here is what I said in the very first post that you responded to (boldface added):

The Koss survey on sexual victimization on college campuses found that about 1 in 12 male respondents admitted to committing acts that met the legal definition of rape.

Now, if we just grant the measure as representative of the general population (it’s probably not, but the factors that would change it—e.g., the number of men who commit rape after leaving college—would mostly tend to make it an underestimation rather than an overestimation),

I stated at the beginning of this conversation that I was working from data gathered from college students and that readers should take them with the necessary grain of salt when applying them to the population at large. However, what I also noted is that most of the factors that might make the numbers unrepresentative would tend to make them too low rather than too high. Here’s one example: if the number of college women who have been sexually assaulted in their lifetime hasn’t significantly increased in the past 20 years (and we know, from studies such as SVCW) then factoring in college graduates cannot possibly lower the prevalence of rape, because we are talking about lifetime prevalence, and incidents that happened while you were in college or high school still count when you are 30 or 40.

You could claim that all the people who never went to college will make a difference. True, but in order to parlay that into a claim that Koss’s figures are significantly inflated you’d first have to give some reason to think that women who never went to college are significantly less likely than those who do to be assaulted (or that men who never went to college are significantly less likely than those who do to commit assault). As it turns out, there’s been plenty of research since Koss’s study came out that specifically dealt with the general population instead of college students (the largest being the CDCP/NIJ National Violence Against Women Study) and the research confirmed that her findings about the prevalence of rape on college campuses were in fact reflective of the population as a whole.

Again, these are things you could know by simply taking the time out to read the relevant research.

Professional antifeminists have spent a lot of time and money and print in the effort to misrepresent Koss’s study, knock over straw dogs that only vaguely resemble it at best, dissemble about its acceptance by social scientists (it is widely accepted and the charges against it are sheer fabrication), and thus dismiss what it has to say wholesale and deride feminists who have made use of it as dishonest partisans. I say these things not because I intend to accuse you of any bad motives, but rather to point out that unless you have actually spent some time reading the research itself then it’s likely that most of what you know about it in fact comes from unqualified hacks who do have bad motives and who often have not even read the primary sources that they claim to be criticizing.

If you want to have a serious talk about the prevalence of sexual assault in our society and how it is measured, that’s fine, but you had better realize that there is serious literature on the topic of putting numbers to the problem and how those numbers are arrived at. If you expect to know what you are talking about when it comes to these questions then you had better put in the effort to learn something about that literature. If you don’t care enough about the issue to spend the time that it takes to learn about it, that’s also fine, but then you had better not go around throwing accusations of dishonesty at the people who have.

Trigger warning: Folks should know ahead of time that this comment might be triggering for sexual assault experiences.

Unfortunately the numbers are accurate.

Koss counted men as having committed rape if they answered yes to a group of questions in her ten question Sexual Experience Survey (section C). If you want a list of the questions themselves I can probably dig one up for you later in the day when I have access to JSTOR. In the meantime, here is Koss’s description of the metric (in an Afterword to Robin Warshaw’s I Never Called it Rape [1994]):

Five classes of sexual aggression and sexual victimization, sexual contact, sexual coercion, attempted rape, and rape. The groups labeled “rape” and “attempted rape” included women who had experienced and men who had perpetrated acts that met legal definitions of these crimes. the typical definition of rape is the following: “… vaginal intercourse between male and female, and anal intercourse, fellatio, and cunnilingus … Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete vaginal or anal intercourse…. No person shall engage in sexual contact with another person … when any of the following apply: (1) the offender purposely compels the other person to submit by force or threat of force, (2) for the purpose of preventing resistence the offender substantially impairs the other person’s judgment or control by administering any drug or intoxicant to the other person….” (Ohio Revised Code, 1980). I have used this strict, narrow definition of rape and have tried to stay in line with legal requirements. The people labeled “rape” victims or perpetrators all experienced acts that involved oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse or penetration by objects against consent through the use of force or threat of bodily harm, or intentional incapacitation of the victim. (p.207)

Some critics of Koss’s study have claimed that the numbers may be inflated because of ambiguous wording in the question concerning the use of intoxicants. I’ve read the question and I don’t think the wording is actually particularly ambiguous, but whether it is or not, Koss also ran the same analyses over again without the question on incapacitation by intoxicants (i.e., so that she was only counting cases in which rape was accomplished against consent by the use of force or the threat of force). She found that it did not significantly affect her results — if you exclude the intoxicant question then the number of women who are counted as having suffered a rape or attempted in their lifetime goes from 1 in 4 to … 1 in 5.

There’s a long argument here about the details of the survey methodology, the finding of later studies (the short version is: they confirm Koss’s findings), and back-and-forth over the characteristics of Koss’s work. But that leads us pretty far astray. The bottom line is that Koss’s research is well-supported and widely accepted among professional social scientists (the attacks on it originated from hit pieces commissioned by Playboy and repeated by professional antifeminists with no particular academic qualifications, such as Katie Roiphe and Warren Farrell).

But that would take us pretty far afield from the point. What all these numbers tell us, in the end, is something that my own experience — listening to my friends tell me about what happened to them — showed me before I ever looked into the literature. Rape is horrifyingly common. You almost certainly know women who have been raped (on average, 1/4 women) and you know men who have committed rape (on average, 1/12 men) — even if you don’t know that you know them. That’s a big part of the reason why I’m a feminist: because this daily, horrifying violence is no accident and it’s no law of nature, and it’s something that we can and must work to end.

Trigger warning: folks should know ahead of time that this may be triggering for sexual assault experiences.