I scarcely see how ACT scores show anything. The ACT has nothing to do with one’s character. There’s a new study for ya - the ACT/SAT scores of convicted rapists and rape victims. What, if you get this score you’re going to be a rapist and if you get that score you’ll be a victim of rape? Give me a break.
My wife and I openly share our successes and failures with our friends, our victories and our defeats. As such, our friends typically reciprocate and have confided in us many personal details, both good and bad. If I see you as judgy or lacking empathy, then you are not allowed in.
My best friend admitted to me that he had participated in a rape while in high school, something I never suspected. He was much more participatory in the social scene and provided details of other rapes he knew about and the people involved. Bottom line - I was surrounded by rapists and rape victims and never suspected any of them. The girls continued to come to school, seemingly normal, and the boys continued to have regular girlfriends and go about their lives.
In my experience, if your personal sphere has no or very few rape victims, it is because you don’t know. The numbers are too big not to be affected.
Except that anything that I can imagine could be called “hookup culture” has been decreasing, not increasing, in recent years, including for high-school- and traditional-college-aged individuals. I know there are a bunch of people who like to go into a “kids these days!” spin on sexual casualness, but the actual behaviors don’t bear that out.
All of which means that “hookup culture” doesn’t explain predation—predation explains predation.
I am speechless.
I think things are lot more complicated than surveys convey. The hookup culture is a big factor in setting up the expectation of sex, and I assume many of these non-consensual encounters happened at parties where both females and males came in order to meet one another. Add alcohol and it is a dangerous mix-for everyone. When both parties are drunk, communication and perception is not at an all time high level. As others have said, this kind of situation is murky and gray.
I have read that 3% of males commit an unexpectedly large percentage of rapes (wish I could remember, sorry, I don’t like to cite without a citation. I will try to find it.) Chances are these are the guys who pick a victim strategically and try to rack up numbers
I do think some survey questions are slanted toward a certain answer. And I do think some of the language is insulting in the sense that women are assumed to be passive and helpless: we all need to teach our daughters to think about the way they dress, the amount they drink and the ways in which they choose to pursue connections. And there are some injustices going on with accusations against young men, which is not to deny trauma experienced by women.
I would like to introduce a topic that is a bit of a tangent. I have daughters in their young 20’s who constantly receive comments and sometimes even attempts at physical contact, while simply walking down the street to work or class, in the daytime, or on public transportation. The stories I have heard from them daily are sometimes shocking. I think the male attitudes involved are similar to those of assaulters/rapists: the women are objects in the worst sense of the word.
One of my daughters needed to cross a street last August, at 9:15am, to avoid a couple of men who had previously harassed her and followed her around the city. She was afraid. When she peeked out from between parked cars, she was hit by a car and almost died. After surgery and coma in the ICU, and many months of rehab, she relearned how to walk.
Her hair is short because her head was shaved, and she can no longer wear high heels. Men don’t harass her on the street anymore.
Come to think of it, this really isn’t as much of a tangent as I thought. It really is related if you think about it.
She will be fine and is resuming her life, or I would not be able to write this. I am violating her privacy in some sense to write this because I think it is important. I think the harm men do with their objectification on the streets is ignored: I have never even seen an article on it.
@northwesty, can you give me a principled reason why I should believe the Bureau of Justice statistics?
The Bureau of Justice statistics, as you know, are based on self-reports. The Syracuse statistics are based also on self-reports, and so are the other surveys and articles. Yet the Bureau of Justice is getting numbers one or two orders of magnitude lower than all the other reputable reports I know about. I have given a reason for the discrepancy: the BOJ statistics are underreports, for a number of specific reason that I have listed. But you assert that the BOJ statistics are not underreports; they are correct.
Therefore, you believe that all the other statistics are wrong. What, in your mind, is the explanation for these overreports, and why can’t any other survey get the (in your view) correct numbers? Why do you believe that all these Syracuse freshman are saying they were raped when they weren’t?
Compmom, I am sorry about your daughter 's experiences with male harassment bs and what happened to her.
There was a story and a video…
When you try, use the search term “Lisak.” He’s the guy who researches serial rapists.
I’m so sorry, compmom. That’s an awful story. I hope your daughter makes (or has made) a complete recovery.
compmom: I’m so very sorry, too. Thank you for sharing that story. Verbal and physical harassment, assault and rape, seems parts of a whole to me as well.
compmom: I’m so very sorry! I hope she is better!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/23/brown-university-rapist-strangle_n_5201644.html
This is unreal! I would have personally expelled him.
@Magnetron, what are your friends’ current attitudes toward their criminal past? Have they gone back and apologized to their rape victims? Or are they afraid that there is no statute of limitations and they might go to jail if their victims turned them in?
Unbelievable. She has a spine injury in her neck and they allow him back on campus? That would be enough for me to expel him.
compmom, I’m so sorry for what you and your daughter had to go through.
I hope this is the case! As I recall back when mini used to post here he had studies that said that was essentially the biggest problem.
As far as I know I don’t know any rapists, but I worked on a project with a banker who stole money from his clients to fund the project we were working on and one of the teachers at my sons’ elementary school was accused of abusing kids at his next post. Both guys seemed perfectly nice.
Because Syracuse isn’t significantly worse than other colleges. Because no one talks about rape, so they don’t know that their friends and classmates were raped there. I had a friend at Harvard who was raped, but I didn’t hear about it until years and years later.
As for teaching your ten year old boys, well I’m not sure what I told him then, but I did tell him that he needed to be aware that he should never have sex when drunk or when the other party is drunk and that he should also be aware that it is the woman’s choice whether or not to keep a kid and he should keep that in mind. If she keeps the child he’ll be responsible whether he wants to be or not. I also said that I don’t believe in casual sex, I think you should be in a committed relationship.
I understand people’s ambivilence about all drunken sex becoming rape. I certainly had plenty of somewhat drunken sex in my day. (Eventually learned that sober sex was usually more fun.)
Compmom, I am so sorry.
The statistic I read recently was something like 3% of male students are responsible for 90% of rapes on campus. The 90% might be high. Anyway, I cannot find it. Here are some similar texts that I could find with Cardinal Fang’s suggestion. I think that this kind of rape is not murky at all. The idea that one individual is raping several times is deeply disturbing and the surveys don’t really make this distinction. The women who do the surveys are not able to compare notes on who raped them while doing the survey, obviously.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2010/02/26/4404/undetected-rapists-campus-troubling-plague-repeat-offenders
“This is the norm,” said Lisak, who co-authored a 2002 study of nearly 1,900 college men published in the academic journal Violence and Victims. “The vast majority of rapes are perpetrated by serial offenders who, on average, have six victims. So, this is who’s doing it.”
(The university was slow to realize there was a serial rapist; all 5 of the women he raped had been drinking and were “fuzzy” w/memory.)
http://www.davidlisak.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/RepeatRapeinUndetectedRapists.pdf
The evidence that a relatively small proportion of men are responsible for a large number
of rapes and other interpersonal crimes may provide at least a partial answer to an oftnoted
paradox: namely, that while victimization surveys have established that a substantial
proportion of women are sexually victimized, relatively small percentages of men report
committing acts of sexual violence (e.g., Rubenzahl & Corcoran, 1998). In this sample of
1,882 men, 76 (4%) individuals were responsible for an estimated 439 rapes and attempted
rapes.
Thanks for the kind comments. My daughter is a miracle and a hero. We are deeply grateful.
RE #191, @“Cardinal Fang” ,boy am I a slow typist.
The first thing I checked was the statute of limitations and it was way past that. I was considering turning them in and would have been very uncomfortable having knowledge of a crime that was still prosecutable. The one who told me was immediately regretful and apologetic (of the rape, not the confession to me), spent years struggling with it and trying to atone. A friend of ours was killed and he was badly beaten sticking up for a woman late at night. We are on opposites sides of the country now and do not have those deep, revealing discussions any more. He has three young girls.
The instigator, otoh, was a serial rapist and abuser with little conscience. He was also a petty thief. I would guess he doesn’t lose any sleep over it. Our last contact was before the big revalation.
In Missoula, author Krakauer interviewed Lisak. Lisak described his research. He surveyed a bunch of men, asking questions like “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances (e.g. removing their clothes)?” and " Have you ever had oral sex with an adult when they did not want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm; holding them down, etc.) if they didn’t cooperate?" He did not use the word rape in his descriptions.
Lisak’s surveys were not anonymous. He interviewed the guys who admitted to these rapes. They were unapologetic. They “had no sense of themselves as rapists.” Most of them “were regarded by their peers as nice guys who would never rape anyone, and regarded themselves the same way.” Typically they admitted to more than one rape-- and why not, because they didn’t think that there was anything wrong with raping someone who was unconscious, or forcing someone to perform oral sex.
Lisak says that 90 percent of rapes are committed by serial offenders like these guys. If that’s so, it’s good news. If we can get more women to report, we’ll discover that they’re all reporting the same guys. It might be hard to prove a he-said she-said situation, but by the third or fourth accusation from someone who doesn’t know the other accusers, we might get the message.
Fang – I cite to the US DOJ stats because they are out there, prepared by a government department whose job is to do that statistical work, they are nationwide, they’ve been prepared consistently over a long period of time, and there’s no particular reason to think that the agency is trying to slant the data in any particular way.
But let’s assume, as you suggest, that new US DOJ stats will come in with an incidence rate five times higher than what they’ve previously reported. Here’s what that would mean.
The incidence of rape among female college students per year would rise from 0.5 per thousand to 2.5 per thousand. A big jump – 500%.
This study of Syracuse would peg the incidence of rape at 79 per thousand in one semester. And 162 rapes per thousand per year. Which would then translate to something like 300+ rapes per thousand over a 4 year college career.
So after inflating the US DOJ stats by 500%, that reported rape incidence at Syracuse is still 800% higher.
Were that to be true, the SU campus would have to be the rape capital of the U.S. and (probably) the world. No parent would ever send a daughter there. They’d be guilty of child abuse if they did so.
I’d be happy to agree that all these stats are junk. But this most recent study appears to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen so far. 300 RAPES (not unwanted kissing or grinding but RAPES) per 1,000 female students over the course of 4 years???
You know you don’t believe that Fang.
@northwesty, you need to be more careful when you quote statistics. You are off by almost an order of magnitude in your quote of the BOJ statistics on college rape. The incidence of rape (completed or attempted) among college women, according to the BOJ statistics, is 3.5 per thousand. The incidence of completed rape only is 2.0 per thousand.
I’m a cautious better. I’m willing to bet that the new BOJ statistics will be five times higher, but that’s the low end of my belief, not the point estimate.
Here are the BOJ statistics on college rape: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rsavcaf9513.pdf
quote=Cardinal Fang is the question for incapacitated rape. (d) and (e) are the questions for forcible rape. (a) and (b) were asked, but the answers were not reported in the journal article.
[/quote]
Does that mean the numbers cited do not include people who answered yes to (a) or (b), or that they weren’t broken out? If they are included then no wonder the numbers are high. “yes, of course I love you!” (lie). Guy then never calls and the woman says “oh, he lied to have sex with me”. Woman then answers yes when asked the question that was posted.
ETA- I see from a later post that you answered that the numbers were not included. I’m not convinced that something similar isn’t skewing the results but I am many pages behind and haven’t read the study yet.