I actually like the laws in my state around Criminal sexual behavior.
@Pizzagirl Yes, in all surveys, some people decline to answer.
But in reputable studies, people are contacted directly and selected randomly. Sending flyers to all freshmen girls and asking for people to take a survey is not a random selection method. It’s a self-selection method. There’s sampling bias here. It’s remarkable this got through peer review because it’s clearly highly flawed.
The problem, @alh, is that when you combine very broad interpretations of rape with attempts, you put men In a situation where virtually any unwanted sexual advances is identified as rape. If you look at the survey here, the definitions include attempted oral penetration. Many of you want to assume that that means a man forcing his &$-@; down a girl’s throat at knife point. But since the survey did not, as near as I can tell, include the qualifier “with a sex organ” it just as easily could mean an unwanted attempt at a French kiss. Now maybe it is true that the survey questions were designed the way they were because of an attempt to get at penetrative acts with inanimate objects, but the broader you draw the language, the more ludicrous conduct at the margins becomes. It is just the consequence of trying to draw conclusions from this kind of data. Hell, when professional soldiers take an action even though they know that one in four or five will die, we call them heroes. But some of you seem to have no problem believing that high school girls run similar odds going to the homecoming dance. It’s just kinda jarring.
As far as what harm does this do, and leaving aside the obvious trivialization of classically defined rape, if you walk around and tell boys that most of them will commit one of the three most heinous crimes in our culture (rape) if given the opportunity, as someone said up this thread, or tell thirteen year old girls that one in four will be raped in high school, then you will have a situation where very few young men will have the innate self loathing necessary to take anything else you say seriously, and very few young women would ever interact with members of the opposite sex at all.
And while I do think that @cardinal fang is a zealous and passionate advocate for one side of this debate, I do not, respectfully, think he or she is explaining the law. He or she is either analyzing parts of the law of sexual assault through the lens of someone who feels that our society callously disregards the plight of millions of women every year or is reporting analysis he or she has read elsewhere from a similar perspective. The law itself is far more complex than what we can discuss here, and the problems with prosecution for rape or sexual assault are, frankly, not going to be solved by broader and broader definitions of what rape or inability of consent is.
“But since the survey did not, as near as I can tell, include the qualifier “with a sex organ” it just as easily could mean an unwanted attempt at a French kiss. Now maybe it is true that the survey questions were designed the way they were because of an attempt to get at penetrative acts with inanimate objects, but the broader you draw the language, the more ludicrous conduct at the margins becomes.”
This study is about asking young women to report things. It is not a court of law. I would not and can’t imagine a girl/woman construing that question to mean an unwanted French kiss or an attempt at one. If a person does not feel violated would they report that they were or would their mind go to the outer limits of the question to see if anything at all might have fallen under that umbrella? Maybe so, but I don’t see it. I would imagine that in a person’t mind it would start with the question of “have I been raped?” if yes then was it forced or while incapacitated. The end.
My guess is most would say that had been sexually assaulted, but that few would say they had been raped. That is an excellent question.
The survey was disguised as a health survey. The questions on sexual assault were buried in a bigger survey about general health questions. So the women who responded didn’t know that their answers would be used in an article about rape. There may have been a response bias, but it couldn’t have been a response bias because the women who were rape victims decided to preferentially respond to a survey about rape, because that’s not how it was advertised.
263 [quote] But some of you seem to have no problem believing that high school girls run similar odds going to the homecoming dance. It's just kinda jarring.
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I was a high school girl in the 70s. “Sensible” girls would never have left the gym where the dance was held to walk out to the parking lot alone, because they put themselves at risk for assault or rape. And they wouldn’t have wandered around the school halls by themselves, or gone to the rest room by themselves while the dance was ongoing. We didn’t call it rape in those days. Girls were just asking for it by putting themselves in a situation where it was easy to take advantage of them.
This was a public high school in an upper middle class suburban neighborhood, full of very nice boys. In my experience at the time, the ones with the “nice boy” reputation were the ones I needed to watch out for. And no, none of this was reported to any parents. It was just our life. Parents didn’t know about rape or abortions. Many parents were making sure we had access to birth control, but the idea was it helped complexions… no public acknowledgement anyone was sexually active.
adding: since there are posters who may not be aware, I am a mother of sons, no daughters.
These statistics are completely believable to me based on my 59 years of female experience. Even though I live in a bubble.
I posted the actual survey a few pages ago. Here are the relevant questions about forced oral sex:
Nothing about French kissing.
http://www.midss.org/content/sexual-experiences-survey-short-form-victimization-ses-sfv
Ohiodad: You are relatively new to these threads. Cardinal Fang went to the law library to do research and then shared it with us. She’s posted a lot about the law this last year for anyone willing to read the links.
CF: you obviously don’t need me to defend you but I do want to thank you again for all that research. I learned a lot.
Selecting people from the group and sampling them is what you do when the group is so big you can’t contact all of them. It’s better to try to sample the entire group, which is what this survey did-- they contacted all the women in the freshman class. About a quarter responded, but that is an excellent response rate, far better than would be found in most surveys. Moreover, neither the responders nor the non-responders knew the survey was about sex, so that can’t be a cause of bias, and the responders looked demographically like the rest of the freshman class, so that also is not a concern.
There could be a response bias; there can always be a response bias. But we have no particular reason to suspect a response bias here.
And if you think this study shouldn’t have gotten through institutional review, then you think that no survey should get through institutional review.
@“Cardinal Fang” I was talking about the Brown study which was the first link on this thread. Hadn’t looked at all at the AZ study. As I think has been conclusively established, I don’t math. Now the last couple pages of this thread make a little more sense. But just looking at what you pasted above, is it defined anywhere what it means to 'try" and have oral sex, or what “out of it” means?
@alh, I am not saying Cardinal fang hasn’t read certain cases on sexual assault. And maybe he or she is a lawyer, maybe even a criminal lawyer, I don’t know. But I am saying that in my professional opinion the law is much more complex than the little snippets posted by Cardinal Fang and others here. Nothing wrong with that at all, but please don’t assume that things are as clear as is sometimes represented.
I am a father of sons and daughters. I too went to a public high school, a little later than you and farther down the economic scale. It is very, very difficult to believe that girls in my school were regularly forcibly raped in the halls or bathrooms. Maybe it happened, but my word, in a school where the fact that the freshman Algebra teacher was a closet alcoholic couldn’t be kept a secret from the freshmen for more than a couple weeks, the ability to hide the fact that one in four or five girls had been raped would have been mind boggling.
@saintsfan, you express the problem exactly. We all interpret the questions asked through the lens of our own preconceptions. This is true for survey participants as well. That is one of the reasons surveys like these usually contain many more control than operative questions. The problem is the more you loosen the definitions and scope of the question, the shakier the underlying conclusion is.
Speaking as someone who has both championed and criticized experiential surveys in other contexts, usually statisticians attempt to mathematically correct for self reporting. Basically, statisticians accept that the data they achieve from self selected survey participants will shade the results one way or another, because people who voluntarily answer those questions usually have a stronger than normal opinion on that topic. There are a variety of mathematical do dads which attempt to correct for this type of skewing. Don’t know whether or what was applied here, but my guess is the accuracy of those methods will go a long way to telling other researchers how valid this data set is.
Ohiodad: I understand this is unbelievable to you. When girls who report rape are called sluts, there won’t be much reporting. When boys don’t acknowledge that forcing themselves on someone is rape, even if they brag about it in the locker room, it still doesn’t register as rape in the minds of their friends. Just easy sluts. A joke. Definitions are really important. imho.
edit: And there is the continuing problem that “nice boys” aren’t capable of rape, so some other explanation is necessary. In the 70s, in HS and college there were lots of other explanations. That is still happening today, even though we do acknowledge acquaintance rape exists. Acquaintance rape did not exist when I was a young woman. It was beyond our imagination. If you were forced to have sex by someone you knew, it couldn’t be rape. It was something else.
As alh mentioned, I’ve spent some time looking at the various state laws concerning rape. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve nevertheless learned a lot-- anyone can read laws and court cases. A few general comments:
Rape is a state level offense-- if a person is arrested and charged for rape, they’ll be charged with a state crime and tried in state court.
Laws concerning rape vary very much from state to state.
The crime is not always named rape. The canonical idea of rape, a stranger forcibly having penile-vaginal intercourse with a woman against her will without her consent, is called rape in California, sexual assault 1st degree in Connecticut, rape first degree in Delaware, sexual battery in the 1st degree in Florida, sex assault 1st degree in Hawaii, criminal sexual assault in Illinois, and other states variously use the same terminology.
But it gets worse. In California and some other states, what we think of as rape is named rape, and lesser offenses of sexual touching are called sexual battery. But in other states, what we think of as rape is called sexual battery. So if you know that someone was convicted of sexual battery, but not what state they were convicted in, you don’t know if they raped someone or if they committed a lesser crime.
Some states criminalize forced anal sex differently, as sodomy, whereas others include in in the general crime of rape/sexual assault/sexual battery.
States differ in the amount of force required for the crime to be rape/sexual assault/sexual battery. In California and some other states, it’s rape if the victim did not consent and the perpetrator knew or should have known that she didn’t consent, even if she is fully conscious and doesn’t physically resist. But in different states, she has to physically resist for it to be rape.
States differ in their requirement of whether the accused can defend himself based on a mistaken belief that the victim consented. In California, that defense only works if he can show that he believed she consented, AND that a reasonable sober person in the same situation would have thought she consented. In some other states, a belief that she consented, however unreasonable that belief might have been, is a defense.
I was talking about the study from Brown, done at Syracuse, too. I don’t know about any AZ study-- do you have a link?
@Cardinal Fang. excellent analysis in post 273. I think part of the problem is the fact that we have so many different terms from so many different states
Let’s be clear on this: Whether people think that something is criminal does not define whether it’s criminal. If that were the case, I’m sure there’d be, say, a lot more investment bankers behind bars right now.
Something that is legally rape (replace with sexual assault or another term, depending on your jurisdiction) is legally rape. You can’t get around that, and please stop trying to.
I see what you mean about Arizona now, Ohiodad. The Brown/Syracuse study we have been discussing uses the “Sexual Experiences Survey revised by Testa et al.” I gave the link to that survey. The survey was developed at the University of Arizona, but it is used elsewhere; in particular, it was used by the Brown folks. The link to the survey web page is below. To see the actual survey, click on SES-SFV at the bottom of the page.
http://www.midss.org/content/sexual-experiences-survey-short-form-victimization-ses-sfv
Oh—and people who try to dismiss a study by just saying it doesn’t use random sampling without being able to look at the mathy details of how the sampling was done/corrected for and responding to that really don’t have enough knowledge of survey techniques to be criticizing sampling methodologies in any way.
Someone who says the survey didn’t do random sampling, when it instead surveyed the entire group, REALLY doesn’t understand survey methodology.