From the prior link…
How will we ever figure out if the surveys are accurate or not, vis-à-vis underreporting? I also think the new surveys are going to run into the same problems with respect to the types of questions that are asked. Do you think there is ever doing to be a survey with questions that most people think are fair and accurately reflect the incident rate of sexual assault, or will the problem of interpretation always exist because of how individuals perceive their own encounters?
Data – I can’t find the actual Tulane study. But this is a quote from the study author:
“But of the 56 people that described situations that would be considered rape by law, only 20% of them actually said they had been “raped.” And 54 percent of them said they had not been raped.”
The study author is not talking about official reports to police or school. He’s talking about survey responses to him.
So the survey responders only reported 11 of the 56 “rape” incidents as being rapes. The survey author counts as rapes another 45 incidents reported by the survey responders that they did not identify them as rapes. Including 30 incidents where the victims specifically said they were not raped!
So 30 out of the 56 reported “rapes” in the study are incidents where the victim said they had not in fact been raped. Seriously?
Junk data like this serves no purpose.
So the 56 “rapes” appear to consist of:
11 who said “I was raped.”
15 who did not say whether they had been raped or not.
30 who said “I was not raped.”
I think some people would argue that many women don’t understand what rape actually is, and discount incidents as something other than rape when in fact it technically was rape.
I think this is one of the main problems I have with the overall arguments. If a woman does not think something that happened to them was rape then it might well not be. One side would say the definition is X, Y, or Z and technically this met that definition. The problem I have with that is that the “victim” is the one who knows if they really consented, or gave certain cues that would be enough to change the incident from one where there was an assault, because of a lack of consent, to one where consent was implied “by actions etc, etc” or whatever the language is in many statutes.
This. The person who experienced the encounter defines the situation and I believe always will when it relates to sexual encounters. We can tell young adults what is rape and what is non-consensual sex, but ultimately they will define that encounter. A great example is Jonri’s Bowdoin incident - no verbal “yes”, no verbal “no”, no “force”, no “incapacitation” — does it meet some legal test - perhaps a minor offense, but that women gets to define what happened to her - at least for the purposes of reporting. She could have easily said nothing, woke up in the morning, regretted what happened and never said another word and tucked it in her head as something she would never do again and that would be that. She might even answer “no” on a survey if she didn’t define the experience in her head as criminal.
54% of the “rape” victims in the Tulane/Loyola study said they had not in fact been raped.
Y’all have a good weekend.
That’s still a lot of rapes.
Many of those surveyed who don’t think they were raped may have been raped.
I would love to read the study too.
That link in post 742 is very good. There is a summary of a transcript or the transcript.
And on top of that - these are survey’s of young people and they use the word “rape” in many different ways - they might have a really difficult exam that covered different material than they thought and they might say “I got raped.” That’s alittle bit like rape - which generally people presume involves force or coercion, but it doesn’t have the heart-stopping meaning it does for us “older folk.” Look at urban dictionary. It’s just another reason I’m not terribly fond of the way the word is over-used by media. The questions in most of the surveys do sound to me like they’ve been written by middle age people.
According to dictionary.com rape is “unlawful sexual intercourse or any other sexual penetration of the vagina, anus, or mouth of another person, with or without force, by a sex organ, other body part, or foreign object, without the consent of the victim.”
I assure you that was NOT the definition when I was growing up. As I posted above in this thread, when I was in high school, I did not know a single person who was “raped.” There were no rumors of rape. However, there were lots of rumors of forced oral sex. I can’t say they were true, but I believe that they were. Neither the victim nor the perpetrator viewed this as “rape.”
I believe in good faith that many people think “rape” is limited to vaginal penetration with a male sex organ.
@BoxChecker2 No on both accounts. A few women–estimates vary from 2% to 8% --lie. So, we should always consider the possibility that a woman has lied. If a woman says she had an unpleasant sexual experience, we should ask her what happened. She may describe contact like forced oral sex or penetraton with a foreign object or hands that is legally rape but which did not involve vaginal penetration with a male sex organ.
This is not a surprising result. Several of the previously referenced studies have said that surveys that use the word “rape”, like the USDOJ methodology, lead to underreporting. A large portion of victims will say that they have had specific actions defined in relation to being physically forced or incapacitated into having nonconsentual intercourse that most in this thread would call “rape”, yet they will not say they had been “raped.” For example, the Geneseo study at https://www.geneseo.edu/webfm_send/2810 states,
I don’t agree with that AT ALL BoxChecker2. Police should take reports seriously. They don’t need to believe, but they should take the report seriously and do the due diligence that they are entrusted to do. And why on earth do you think it’s morally correct to try and change the mind of someone who is not defining a sexual experience as rape – it’s not anybody’s business but the person who experienced it.
Data10 that makes sense to me except for the devalued part. Relationships are complex and in some cases if the couple had sex before but for some reason one time one party wasn’t into it, or went along with it half halfheartedly or climbed between the sheets with someone and thought it wouldn’t matter if they simply slept together they may very well not define any ensuing sex as rape, even if they weren’t into it and even if it meets the most narrow of definitions. Our minds simply don’t compartmentalize that way when it involves someone we may or may not have had a “good” encounter or even relationship with. I think it would be a very complex survey indeed that could “parse” those intricacies of relationships. In the absence of force, in the absence of “no” i think it would be very difficult for outside observers to separate from their own life experiences good and bad. I don’t think we could even get reliable answers to the ‘why didn’t you report’ question because people may “cover up” their real reasons for not reporting and choose a more common, publicly perceived acceptable reason.
I had this post mostly saved as a draft when I was beaten to the punch with some sections of this article. A very good and short read about reporting, perceptions, why people don’t report and how to improve the situation.
Some key points: only 4% of women who experienced something that would legally be called rape in Louisiana reported the incident to authorities.
Here is a reported rape from 2013 - the perp was a person who was know to the victim and offered to be her “safe” walk home from a bar. Yes, she had been drinking, yes she danced with him, yes she allowed him to walk her, but in no way would those things add up to I want you to rape me in the parking garage. There are no gray areas in this even though some people might say she shouldn’t have “put herself in that position”. In fact, according to much of the information one could have thought of this guy a good samaritan who was helping her to get home. NOLA poses a higher than average risk of being forcibly raped by a stranger. Women are both abducted in cars and subject to aggravated rape at gunpoint while out walking around. That is not an immediate risk in every college location. One would like to think that your fellow classmates could be trusted to be a safe walk - particularly at a school with a population as small at Loyola where you would know or know of most students. In this case the perp must have had the mindset of entitlement and immunity thinking that she wouldn’t tell because how else would you possibly get away with it.
http://www.noladefender.com/content/loyola-univ34ersity-stu56dent-raped-campus
This crime would be one of only 2 reported rapes in the stats below and 4 rapes total. Loyola as an institution believes that the one in five number for rapes and attempted rapes together is accurate or close to accurate and use that as the preamble to their awareness training and response program. Loyola has about 1,684 female undergraduates. Four reported rapes in a year would be about 0.24% of the female population.
http://finance.loyno.edu/police/campus-crime-report
NOPD has such a piss poor record of dealing with even obvious forcible stranger rape that many rapes go unreported. The two institutions have taken it upon themselves to own the problem and be both more pro-active and more responsive because the NOPD is just not he place to go traditionally. Whatever the actual numbers are, the two universities have decided that it is a problem and that they are going to try to address it and not just with tribunals. How can that be bad?
http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2014/11/tulane_panel_asks_how_do_we_en.html
Here is a 2014 editorial about the decision to name a Loyola student who is charge with raping a Tulane student. Part of their discussion was an internal discomfort with naming names then realizing that part of treating rape like any other crime requires that people talk about it in the open.
https://jessicadeboldworks.■■■■■■■■■■■■■/my-published-work/editorials-in-the-maroon/
I did a bit more looking into Maine law before writing this. First, 255-A is the most appropriate statute. See State v. Gantnier, 55 A.3d 404, 409 (2012). Under that statute, the prosecutor needs to prove the actor:
- intentionally;
- subjects another person to any sexual contact; and
- The other person has not expressly or impliedly acquiesced in the sexual contact.
According to the facts in your post, the only element in dispute is the implied acquiescence. Under Maine law, that can be proven purely on the alleged victim’s testimony. State v. Drewry, 946 A.2d 981, 991 (2008). Her not showing “no” is not necessarily sufficient to show implied consent. State v. Dipietrantonio, 122 A.2d 414, 417 (1956). In fact, such defenses have been tried and have failed. Whitmore v. State, 670 A.2d 394, 395-96 (1996). That said, implied consent is circumstance dependent and it could, I suppose go the other way. It probably wouldn’t though, because juries hate sex criminals. That’s assuming it ever saw a jury, which it almost certainly would not.
54% of the “rapes” counted in the Tulane/Loyola study were from survey responders who affirmatively said they had not in fact been raped.
Juries don’t like rapists. Rapists who use force. Rapists who are unknown to the victim.
After that all bets are off as far as how a jury would react. I think it was in the missoula book that one of the prosecutors said he/she prefers juries with men because women weigh there own life experiences when they listen to victim testimony. But I agree this one may not get to a jury if the minimal reporting is accurate.
@northwesty, lol.
A show that starred a rapist. 
It’s interesting that people have been squawking about the problem of perception with the idea that women will feell raped when in fact they haven’t been resulting in unrealistically high numbers. The Tulane/Loyola study discussion centers around the idea that people who have actually been raped by the legal definition in Louisiana (not exactly a touchy feely liberal bastion of political correctness) don’t always perceive that bad experience as rape. They discuss the problem of wording. If you ask a person did these things happen to you (things that constitute rape) they might concur but if you actually ask them if they’ve been raped they might say no. That does not prove that they were not subject to those actions that by Louisiana State law are considered to be rape. It means that they have a perception issue or trouble admitting that out loud.
To draw for a moment on the Duggar thread, Josh didn’t sexually molest his sisters he “touched them inappropriately through their clothing while they slept.” (according to dad) That is SO much easier to say out loud!