| theprof00 said:
LASTLY I just want to again point out that despite all the words I wrote above about what the DOJ does and does not track, what numbers could be, etc etc, I used a very conservative formula that actually mistakenly gave nearly 1% away every period over 5 periods, and did not include previous higher incidence rates, or lower population. If there is still some argument, I have literally no idea what that could possibly be. |
Now that you mention it, I do think I was wrong adding in another 81million to the population size. I wasn't accounting for the assumption that crime trends would be consistent in the future so a rape involving someone who is not deceased would theoretically be attributed to someone who is currently alive in the future.
However this does mean that crime trends to need to be accounted for when assuming future crime and I am not good enough at stats to attempt to do that calculation (although, I do think it would have a quite notable effect due to the steep decrease in rape rates).
As for revictimization, I don't think the BJS accounts for it in the way you think it does. It is a survey that looks for amounts of victimizations per year, not the amount of victims per lifetime. If they do account for revictimization, it would be to increase their numbers to more accurately represent amount of victimizations per year, not decrease them. Further, the survey does even less than I thought it did when looking at victims per year. It actually allows for a victim to be counted up to 10 times per year. In fact, I was able to dig up stats (thanks for the lead) from the BJS excluding serial victimizations. Unfortunately it comes without numbers, but without even including multi-year revictimization, about 15-20% of the total BJS figure can be eliminated per year as a discrepancy between victimizations and victims: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mchfrv.pdf (Figure 10)
I'm not sure if this is the wording you were originally saying, but with your calculation I think the result would be "1 in 5 women will be victims of rape or sexual assault" and not "1 in 5 women have been victims of rape or sexual assault", because I think that your calculation assumes everyone in the population is 81 years old and about to die (I think?) because as I said above, you are accounting for theoretical future crimes in your sampling. Thats fine, I just wanted to make that distinction.
I do think this is still likely high for reasons stated above, however likely not by a tremendous amount.
EDIT
Oh, and side note, here is the BJS' definition of rape:
Now, I'm not sure if they are including attempted rape as part of rape by saying "attempting such an act", but I did notice that this definition does include penetration by a foreign object (which you said it didn't). Attempted rape also includes verbal threats, which I would typically classify as something else, but maybe thats just me. Sexual assault is also a fairly broadly defined phrase, and I do think that rape and sexual assault should be kept seperate when looking at stats (although I realize that isn't always possible).
