‘Rape Culture’ Is A MYTH | Change My Mind

[sundin13]

eva01beserk said:

sundin13 said:

If you are curious, the BJS suggests that there were about 325,000 instances of rape or sexual assault in 2016 (including only individuals over 12 in that statistic), with about 20% of those being reported to the police.

While these numbers are clearly less than the NISVS numbers, I'm not really sure if that says much about whether we live in a "rape culture" because the definition of rape culture is vague and subjective. In my personal opinion, those numbers are still high enough that I would consider sexual violence to be a major issue in the United States.

I belive 1 rape is still to many. But thats not the issue. They are making things worst by exagerating everything and due to that women are in a state of panic basicly making them distrust men and afecting families.

But I also repeat. that unreported statistic is based on nothing. While its ovbiously true that a lot of cases go unreported, to belive is that high that would make 1 in 5 women have been asaulted is just lunacy. 

Numbers which indicate what percentage of crimes are not reported to the police are not "based on nothing". BJS has a National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which I believe was referred to as the "gold standard" in your video source. This survey utilizes different methods than the UCR reports. UCR gets data from the police to determine how many crimes were handled in any given year. NCVS gets data from individuals to determine how many victimizations occurred in any given year. This data includes information on whether or not each victimization is reported to the police.

Second, I believe you are misconstruing the argument you have been presented. Not all of the links that you were presented utilized NISVS data. The first link seems to partially use it, but beyond that, it doesn't seem like that specific survey is really utilized much in those links. Some link to various things which cannot be fact checked (a book or an educational video), but by and large, criticizing that one survey does not respond to the point that is being made.

To address the original claim:

"Everybody knows one woman who has been the victim of sexual assault or rape." While obviously the claim is not literally true, we can look into whether it is statistically true.

The rate of sexual assault or rape is about 1/1000/year (Worth noting that this is a vast under-estimate. The numbers for the last few years have been around 1.1-1.6, and these numbers have drastically dropped over the last 30 years). The average person knows 600 people, therefore using the most simple math, the average person knows 0.6 people who are sexually assaulted or raped every year. Assuming the average lifespan is 70 and there are zero victimizations in the first 12 years of someones life (as the stats don't include individuals under 12), the average person would know 34 people who were victims of sexual assault or rape over their lifetime.

That is actually a lot higher than I was expecting. Is my math wrong somewhere?