CDC: MRA claims that “40% of rapists are women” are based on bad math and misuse of our data
Feminists often complain, with considerable justification, that Men’s Rights Activists try to turn every conversation about women’s issues into a game of “what about the men?” You’re talking about female rape victims — well, what about the male rape victims?
The trouble with this strategy, from the point of view of the Men’s Rights Activists anyway, is that this little “gotcha” is much less of a “gotcha” then they’d like it to be.
In the case of rape, for example, feminists are well aware that men are raped as well: the “Don’t Be That Guy” ad campaign, which sent so many MRAs into hysterics, focused on male victims as well as female ones. The emergency room rape advocate organization that a friend of mine volunteers for provides advocacy for victims regardless of gender.
So many MRAs have started playing another game: trying to twist the conversation around in order to cast women as the villains. Rape is a bit tough for them here, since the overwhelming majority of rapists are male. So MRAs talk about the alleged epidemic of female false accusers instead. Or they change the topic entirely and make dead baby jokes (see my post yesterday).
Recently, MRAs have tried a new strategy, seizing on data from The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, a massive study conducted in 2010 under the aegis of the Centers for Disease Control, to claim that “40% of rapists are women.”
This is a claim repeated by numerous MRAs on numerous websites; see, for example, this post by A Voice for Men’s Typhonblue on the blog GendErratic. Here’s the same claim made into an “infographic” for the Men’s Rights subreddit.
Trouble is, this claim is flat-out false, based on an incorrect understanding of the NISVS data. But you don’t have to take my word for it: the NISVS researchers themselves say the MRA “interpretation” of their data is based on bad math. It’s not just a question of different definitions of rape: the MRA claims are untenable even if you include men who were “made to penetrate” women as victims of rape (as the MRAs do) rather than as victims of “sexual violence other than rape” (as the NISVS does).
I wrote to the NISVS for clarification of this matter recently, and got back a detailed analysis, straight from the horse’s mouth, of where the MRA arguments went wrong. This is long, and a bit technical, but it’s also pretty definitive, so it’s worth quoting in detail. (I’ve bolded some of the text below for emphasis, and broken some of the larger walls of text into shorter paragraphs.)
It appears that the math used to derive an estimated percentage of female rapists … is flawed. First, we will summarize the assertion and what we perceive to be the basis for the assertion.
According to the web links, the “40% of rapists were women” was derived from these two steps:
1) Combining the estimated number of female rape victims with the estimated number of being-made-to-penetrate male victims in the 12 months prior to the survey to conclude that about 50% of the rape or being-made-to-penetrate victims were males;
2) Multiplying the estimated percentage (79%) of male being-made-to-penetrate victims who reported having had female perpetrators in these victims’ lifetime with the 50% obtained in step 1 to claim that 40% of perpetrators of rape or being-made-to-penetrate were women.
None of these calculations should be used nor can these conclusions be correctly drawn from these calculations.
First the researchers clarify the issue of definition:
To explain, in NISVS we define rape as “any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes times when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.”
We defined sexual violence other than rape to include being made to penetrate someone else, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and non-contact unwanted sexual experiences. Made to penetrate is defined as including “times when the victim was made to, or there was an attempt to make them, sexually penetrate someone without the victim’s consent because the victim was physically forced (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threatened with physical harm, or when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.”
The difference between “rape” and “being made to penetrate” is that in the definition of rape the victim is penetrated; “made to penetrate” by definition refers to cases where the victim penetrated someone else.
While there are multiple definitions of rape and sexual violence used in the field, CDC, with the help of experts in the field, has developed these specific definitions of rape and other forms of sexual violence (such as made to penetrate, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and non-contact unwanted sexual experiences). We use these definitions to help guide our analytical decisions.
Now the researchers get into the details of the math:
Regarding the specific assertion in question, several aspects of mistreatments of the data and the published estimates occurred in the above derivation:
A. While the percentage of female rape victims and the percentage of male being-made-to-penetrate victims were inferred from the past 12-month estimates by combining two forms of violence, the percentage of perpetrator by sex was taken from reported estimates for males for lifetime (a misuse of the percentage of male victims who reported only female perpetrators in their lifetime being made to penetrate victimization). This mismatch of timeframes is incorrect because the past 12-month victimization cannot be stretched to equate with lifetime victimization. In fact, Table 2.1 and 2.2 of the NISVS 2010 Summary Report clearly report that lifetime rape victimization of females (estimated at 21,840,000) is about 4 times the number of lifetime being made-to-penetrate of males (estimated at 5,451,000).
B. An arithmetic confusion appears when multiplying the two percentages together to conclude that the product is a percentage of all the “rapists”, an undefined perpetrator population. Multiplying the percentage of male victims (as derived in step 1) above) to the percentage of male victims who had female perpetrators cannot give a percentage of perpetrators mathematically because to get a percentage of female rape perpetrators, one must have the total rape perpetrators (the denominator), and the number of female perpetrators of this specific violence (the numerator). Here, neither the numerator nor the denominator was available.
C. Data collected and analyzed for the NISVS 2010 have a “one-to-multiple” structure (where the “one” refers to one victim and the “multiple” refers to multiple perpetrators). While not collected, it is conceivable that any perpetrator could have multiple victims. These multiplicities hinder any attempt to get a percentage of perpetrators such as the one described in steps 1) and 2), and nullify the reverse calculation for obtaining a percent of perpetrators.
For example, consider an example in which a girl has eight red apples while a boy has two green apples. Here, 50% of the children are boys and another 50% are girls. It is not valid to multiply 50% (boy) with 100% (boy’s green apples) to conclude that “50% of all the apples combined are green”. It is clear that only 20% of all the apples are green (two out of 10 apples) when one combines the red and green apples together. Part of the mistake in the deriving of the “50%” stems from a negligence to take into account the inherent multiplicity: a child can have multiple apples (just as a victim can have multiple perpetrators).
D. As the study population is U.S. adults in non-institutional settings, the sample was designed to be representative of the study population, not the perpetrator population (therefore no sampling or weighting is done for the undefined universe of perpetrators). Hence, while the data can be analyzed to make statistical inferences about the victimization of U.S. adults residing in non-institutional settings, the NISVS data are incapable of lending support to any national estimates of the perpetrator population, let alone estimates of perpetrators of a specific form of violence (say, rape or being-made-to-penetrate).
E. Combining the estimated past 12-month female rape victims with the estimated past 12-month being-made-to-penetrate male victims cannot give an accurate number of all victims who were either raped or being-made-to-penetrate, even if this combination is consistent with CDC’s definition.
Besides a disagreement with the definitions of the various forms of violence given in the NISVS 2010 Summary Report, this approach of combining the 12-month estimated number of female rape victims with the 12-month estimated number of male victims misses victims in the cells where reliable estimates were not reported due to small cell counts failing to meet statistical reliability criteria. For any combined form of violence, the correct analytical approach for obtaining a national estimate is to start at the raw data level of analysis, if such a creation of a combined construct is established.
So you’re going to need to go back to the drawing board, MRAs.
What is especially distressing here is that the NISVS data could have been the starting point for a serious discussion of male victims of sexual assault by women, which is a real and often overlooked issue. Unfortunately, MRAs have once again poisoned the well by misusing data in an attempt to exaggerate the purported villainy of women and score cheap rhetorical points.
NOTE: A regular in the AgainstMensRights subreddit approached the NISVS researchers with this same question some months back. Unfortunately, the statement they got back from the NISVS contained an incorrect number. The statement I’m quoting here corrects this number and adds more context.
I can provide contact info for the NISVS representative who got back to me on this to any serious (non-troll) person who requests it.
Posted on October 29, 2013, in all about the menz, antifeminism, evil women, misogyny, MRA, playing the victim, rape, rape culture, reddit, sexual assault, TyphonBlue and tagged anti-feminism, antifeminism, cdc, men's rights, misogyny, MRA, NISVS, rape, rape culture. Bookmark the permalink. 990 Comments.
” (Using ‘working’ figures derived from what is already available helps us to choose the best approach and the ‘best place to look’ to find more accurate figures. We use a Bayesian approach to derive these, as this gives us a figure telling us how correct we are in thinking that the ‘working’ figure is correct (turtles all the way down :) ). I don’t think such an approach is possible in this case though)”
I was going to claim LessWrongitis, but ze actually seems fairly well versed, I may actually reply.
Well, I’ll certainly explain here. Adiabat is seeking an explain action why the lifetime data on perpetrator gender cannot be applied to the 12 month data. The answer to which is actually right in the initial question of why there’s such a discrepancy between the lifetime and 12 month data — with a handful of potential reasons so far, it’s impossible to answer that why. And without knowing why there’s such a difference between lifetime and 12 month data for the raw counts of victims, there’s no way to know if whatever is behind that is also affecting the variable of perpetrator gender. That is, without answering the first question (wtf is up with the counts), we can’t reliably guess at what the 12 month data would show for the genders of the rapists.
I haven’t done an ice cream example yet have I? I’m slacking, stats without ice cream examples *shakes head*
Example time, and yes, there will be ice cream. So, if we know that over the course of their lifetimes, 30% of women and 15% of men favor chocolate ice cream, but over the last 12 months 30% of men have favored chocolate while the women haven’t changed preferences and we know that over the course of their lifetime, 75% of men like their ice cream with sprinkles (or jimmies, or whatever you call them), can we say that over the last 12 months 22%~ favor chocolate ice cream with sprinkles? (30%*75%). Well no, because first we need to know why chocolate ice cream is so much more popular lately. Either that or survey how may men like sprinkles.
In any case, you certainly can’t do “well twice as many men like chocolate, so twice as many men like sprinkles”, since, um, 150% of men? That sounds weird, did half of men grow a second head and it likes sprinkles?
(Note, strawberry, chocolate syrup, no sprinkles :) )
And adiabat, if you stop by, my genderqueer self uses gender neutral pronouns — ze / zir, not he / him. Thanks!
…I want ice cream now >.<
An outlier is something that stands outside of the average data. Usually it’s a result of extraordinary circumstances. For instance, if you were measuring the exam results of a group of students in order to determine the effectiveness of a particular curriculum, then the results of the best and worst students of that group will probably be outliers. You can’t take a 90% score from the very best student to argue that the curriculum is excellent, nor can you take 40% from the worst to argue that it’s useless, so you either set them aside as special cases rather than representative values, or make sure to count them in with the larger data set, but never use them on their own, since they’re misleading.
farther
than makes statistical sense.
Blerf. Late night word brain. Faily faily. :\
Confession: I read that as resnet the first time, cuz that’s what Pitt calls, well, basically all the other student positions in the IT department, because they do *drum roll* networking stuff in the residence halls (and then there’s a handful of students in the IT office, and idk if my position in software licensing is still a student job, they were trying to get Pitt to okay it as a FT job)
Outliers…Athwyren is mostly correct, but it depends just how far from the average that 90% and 40% are. It’s a smidge complex, but basically you find the median, and then the median of the top and bottom halves, do some math, and end up with two numbers, one being the low end of the normal distribution! the other being the high end. Anything outside that range is an outlier. So if you have 25 students and the scores go from 40% to 90%, but they are all 2~ points apart, those aren’t outliers. Otoh, if most of those students got 60-70%, and nearly all of them 50-80%, then yeah, 40% and 90% will probably be outliers.
Sometimes you can just eyeball it though, like if one student on that managed to score 10% and everyone else got 40%+? Outlier.
re outliers: This is why many people who get into CalTech, or MIT, etc. don’t fare well. They spent their lives before being ‘whiz-kids” who, by virtue of talent/good fortune, were well outside the norm in their schools, and didn’t have to work terribly hard.
When they get to Carnegie-Mellon they discover they 1: aren’t the smartest person in the room, and 2: they have to work to keep up.
Neither of these is bad (being average in a pool of the incredibly talented means… one is incredibly talented), but either one can be a real shock; both together is sometimes overwhelming.
That kinda sounds fun…I never liked being able to not show up to courses that cost an arm and a leg. Then again, I was usually about the third smartest person in the room (‘crept English, cuz tracking and I can’t spell so lowest track and these people need to be read to, SAVE ME!)
I was also always perfectly happy playing second chair violin, so not being first just doesn’t bother me any. Not being challenged does (for which you are a breath of fresh air btw)
i am growing very frustrated … i saw yet another critique of this article, and ended up finding these two; blackforestgatomon.tumblr.com/post/65809912868/mra-male-rape-statistics-are-wrong, schaka.tumblr.com/post/65820948304/mra-male-rape-statistics-are-wrong
i cnt believe the conclusion of the first post, 80% of rapists of men are women?! drastically bigger number than previously calculated! and schaka’s rates of both female and male victims in 12-mo. numbers seem inconsistent? i could be seeing this wrong?
@athywren, argenti thank you i will read up more on the outlier notes later, but i think i have been wasting all your time in my vain endeavor to understand all this, especially when you all seem to be going through troubling events (i didn’t realize how much of a community this site is…) for now i need to rest my head. im really not suited for math
before i forget to ask tomorrow – in adibat’s comment, why do they think lifetime figures are outliers though? and in schaka’s post this stuck out. “The 50% in the last 12 months is referring to men making up 50% of rape victims. Clearly not by their definition, but by the definition of most sane human beings.” does this mean they didn’t combine the two categories of rape and mtp?
Because that’s the only way to get the argument they want to make to make any sort of sense. You’re crediting them with far more honesty than they deserve.
The CDC didn’t combine those categories, no. So combining them men made up 50%~ of rape victims in those 12 months…which is why they insist on discounting the lifetime data, where the rate is lower.
“80% of rapists of men are women?!”
That one is more or less true. Iirc it was 79%~ of men who had been made to penetrate had been forced to do so by a woman (now, I’m fairly sure there was a stat in there for men who were penetrated and that was largely by other men, but they’ll ignore that, it isn’t convenient right now)
93.3% of the 1.4% male respondents who reported having been raped by penetration reported a male perpetrator.
For lifetime figures every 5th rape victim is a man and slightly less than every 5th rape victim is a man raped by a woman (1/5.25). For the last 12 months numbers every second (non-incarcerated) rape victim is a man.
tried dissecting an article on my own! i doubt it worked. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24713110
1. i understand the sample size issue that didn’t include other nations, but why did ‘a quarter’ terminology bother the author less than ‘1 in 4’? do they not mean the same thing?
2. athywren, argenti when they didn’t include numbers from recently conflcted areas those would be outliers, correct? because they didn’t best represent the average?
3. the last issue they talked about in the article confused me the most. i know that since rape victims alone already have such a hard time coming out about their experiences, certainly people who knowingly commited rape would be even harder to draw out, so that was why they worded the question that way. but would its ambiguity affect the nature of the answers? i also saw a video of someone raising questions about rape studies in the united states; could this be the same thing?
and i want to thank everyone so far who have been very patient with my lack of knowledge. its hard but i feel very motivated to study harder because of your assistance.
@argenti, just curious, the ‘inconvenient’ stat of majority of male victims raped by men is also of a lifetime figure?
Yes, the 12 month number was too small to be statistically reliable. And I’ll review your link in a bit, I need coffee to process Teh Maths :)
Oh and don’t worry about asking questions, I’m happy to answer stats questions. I spent ages offering to teach MRAs how not to kill math, with no takers, so people who actually want to learn? Ask away!
1) I’m assuming you’re referring to these quotes —
“‘Nearly a quarter of men interviewed reported perpetrating rape against a woman or girl.'”
“”One in four men across Asia admit to having committed rape.” This statistic was widely reported around the world, following the publication of a UN study. Could that possibly be the case?”
The issue isn’t 1 in 4 versus 25%, it’s “in Asia” versus “of men interviewed”. So you’re riht that the sample size is the issue — it just isn’t representative enough to say it applies to all of Asia, just the interviewed men.
2) Yes. Areas experiencing civil conflict or war almost always have higher rape rates than though in a (relative) peacetime.
3) The issue isn’t about whether they’d admit to it, the issue is that the women may’ve “consented” because they also felt that having sex was their wifely duty. That is, it may reflect oppressive gender roles better than rapists. In the US, Canada, UK, etc, that would be called rape now, but in the US, until a few decades ago, you couldn’t rape your wife — you were legally entitled to sex from her whenever you wanted. If that’s the case in the areas studied, that question doesn’t tease out men who coerced her from men who simply went along with the gender roles they’d been raised wih. The latter is still wrong, but reflects on gender roles, not rape, and that question conflates the two.
I’d need to see the video on the US studies to comment on that though, sorry.
Also, could you capitalize at least the beginning of your sentences? It’d make it a bit easier to follow what you’re asking :)
@Argenti, im sorry, the caps lock key on my computer hasn’t been working. but now it’s been more like a bad habit.
I have some questions about schaka’s post? do you know how we go from 1.3 million male rape victims in a year to just 5.5 million in a lifetime? Are adult men at much higher risk of being raped and/or raping men has become much more common in the past years?
this part also stuck out to me; “16% of men with documented cases of sexual abuse considered their early childhood experiences sexual abuse, compared with 64% of women with documented cases of sexual abuse. These gender differences may reflect inadequate measurement techniques or an unwillingness on the part of men to disclose this information (Widom and Morris 1997).”
Less than 20% w/ documented history of abuse considered themselves to be abused anymore. According to schaka, it doesnt make sense to look at lifetime figures; even if you consider that the participants weren’t directly asked for their “opinion” on what happened to them, but the decision was made based on questions found towards the end of the study’s document. Do you think this means men rationalize/justify abuse which happend to them to a much greater extend than women, since they just said no to questions that would’ve been a clear yes 5/10/15/20 years ago?
also, I don’t mean to send you on a wild goose chase (I don’t know if I used that phrase right) but adiabat also responded to your stat assessment. It had something to do with whether Mras can bully anonymous participants, which I don’t have an informed opinion on.
i forgot the video – youtube.com/watch?v=P91QJWIT8DI this sounds very antagonist towards feminism so you wont like it.
Typhonblue just called me a bully: http://www.genderratic.com/p/836/manufacturing-female-victimhood-and-marginalizing-vulnerable-men/#comment-121710
o_O
“I have some questions about schaka’s post? do you know how we go from 1.3 million male rape victims in a year to just 5.5 million in a lifetime? Are adult men at much higher risk of being raped and/or raping men has become much more common in the past years?”
You might want to reread the last couple of pages, there was lots of speculation on wtf’s going in there. Could be age, could be that the year in question just saw a lot more rape than average, there were a few more options, but you’do do better to go read that in context.
“this part also stuck out to me; “16% of men with documented cases of sexual abuse considered their early childhood experiences sexual abuse, compared with 64% of women with documented cases of sexual abuse. These gender differences may reflect inadequate measurement techniques or an unwillingness on the part of men to disclose this information (Widom and Morris 1997).””
That’s the other study, the one TyhponBlue loves so much (which, in a fucked up way, could explain the first question since one of the theories is that men forgot the earlier abuse)
“Less than 20% w/ documented history of abuse considered themselves to be abused anymore. According to schaka, it doesnt make sense to look at lifetime figures; even if you consider that the participants weren’t directly asked for their “opinion” on what happened to them, but the decision was made based on questions found towards the end of the study’s document. Do you think this means men rationalize/justify abuse which happend to them to a much greater extend than women, since they just said no to questions that would’ve been a clear yes 5/10/15/20 years ago?”
Possibly, possible some did forget, possible some weren’t comfortable disclosing their abuse, and I’m curious what sort of documented history they mean, because I found out I had a social services file years after the fact — if it hadn’t slipped cuz the school thought I knew, and that was the “documented history” they meant, I’d have said no and thought the answer correct. That is, depending how the worded the questions, they may not have been asking what they thought they were.
And yep, you’re using the phrase “wild goose chase” correctly. As for the video, and adiabat, I’m going to have to get back to it later, my sleep is all off and I haven’t the brain cells for it right now.
Ally: That seems to be an indication TB has no real response. It’s fundamentally a concession of defeat.
Congratulations, 1: you won, 2: you have made “the big time”.
Oooh, Ally, you big nasty bully you, scaring poor little Typhoid Blue like that!
::applauds::
Ally — oh that’s just special.
As for wanting the raw data, someone has clearly never tried analyzing large samples. My hurts just thinking about working with that many data points!
And all over my preferred pronouns!
I must say that I’m glad to see everyone but her taking your correction relatively gracefully. FTR, part of why I like “ze” is because z is a poor neglected letter in English.
Wait, what about Ally’s FREEZE PEACH!!!
Freeze Peach is only for dudes, cloudiah, you know that. Or rather, MRAs and (on sufferance) feMRAs.
I should have told them I’m a trans girl. Then they would extend their solidarity to me and apologize for taking my freeze peach! Compassion for “men” and “boys” indeed.
By the way, I’m suddenly craving peach ice cream.
Can anyone who goes to those pages recall anything resembling compassion for anyone, ever, from them? I don’t think rageboners about made-up tales of Rongs Dun To Menz count.
I thought that Argenti was simply working with the data on hand as a private citizen, fool that I was. Then I checked out the Genderratic thread and learned from “Adiabat” that Argenti is (somehow) in cahoots with the CDC. Release the raw data! Tear down this wall!
While Argenti’s calculations work with the the available data, would it work with data none of us have? Thanks to the CDC and (somehow) Argenti, we’ll never know. How conVENient!
After an endless number of posts, Adiabat grudgingly admits that Argenti is right, albeit ze is also being a total stickler.
Extra Fun Quote:
Oh, snap!
Is it a vast outlier, or merely an outlier? We at Genderratic have decided that it would be more ideologically correct if it was just a bit of an outlier, so obviously that’s the appropriate conclusion and we should proceed on the assumption that it’s true.
BTW the rest of you lack academic rigor.
So mockery and logic are incompatible? I see.
And Argenti is Dave.
Wow, the logic in that one is… strong?
@Argenti, I’m apologizing for not responding to you sooner, I will be asking you some more tomorrow. also, do you mind being referred to with pronouns “they/them,” as well as “ze/zir”? I usually frequent tumblr a lot often and have never seen ze/zir used ever.
@Argenti, After looking through the speculations on the last comment page it seems that the age was a huge factor here. http://schaka.tumblr.com/post/65820948304/mra-male-rape-statistics-are-wrong I think schaka already pinpointed this problem, i didn’t read too carefully before – “Participants in the study had to be over 18 and we know that kids are unlikely to be made to penetrate.” And regarding how much the 12-month figure differs from the lifetime, would the 12-month figure for male mtp victims be considered an outlier then? also sorry, if you’re more comfortable w/ ze/zir, i will use them.
@Brooked hi, I could be wrong but it sounded adiabat was saying that both they and argenti have different methods in approaching numbers and that without the raw data we’ll never truly know who’s correct? Then they proceeded to explain using Argenti’s original ice-cream sprinkles examples. A lot o that hinged on whether it’s ok to release raw data from anonymous people.
@Argenti again, sorry for the 3 day delay.
hannasoumaki — part of the difference in how adiabat and I are approaching this is that I am…less fond…of Bayesian statistics. Like, that XKCD is cute and all, but betting the machine? Not math. My reasons here are complex and probably confusing, so I won’t confuse you with them, but the difference in mathematical approach to using the lifetime figures to calculate one year data is part of it.
Now, about the post you linked, but given the survey participants are largely middle aged, I don’t think that also could account for the difference between the two numbers being that large. But, yes, something like half of female rape victims are raped before age 25, and most of them before age 18 — people who wouldn’t have been surveyed since they’re minors. However, that could account for the gender disparity of the lifetime data, but not the disparity between lifetime and 12 month MtP data. Because the sample was mostly middle aged people — men who’d been at risk of being made to penetrate (raped) for only a few years less than the women had been at risk of being rape — you’d expect a decent number of them to have been rapid by MtP prior to the 12 months in question.
More ice cream examples!
If girls are allowed to eat ice cream birthday cake, and boys aren’t, then for young adults you’d find that the number of girls who had ever had an ice cream cake, versus those who’d had it in the last year, would be fairly similar percentage wise — if 90% had ever had an ice cream cake, then somewhere around 90% probably had it in the last year. But for boys, you’d find far more young adults who’d had one in the last year than had had one in their lifetime, since they’ve had 18~ less years to be eating ice cream cakes (call it 10~15 for MtP though, since very young girls aren’t raped in large numbers, and older teenage boys are at risk of being made to penetrate).
However, if you ask middle age people, you’d expect to find similar rates for men and women for both lifetime and 12 month ice cream cake consumption — if the rates are actually equal. If women like cake more than men, then you expect to see higher number for women for both lifetime and 12 month data. The middle age men have had plenty of time to eat ice cream cake if they’re going to.
Otoh, if you find that men, in the last year, had way more ice cream cake than in their lifetime, while women have had ice cream cake at about the same rate as ever, and your sample is middle aged adults, then ice cream cake was probably rather popular among men last year.
/strained analogy
What I’m getting at here is that the sample was old enough that you’d expect to see similar rates unless the last year was an outlier. Or, at least, age probably isn’t the main missing variable when it comes to the difference between lifetime and 12 month data for men. Could be part of it, but probably not to the degree they found, not with a sample where approximately half their lifespan is covered in the lifetime data.
More importantly since there is obviously something funky going on with the lifetime versus 12 month data, any assumptions about applying other lifetime data to the 12 month data are rather iffy until you figure out wtf is up with the disparity there.
Ah, a less stretched analogy. It’s like looking at photos of someone from their lifetime and finding most we’re taken by their mothers, then finding that men had had a lot more photos taken in the last year than you’d expect given how many photos they’d had taken in their lifetime thus far…and deciding that mean their mothers took a lot of photos of them in the last year. Just because the mothers took most of the photos over the course of their lifetimes doesn’t mean their mothers took most of the photos taken of them in the last year. Even more so when there’s already obviously weird going on with the number of photos they’ve had taken in the last year. (“Ever had your photo taken?” “Sure, plenty of times” “who took most of them?” “Hm, my mother probably” “had photos taken this year?” “Yeah, a surprising number of them actually” “I assume your mother took most of them?”…sounds a bit less than logical right?)
Damn, that got long. Sorry about that!
No one knows the gotcha game better than David Futrelle. It’s your oeuvre.
David, now you are just backtracking. You could be honest about it but then intellectual integrity has never been your strong suit. Why am I even talking to the gotcha master?
I don’t know. Why are you?
You still haven’t explained why you feel the need to tell us you’re “not that guy”. It has a real skeletons-in-the-closet denial about it.
That Guy:
So… intellectual honesty involves 1: making an unsupported assertion that someone is neig dishonest about something.
2: Insisting that they need to “confess” to being wrong to prove they are honset.
3: Never dealing with the data which is presented to show why the assertion of error was factually incorrect.
“And Argenti is Dave.”
Aren’t we all?
Are we supposed to know what “it” is standing in for when that guy says “You could be honest about it?” I haven’t a clue.
The number of victims of cat-related violence in the manosphere compared to the average population?
I don’t think it’s that so much as an immature attempt to voice opposition to the Feminist Gynocracy.
@Argenti, no it’s okay, thank you. So does the different approach in mathematics affect the objectivity of a stats analysis? and which do you think is a more objective approach?
I thought so too, but I don’t know if it accounts the for the huge disparity. For women it’s 1:20 for 12 months:lifetime, correct? I just don’t think it’s b/c child abuse isn’t factored into the last 12 months. if I looked at this correctly, these stats don’t quite match up. http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/cm-data-sheet–2013.pdf I am aware that we are looking at reports here, but I’m still not comfortable saying the lifetime data looks so differently due to child abuse. I do agree, that age is probably the defining factor. Like you said in your analogy, young boys can’t be mtp and since the questioners in the study decided when somebody was eligable for the “mtp” category, I expected to see other numbers under “sexual violence” to go up massively but nothing like that is showing, so I think that numbers are actually equal but documentation isn’t.
Also, I realize this horse has loooong since bolted the stable, but can I just say that I appreciate the Boobzers coming to bat over the defintion for male sexual violence? I didn’t get involved, because honestly, it upset me too much, because by the earlier standards, what happened to me wasn’t rape, and hearing other people debate and discuss whether such experiences (not necessarily mine, and yet JUST LIKE MINE) count as rape or not. I’m glad you changed your mind, David.
@Argenti never mind, a friend helped out by accessing her library database. Here is the full study; http://imgur.com/GRgWIKZhttp://www.imagebanana.com/view/jkj3api0/Accuracyofadultrecollectionsofchildh.png
she found an offline version as well, but didn’t want to upload it b/c was unsure of the legal status.
Hannasoumaki — no, given the survey participant’s ages, I doubt age is the main factor. If they were younger, maybe, but I doubt the difference in male versus female victims before they hit 18 could account for that much difference when the participants were mostly middle aged.
And btw, I’m not a student anymore, no uni access, I can get around that since I know people with access, but asking your friend is probably the better bet.
re access: If there is a local college (community, or 4 year) one can often use their library computers, and so get JSTOR access.
Thanks for the link, hannasoumaki.
It really does look like, as I initially expected, that the gender difference mentioned in the Widom and Morris study is really just referring to whether the respondents consider themselves sexually abused. It doesn’t follow from this study that men will underreport sexual abuse even in a survey that uses behavior-specific screening questions. In short, Typhonblue’s citation is even sillier than I thought.
Pecunium — Yale? Yeah, not dealing with that when my pharm student is, well, a student. (Email me, I want to whine about code)
If that wasn’t directed at me, then yes, do that.
Ally — silly is one word for it. I couldn’t get it to work on the iPad and the mac is in Vista cuz coding, but that’s about what I suspected — it isn’t that men are less likely to remember it but less likely to call it sexual abuse. Which implies that when asked the sorts of specific questions the CDC asked, that study is irrelevant.
Not only that, but also the researches did not even verify whether the abuse that was disclosed was connected in any way to the officially documented cases of abuse. So yeah, it has methodological flaws as well.
I went back to that link and realized that it didn’t upload, my mistake so here’s a better one (i hope); http://www.imagebanana.com/view/jkj3api0/Accuracyofadultrecollectionsofchildh.png
@Argenti I don’t think I’m better off either, I’m not at school due to medical leave and my friend doesn’t want to violate copyright issues, i believe. But how was age not a factor here? Didn’t the commenters back in the last page discuss that?
@Ally S but whether they considered it abuse or couldn’t remember, wouldn’t the results show up the same way?
You went to Yale?!
hannasoumaki: Yale is the school nearby.
Re: Yale — what he said.
As for age, I don’t think it’s the main factor — it probably is a factor though.
“@Ally S but whether they considered it abuse or couldn’t remember, wouldn’t the results show up the same way?”
It’s two studies — the one that found that men were less likely to report/remember abuse asked the men in question whether they’d been abused. The CDC one asked about specific scenarios, making the question moot. So for the CDC one, no, not remembering it would lower the number. But there’s fuck all proof that the other study found that they remembered less, as opposed to reporting less or not defining it as sexual assault.
hannasoumaki, think about this way:
The Widom and Morris study asked men with official, legally documented cases of sexual abuse questions about specific experiences (behavior specific questions without words like “abuse”) in order to screen for child abuse. And then if they answered yes to any of those questions, they were asked another question: whether they consider any of those reported experiences to be child sexual abuse. 64% of women who reported abusive experiences answered yes to that question, whereas only 16% of men who reported abusive experiences did so.
Anyway, the MRAs are using this study as proof that the discrepancy between male rape victims and female rape victims for lifetime incidence is a result of men being reluctant to report their abuse in a survey. But their argument is unsound because the CDC study also screened for sexual violence with behavior-specific questions. It did not ask whether the respondents considered their experiences violent, abusive, etc.
Basically, all the study shows is that men are less likely to call abuse they have already reported what it really is: sexual abuse. It does not imply that men are less likely to disclose abusive experiences in a survey with behavior specific questions to screen for victimization.
Holy shit, check this out:
That’s the fucking sample size used for the study, folks.
Did any MRA parroting this study even bother to fucking check it?!? =S Wow. They really have hit a new low.
That’s…wow…I’ve done studies with bigger sample sizes. It’s called ask a psych class.
@Ally S Thank you for clarifying for me. And for the useful note on sample size, I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t take a better look at it.
@Argenti sorry to be a bigger hindrance, but i will be unable to be here for a week. I don’t know if I should keep adding to this thread when the original post is over a week now. do you think it would be a bother to contact you some other way for other questions? and i appreciate you and Ally S’s guidance so far, I hope I didn’t annoy you too much.
Eh, I don’t have a problem with keeping old threads alive as long as it’s on topic, which this has been. I’ll set it to notify of new comments. Probably better anyways, I’m sorta buried in other things at the month myself.
>the “Don’t Be That Guy” ad campaign, which sent so many MRAs into hysterics, focused on male victims as well as female ones
In one poster out of how many? And how many posters featured a female rapist?
>trying to twist the conversation around in order to cast women as the villains.
If they’re trying to cast women as victims, don’t you think they’d come up with a number higher than 40%? If they’re just making shit up, surely they’d claim women are the majority of rapists, right?
>The difference between “rape” and “being made to penetrate” is that in the definition of rape the victim is penetrated
Our definition is correct because our definition says so!
>Part of the mistake in the deriving of the “50%” stems from a negligence to take into account the inherent multiplicity: a child can have multiple apples (just as a victim can have multiple perpetrators).
Allright, so just make all the data you’ve collected available and let us do the math ourselves, for both males and females.
>the NISVS data are incapable of lending support to any national estimates of the perpetrator population, let alone estimates of perpetrators of a specific form of violence (say, rape or being-made-to-penetrate).
So then, anyone using this study to argue that men are a certain percentage of rapists would be equally wrong?
>Combining the estimated past 12-month female rape victims with the estimated past 12-month being-made-to-penetrate male victims cannot give an accurate number of all victims who were either raped or being-made-to-penetrate, even if this combination is consistent with CDC’s definition.
So then, if this isn’t accurate, what useful data did your study actually produce?
>For any combined form of violence, the correct analytical approach for obtaining a national estimate is to start at the raw data level of analysis, if such a creation of a combined construct is established.
Allright, and I’m assuming you’ll get right on that.
Dude, really?
Go read the fucking comments. Those “points” of yours have already been brought up and addressed.
And no, you cannot draw conclusions about perpetrators from a study about victims.
“40% of rapists are women” is based on bad math. It is completely inaccurate.
The “Don’t Be That Guy” posters focused on male rapists because, yes, the majority of rapes are committed by men.
And nobody is using the NIPSVS to determine the percentage of rapes committed by men.
Alex, learn to HTML. While you’re at it, learn to logic.
My favorite has to be that since the study asking people if they’d been victimized cannot say anything about perpetrators, that makes all 120~ pages useless.
Second favorite — just give us the raw data!
I’m beginning to hope they do release it, because damn would I enjoy watching MRAs realize they have no idea what to do with hundreds of thousands of data points. (To put this in perspective, because of the religion section, the survey here produced ~35,000 data points [most of them saying "nope, that's not my religion" but they're still cells in a table that you need to sort through])
Uh…I dropped a 0. Make that close to 40,000 when I stop rounding 1,600 to 1,500 since clearly doing it mentally was fail.
And that’s a sample size of 1,640, where most of the questions weren’t used in combination with each other. I truly wish them well sorting the CDC data.
400,000
Why does that 0 hate me?!
@Argenti
Because you won’t release the NISVS raw data!!!!
The NISVS covers intimate partner violence and stalking as well as sexual violence. The report is a valuable resource, but it’s a survey of victims’ experiences and can’t magically provide data about perpetrators. I don’t think you can reason with people who think there is a mass conspiracy to suppress data about female (or male) rapists, but maybe I’m just blinded by my misandry.
It’s a
FurrinatiFeminazi conspiracy! PROOF!