Demotivated

Yea blah, blah, blah. I wanna hear the fucking percentage of men who are rapists, you gutless wonder. Tell me the fucking number.</blockquote.

On this thread? I'm ballparking that it's ~ = 100 x 1 / (# of commenters who aren't you)… Did I get it right?

From Wikipedia:

“Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.”

I tell you, it’s eerie…

Ah, here’s the college rapist article link I was looking for:

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2010/03/05/profile-of-a-college-rapist/

The post links a couple sources and Jill does a nice rundown on some of the psychology and implications of this profiling.

Now not being the geniuses you folks are, but I doubt serial rapists are all that prevelant. Although I’m usually wrong.

In short, yes you are wrong again.

@Holly

Sorry, urite. Dropped a zero.

I can’t really figure out what in the hell NWO is even saying.

I gotta be honest with ya, I’m gonna feel a little un-nerved knowing I’m on a plane with 25 rapists and a plane full of women who are either rape victims or future rape victims. I really had no idea.

While you’re being deliberately dumb by pretending anyone said “every woman gets raped”, you’re actually not that far off. There probably will be a few rapists and more than a few rape survivors on that plane.

And that should unnerve you.

Serial rapists are common, actually; the same study I mentioned in which 12% of men self-reported raping or trying to rape, about 4% of those men (that is, 4% of the total sample) were responsible for a hugely disproportionate number of rapes.

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Meet The Predators
November 12, 2009
tags: sexual assault, rape, Alcohol
by Thomas

A huge proportion of the women I know enough to talk with about it have survived an attempted or completed rape. None of them was raped by a stranger who attacked them from behind a bush, hid in the back of her car or any of the other scenarios that fit the social script of stranger rape. Anyone reading this post, in fact, is likely to know that six out of seven rapes are committed by someone the victim knows. It has been clear for a long time, at least since Robin Warshaw’s groundbreaking “I Never Called It Rape,” which used Mary Koss’s reseach, that the stranger rape script did not describe rape as most women experienced it. It’s easy to picture the stranger rapist: a violent criminal, not much different from the violent criminals who commit other violent crimes. This guy was in prison before, and he’ll be back there again, though not for rape because reporting and conviction rates are so low. (See, generally, Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will.)

But who commits the vast majority of rapes, the nonstranger rapes? The acquaintance rapes? Anecdotally, we all know the answer — or an answer, or some answers. The tall guy, the short guy, the skinny guy, the fat guy, the frat guy, the nerdy guy, the jock, the geek, the date, the friend-of-a-friend, the drinking buddy, and the guy from accounting. Lots of different guys in lots of different circumstances.

When women note that the rapists don’t come with convenient notes on their foreheads and that therefore women have to entertain the possibility that every guy (even ones they know a bit) are rapists, folks get all sorts of upset. But the less women know about who these guys are, the less they know who to worry about.

It is notoriously tough to figure out who the rapists are. Reporting and conviction rates for acquaintance rapes are so low as to be useless as a diagnostic tool. And how else can we know? The rapists won’t just tell us that they are rapists, right?

That’s what I would have though. Turns out I thought wrong. If a survey asks men, for example, if they ever “had sexual intercourse with somone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances,” some of them will say yes, as long as the questions don’t use the “R” word.

I have taken a look at two large-sample surverys of undetected rapists. One is Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists by David Lesak and Paul M. Miller, published in Violence and Victims, Vol 17, No. 1, 2002 (Lisak & Miller 2002). The other is Reports of Rape Reperpetration by Newly Enlisted Male Navy Personnel by Stephanie K. McWhorter, et al., published in Violence and Victims, Vol, 24, No. 2, 2009 (McWhorter 2009). (I can’t link to either study because neither is available in full for free.)

These look to me to be the best available data on who the rapists are who have not been caught and incarcerated — which is the vast, vast majority. They are, however, limited, so that in talking about them it constrains the discussion of rape into a narrow range around a modal form of men raping women.*

Lisak & Miller

Lisak & Miller set out to answer two questions:

First, do a substantial number of undetected rapists rape more than once (i.e. repeat rapists)? Second, do undetected rapists (repeat or otherwise), like their incarcerated counterparts, commit other types of interpersonal violence …?

Lisak & Miller at p. 74.

Their sample was 1882 college students, ranging in age from 18 to 71 with a median age of 26.5 — so somewhat older than a traditional college population. The group was also ethnically diverse. They asked this group four questions about rape and attempted rape. I’ll paraphrase:
1) Have you ever attempted unsuccessfully to have intercourse with an adult by force or threat of force?
2) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone who did not want you to because they were too intoxicated to resist?
3) Have you ever had intercourse with someone by force or threat of force?
4) Have you ever had oral intercourse with someone by force or threat of force?

[Edited to add: I paraphrased the questions to make them shorter, but now the questions are being quoted, so I thought it was only fair to the authors to key in the full text of the questions they used:

(1) Have you ever been in a situation where you tried, but for various reasons did not succeed, in having sexual intercourse with an adult by using or threatening to use physical force (twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.) if they did not cooperate?
(2) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances (e.g., removing their clothes)?
(3) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm; holding them down, etc.) if they didn’t cooperate?
(4) Have you ever had oral sex with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm; holding them down, etc.) if they didn’t cooperate?
Lisak & Miller at 77-78.]

So without quibbling over the precise statutory definition, this equates to rape or attempted rape. 120 men admitted to raping to attempting to rape. This is actually a relatively slim proportion of the survey population — just over 6% — and might be an underreport, though for part of the sample, the survey team did interviews to confirm the self-reports, which tends to show if there is an undercount in the self-reports, and found the responses consistent. But the more interesting part of the findings were how those rapists and their offenses broke down.

Of the 120 rapists in the sample, 44 reported only one assault. The remaining 76 were repeat offenders. These 76 men, 63% of the rapists, committed 439 rapes or attempted rapes, an average of 5.8 each (median of 3, so there were some super-repeat offenders in this group). Just 4% of the men surveyed committed over 400 attempted or completed rapes.

The breakdown between the modus operandi of the rapists also tells us a lot about how wrong the script is. Of all 120 admitted rapists, only about 30% reported using force or threats, while the remainder raped intoxicated victims. This proportion was roughly the same between the 44 rapists who reported one assault and the 76 who reported multiple assaults. (What the authors call “overt-force rapists” committed more sexual assaults, on average, than the “intoxication rapists” by about 6 to 3, but the parts of the sample are so small that this result did not reach statistical significance and could be sampling error rather than a real phenomenon. I’d really like an answer to that, though.)

Lisak & Miller also answered their other question: are rapists responsible for more violence generally? Yes. The surveys covered other violent acts, such as slapping or choking an intimate partner, physically or sexually abusing a child, and sexual assaults other than attempted or completed rapes. In the realm of being partner- and child-beating monsters, the repeat rapists really stood out. These 76 men, just 4% of the sample, were responsible for 28% of the reported violence. The whole sample of almost 1900 men reported just under 4000 violent acts, but this 4% of recidivist rapists results in over 1000 of those violent acts.

If we could eliminate the men who rape again and again and again, a quarter of the violence against women and children would disappear. That’s the public policy implication.

McWhorter

Stephanie McWhorter and her colleagues completed a study just this year that in my view replicate the important results of Lisak & Miller, working with a very different population of young-ish men. She studied 1146 newly enlisted men in the U.S. Navy, asking them about their behavior since age 14. McWhorter’s participants were younger than Lisak & Miller’s sample, averaging just under 20 and topping out at 34, as one would expect from a sample of military recruits. The study was longitudinal, following up at intervals during the participants’ Navy hitch.

McWhorter used a Sexual Experiences Survey tool that has been in use for more than 20 years. Of her 1146 participants, 144, or 13%, admitted an attempted or completed rape — substantially higher than Lisak & Miller. But in another respect, her work very much matched theirs: 71% of the men who admitted an attempted or completed rape admitted more than one, very close to Lisak & Miller’s 63%. The 96 men who admitted multiple attempted of completed rapes in McWhorter’s survey averaged 6.36 assaults each. This is not far from Lisak & Miller’s average of 5.8 assaults per recidivist. Looked at another way, of the 865 total attempted or completed rapes these men admitted to, a staggering 95% were committed by 96 men, or just 8.4% of the sample.

McWhorter’s findings on modus operandi also confirm the basic finding of Lisak & Miller’s earlier study: 61% of the reported attacks were intoxication-based, 23% were overt force alone, and 16% were both. (77% of the pre-enlistment and 75% of the post-enlistment rapes or attempted rapes were, in whole or in part, intoxication attacks. But 34% of pre-enlistment and 45% of post-enlistment assaults involved overt force, a change in pattern that ought to be explained by further research.)

McWhorter’s research also indicates that rapists start young. Of the men who did not report an assault pre-enlistment, only 2% reported assaults while in the Navy, but 16% of those who admitted that they raped or attempted to rape between age 14 and enlistment also said they did it again while enlisted. 60% of rapists, however, said their first assault was after they turned 18. This implies that there is a window when rapists start raping, in their late teens.

Finally, in an entirely unsurprising finding, rapists who admitted assaulting strangers – ever – were less than a quarter of the rapist population. More than 90% targeted acquaintances some of the time, and about 75% said they only targeted acquaintances. Only 7% of all the self-reported rapists reported targeting only strangers. And, in fact, there was zero overlap between the men who said they targeted starangers, and those who used only force.

I’m going to repeat that, because I think it is important. As McWhorter wrote:

Of the men who used only force against their victims, none reported raping a stranger; all the men knew their victims… [T]he stereotypical rape incident characterized by a man violently attacking a stranger was not reported by any of the respondents. Instead, respondents who used only force against their victims reported raping only women they knew. men who trageted strangers exclusively reported they used substances only in the rape incident.

These findings may help explain why most self-reported [attempted or completed rape] incidents go undetected.

McWhorter, p. 212-13.

Conclusions

Lots of smart people will take a lot of different things away from this research on undetected rapists, and on more research that will hopefully follow. Here are my impressions:

First, the stranger-force rape is a small proportion of rapes, and is all but absent from the samples of self-reporters. Other research** shows that lack of prior acquaintance and use of the weapon are the only significant factors that increase the likelihood that a victim will report the offense. Attacking strangers with force or weapons is the only pattern of victimization at all likely to lead to incarceration of the rapist, let’s face it — so those who commit rape in the way that follows the script may be already in jail, not in college or the Navy filling out surveys. The rapists who are out there are mostly using intoxication, and mostly attacking victims they know.

Second, the sometimes-floated notion that acquaintance rape is simply a mistake about consent, is wrong. (See Amanda Hess’s excellent takedown here.) The vast majority of the offenses are being committed by a relatively small group of men, somewhere between 4% and 8% of the population, who do it again … and again … and again. That just doesn’t square with the notion of innocent mistake. Further, since the repeaters are also responsible for a hugely disproportionate share of the intimate partner violence, child beating and child sexual abuse, the notion that these predators are somehow confused good guys does not square with the data. Most of the raping is done by guys who like to rape, and to abuse, assault and violate. If we could get the one-in-twelve or one-in-25 repeat rapists out of the population (that is a lot of men — perhaps six or twelve million men in the U.S. alone) or find a way to stop them from hurting others, most sexual assault, and a lot of intimate partner violence and child abuse, would go away. Really.

http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-predators/

@NWO

See, I thought I was just being unkind pointing out that your so stupid you don’t know the difference between statistically improbability and statistically impossibility, but your actually just fucking terrible at math. How are you an engineer? I am specifically referring to your screed above that you did yourself. First off, in any population study, your not going to measure occurrences assuming a static population over anything greater then a year, because, pro-tip, people have sex and this can result in babies (in case you didn’t know). Have you heard the term population growth? On top of failing to account for a dynamic population (Hell, it remains static for 50 fucking years?) your idea fails to account for repeat occurrences upon the same individual.

Let me be more specific in the type of surveys that produce the “1 in someone is this” result. They are snapshots of data collection over a point in time. So, when a study finds that one in six women may be raped, several other studies are then conducted. Repeat studies help to confirm the data, as long as you use similar methodology, which many studies do (The biggest issue is that most just use their random sampling from colleges, which is a separate issue because of class/race dynamics of higher education). But hey, considering you fail at math to begin with, I’m sure this will all go over your head.

Oh my god. You guys.

This is a winning moment.

NWO does not know that South Africa is a country.

Not that I’m ever going to get an answer, but … Slaveman, what is it your siblings who tell you ALL the stories do at the hospital, again? What jobs do they have, where they would have lots of stories to tell you about rape victims, if people actually ever got raped?

NWO, multiple posters have provided information and links on studies that attempt to estimate the number of rapists. Multiple posters have provided information, links and accurate analysis to show you why your math is, almost always in error.

Can we just skip the next eight or nine posts of you butchering arithmetic, amply illustrating your ignorance of geography, and showing an 8 year old’s level of skill with sarcasm and move straight to the part where you accuse us all of thinking we’re “perfect”?

That way we can return to a discussion of accountability and you can go watch Monk and be sad. Sound good?

NWO: I honestly can’t tell if you’re being deliberately obtuse in an attempt to troll, or if you really are. that. fucking. ignorant. Because if it’s the former, you’re a grotesque parody of an actual human being, making light of very real suffering. If it’s the latter… well, ignorance is curable. Sort of.

Nobinayamu: But that would deprive him of a chance to show off how wonderfully manly his fourth grade intellect is, compared to people who actually know what they’re talking about! How can you be so cruel to an oppressed male?