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.
So I’ve been reading back through the comments here, and I’m thinking that the semantic (not legal) distinction I have been trying to make is really not worth the trouble that it is causing. I thought the distinction I was making was relatively clear, but the fact that it has been taken to mean all sorts of things I didn’t intend it to mean suggests to me that the distinction I was making did not serve to clarify matters but to muddy them and so is not actually a helpful distinction to make.
Obviously a lot of the people seizing on my comments — on r/mr in particular — are not doing so in good faith; they’re just playing “gotcha.”
But the issue is more important than that, and I’m not going to dig in my heels because of them.
I think MTP should be taken seriously regardless of whether it is classified as rape or as sexual assault other than rape. But I’ve been convinced by the comments here that this is probably overoptimistic on my part. If made-to-penetrate needs to be called rape to be taken as seriously as what has traditionally been called rape, then it should be called rape.
So, yes, I have changed my mind on this. Made-to-penetrate should be classified as rape.
That was my thought, too. Sure, you can want it to be treated the same, but it’s a stretch to expect “sexual assault” to carry the same severity in its connotations as “rape”, especially since “sexual assault” as an umbrella term will still include milder forms.
(Sorry, David, didn’t see your post.)
David: Thank you for reconsidering your position, and declaring. (Note: Trolls will now be using this as evidence that we have a groupthink hivemind and thought police. So no, we can’t win by trying to not give them something to point at. But we can win by being intellectually honest with each other, and mocking the little misogynistic fuckwits.)
And on that note, I’m just gonna say that Emergency Kittens is the most awesome use of Twitter out there, and be done for the night:
https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens
Seconding freemage! (on both comments)
titianblue:
I am a member of a secret illuminati group with a hidden agenda or I voiced my disagreement with Davids Futrelle assertion that he wouldn’t call “made to penetrate” for rape. Feel free to take your pick, although I’d think it’s a pretty bleak outlook on the world to think that any outsiders who disagree with some insiders must have a secret agenda.
I think it is clear that it mattered how the “made to penetrate” act was categorized as non-rape and that the effect of that choice is clearly seen in how the media – and quite a few blogs – reported on the NISVS 2010 Report. And despite people assurances that wanting to keep “made to penetrate” out of the rape category is not setting up a hierarchy it remains pretty clear that for most people in the public there is a hierarchy. Several survivors have told here that they feel it’s a lessening of the violation committed against them. I saw someone stating that it’s somewhat similar as telling a gay person that it makes sense to call same-sex marriages for “civil unions” rather than “marriage”. Of course one could just handwave away the protests from the gay community by saying that it’s just a matter of semantics. That’d be wrong. It matters for the gay people who calls their marriage for marriage and it matters for the victims who calls their rape for rape. Saying that it make sense to call it civil unions in any official sense, but people who are in civil union are free to call it marriage doesn’t do much to placate those who are for an equal marriage act.
David,
I appreciate you changing your stance on this.
I’m **overjoyed** that David rethought “MTP as rape.” I was going to express my intense disappointment but was waiting to express it carefully.
Male rape is covered up, largely because of gender roles. No matter how seriously we take sexual assault (and I do believe it can be as bad as, or even worse than rape), the message many victims and other people will hear is that these are not rape victims.
David was right in an idealistic way: we shouldn’t have to call something rape to give it the attention it deserves. Murder is bad for example. But the context here is that many male victims struggle to convince themselves or others that they’re victims at all. We should take the strongest stance possible supporting them, and that means all penetrative sex without consent should be “rape.”
These comments are on page five now and I don’t have the time to read all of them, so if it’s been covered already, forgive me for repeating it, but my assumption is that the CDC differentiates between being penetrated and being forced to penetrate because it’s the center for DISEASE control, and disease is more effectively spread to those being penetrated than those who are doing the penetrating. So, while I totally understand the need for the CDC, as an organization that focuses on diseases and how they spread, to separate all them into different categories, next time, they should probably put them both under the title of “rape,” and consider them both subcategories of the same issue. The same goes for being forced to perform any sort of oral sex.
I certainly don’t think the error in judgment was some intentional feminist conspiracy being played out through the CDC, but that social justice is probably not their primary concern when they’re classifying data. But for the sake of taking every victim seriously, because rape is horrible no matter who it happens to, they should adjust this next time.
And just to be clear, the way we may feel about the researchers’ terminology does not invalidate their results. Nor does it make the MRAs’ total ineptitude at maths suiddenly morph into accuracy.
Nor make rape of men the only real rape, which MRAs would love to be the case. /snark
This makes me kinda nervous about continuing to use it on my body…
lionicle:
That assumption is wrong.
I’d recommend visiting CDC’s page and reading their mission statement and their organizational chart to get a picture of the scope of CDC’s work.
The NISVS 2010 Report is authored and published by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control which is under the Office of Noncommunicable Diseases, Injury and Environmental Health which again is a part of CDC. In short – CDC concerns itself with health in general and not just communicable diseases.
The NISVS 2010 Report does not mention STDs at all.
Appreciated.
titianblue:
Yes, I have. The answer I got was basically a tautology where they defend the definition they use by referring to the definition they used. Here is the relevant parts of their reply:
@Blair, very bad math.
That’s exactly why you cannot take the lifetime prevalence data and apply it to the 12-month cases. Researchers expected, and found, that these categories would be/were very different, and now you agree. So all of the math you did was meaningless, already.
We do have a good reason. The “lifetime” data is not merely the sum of “12-month” data taken every year. Three examples:
(1) The survey is taken by adults. If young girls are far likelier to be assaulted than young boys, and if this gap closes for adults, then we’d expect survey’s lifetime rates to skew towards women and 12-month rates to be much closer.
(2) Sexual violence is not statistically random. For example, previous abuse increases the likelihood of future abuse. Your assumption that 12-month data should be statistically similar to lifetime data would imply the opposite, that your probability on any given year is the same.
(3) Multiplicities, as the CDC noted. Hypothetically, the same men could be assaulted every year while different women are assaulted every year.
But more importantly: surveys don’t need to have identified the reason for the discrepancy. Their most important job is just to identify the data. Our goal of course is to understand the cause, but when we don’t yet, that doesn’t mean we reject the data. “Astronomy must be wrong because we know the earth is flat and stationary.”
Wow! What an oddly specific place to draw the line. You concluded that 37% of rape victims had female perps, which means that there is roughly a “2x magnitude difference” (twice as many had male perps). You found this nearly 2x rate believable. Yet, even with men committing 2x the victimizations, and knowing that men will disproportionately target women, you somehow find 3x to be completely unbelievable.
Your actual math is wrong, too. You used the data mismatch that this entire CDC response debunked. Then you guestimated a number for 12-month male victims but there’s no indication this guestimate is accurate (can you even show your ~316k guestimate would have had a relative standard error over 30%, or cell size less than 20?). But it would not be a comfort even if it matched the CDC’s raw data exactly, since that data was excluded because it is not statistically reliable. So we cannot reliably measure the info you want.
Then, you do not extend this courtesy to other categories of violence that were excluded for the same reason (like women forced to penetrate) so you’re just refusing to count some victims entirely. And ultimately you’re only able to reach a conclusion about *victims*, while the CDC was refuting the bogus claims about *perpetrators*.
Bottom line: *WHY*? Just, take the CDC’s advice. Use research about perpetrators if you want conclusions about perpetrators. No abuse of math or conspiracy theories required that way.
lionicle — oh, don’t worry about that, I use it on fruit and such. I think it’s just really effective at breaking down oils, but I could be wrong there. It definitely isn’t doing its magic by any sort of corrosive effect.
Faint Praise — please stick around, I’d love to have someone else here who can help with this sort of statistical debunking, not like I know ALL THE MATHS or anything 🙂
David — Nth’ing the thank you for reconsidering.
For statistical debunkers, you may want to scroll back and look at a comment by Delurking Data Geek as well. Sounded interesting.
Now, I’m trying to picture a scenario in which AVfMers are able to convince Paul Elam to reconsider his position on x, through thoughtful discussion and reasonable arguments.
:: laughs so long and hard that she ruptures stomach muscles ::
And this is why I love this place so much — and why MRAs/AVfM deserve only mockery.
I’m putting together a list of links of resources for men for the sidebar — well, two lists, one of resources specifically for men, another for resources available regardless of gender.
Just International, for example, is the best organization for men concerned with prison rape to get involved with, but it advocates for all victims regardless of gender, including trans* victims, who are disproportionately targeted, so I’m not including it in the “resources for men” list but rather in the “resources for all” list.
I’d appreciate any suggestions that any of you have. Right now the list is American-centric; I may sprinkle some other resources in with the American ones or have a third list of international resources.
Given the data on number of perpetrators, for men versus women, this seems quite likely, and is, in fact, part of how I arrived at my 19%~ — 71.2% of women reported only on perpetrator, versus 92.1% of men. So at the very least, men are more likely to be raped by one person. Now, I don’t recall if that was perpetrators per incident, or total (and will go check that) — but either way, far more men reported being raped by one person and unless the way it was worded means one person per attack, which allows for multiple rapes committed by multiple women, it certainly implies that men are more likely to be raped by the same woman than women are likely to be raped by the same man.
Logic there — ignore the count of men and women raped by one perpetrator, focus on the inverse, the count raped by more than one perpetrator. For men, that number was too low to be reliable and I had to use 100% – [the percent raped by one perpetrator], for women it was nearly 30%. Which, no matter how you slice it, means women are probably more likely to be raped by multiple men over their lifetime (caveat, if it’s per incident, there’s the issue of whether they were the same men each time, and how that compares to the number of man raped by the same woman repeatedly)
Give me a second to check the meaning of that variable and I’ll make this make more sense!
The 12-month sample and the lifetime sample are very different in that the former excludes many victimizations that may have occurred at ages 17 and below, so I think the age-related explanation makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, ok, ignore everything about if that was one perpetrator per incident, it’s one perpetrator over the course of their lifetime.
So 90%~ of male victims have one rapist, while 70%~ of female victims do — 20% more men than women have one rapist over the course of their lifetime. The inverse of that being that women are more likely to be raped by multiple men than men are likely to be raped by multiple women.
Unfortunately they don’t say the rate of repeat victimization among men, but among women, 35.2% of those first raped before age 18 reported at least one other rape, and 14.2% of those whose first rape was after 18 reported another rape. And 29.9% where first raped at under 18, making the overall rate of repeat victimization among women 20%~, but it’s impossible to say, using this data, the rate of repeat victimization among men.
Am I making sense? I haven’t had nearly enough coffee yet!
Ally — eh, sorta as, at least for women and male rape victims (not MtP, but CDC defined rape), age of first rape is skewed young. With just over 2/3rds of women reporting their first rape was before they were 25. So you’d need a fairly young population sample for the lifetime numbers to be lower than the 12-month as an older population would be more likely to have been raped at a younger age (more than a year ago), while a young population would be more likely to have been raped in the past year.
Let me see if they have population data on ages, it’d help answer this.
Here you go, Argenti: http://i.imgur.com/jWivh59.png
Huh, damn. The ages are actually amazingly representative of the population at large, which is largely aged 30-64. Meaning that most of the sample, who were raped, would have likely been raped more than a year ago. Thus not explaining the difference between lifetime and 12 month data (page 112)