::: TW: Discussion of sexual assault, rape, penetration, math
Ooooh, actually, I made the mistake of looking at where that claim came from, and it came from a comment they made. In it, for evidence of their math, they link to this article. The article is… something, but I’m setting that aside because the claim the article makes is patently incorrect; the data comes from this surveillance study at the CDC. (Got the link from the article, trying to leave an obvious path here.)
The claim is that the numbers are artificially uncoupled because the rape statistics for men don’t include forced penetration of another person, where the male is the victim. However, this is a line directly from the Results paragraph-
“An estimated 43.9% of women and 23.4% of men experienced other forms of sexual violence during their lifetimes, including being made to penetrate, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and noncontact unwanted sexual experiences. The percentages of women and men who experienced these other forms of sexual violence victimization in the 12 months preceding the survey were an estimated 5.5% and 5.1%, respectively.”
Emphasis mine.
The main premise of the Time article, that the report doesn’t include being made to penetrate is false. The 40% number isn’t backed up here, either, and the thing that the Time article is linking for it’s evidence is a summary of a series of phone surveys! It’s kind of an update-to-the-data thing… Why bother citing a random summary when we can just refer to the wholesale data the CDC was updating?
Since we clearly value the CDC reporting (since that was the only source used in the previous Time article), I’ll use them!
Here’s a webpage, from the CDC, titled ‘About Sexual Violence.’ Surprising perhaps no one, it states unequivocally the following:
Over half of women and almost one in three men have experienced sexual violence involving physical contact during their lifetimes.
Still concerned that the number here isn’t representing men being forced to penetrate someone? Well that CDC page has, after that sentence, a citation of a study- one done also by the CDC- but the weird thing is, they didn’t hyperlink it. That’s okay, they included the name of the study and the people who did the study, so I was able to find a PDF of the information, and now, you can view it here if you like as well. For clarity’s sake, this is titled, “The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2016/2017 Report on Sexual Violence.” And in it, it defines sexual violence-
This report addresses five types of sexual violence. They include rape, being made to penetrate someone else (males only), sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and sexual harassment in a public place.
Why is this important? Because if you add together the 12.6 million men who reported being made to penetrate someone in his lifetime to the 4.5 million men who reported completed or attempted rape victimization at some point in his lifetime you’d get 17.1 million. We’ll assume that every single one of those victimizations was a woman assaulting a man with zero male on male aggression.
Your claim was that 40% of all rapes were female. Let’s roll this math forward.
Same page, 33.5 million women claim completed or attempted rape at some point in their entire lifetime (I have chosen to leave out any other types of sexual violence against women, to try and make this a more even thing, because I am actually trying to get as close to a good-faith number here as possible). Hm. Total victims here, 50.6 million, of that 50.6 million, we are generously saying 17.1 million are male (no overlap, straight math, all assaults and penetrations are counted separate).
33.79% of all victims of physical contact, sexual assault, were male, leaving 66.2% to be female. This does not support that 40% of all rapists are women.
Do I think that male numbers are underreported? Yes. I also think female numbers are underreported. I never reported any of the terrible things that happened to me, and I’m a woman- I know other women who have said the same thing. But misrepresenting these numbers helps no one, and inserting an article where someone claims erroneously that these numbers don’t reflect reality, and using that as your only source, really doesn’t help. If we want to help, we have to provide factual, no-nonsense information, and we have to provide resources for survivors, not skew information to try and make the awful, awful reality look different than it is.
TL;DR- No, it’s not 40% of rapists are women. Closer to 34%, and that’s assuming a lot of things to favor a higher number being perpetrated by women.
Edited to add- I forgot a sentence that was kind of important, and also I cleaned up the language a bit. And then I edited it because I realized I’d left some language in there that, without the bit I cut that was after it, looked like I was minimizing rape, which was not my intention.
Wow, what a spinjob, all to conclude that the number is ackshually just 34% instead of 40% when you use the CDC’s lifetime data instead of their year-over-year data like I did in my calculation. This is to be compared, of course, to all of the “95% of rapists are men” signs and infodocs drawing from the CDC’s incredibly misleading “rape” figures, but it doesn’t sound like you’d be quite as concerned about that much more prevalent, much more inaccurate, and much more damaging discrepancy.
Anyhow, based directly on the CDC’s year over year data from the three years they’ve released the report, as I detailed in my other comment, yes, 40% of rapists are women, and I think it’s pretty disgusting how much effort you were willing to go through to wiggle out of so few percent, all just to minimize male victims of rape as much as you can.
There’s a part where they explain the 34% is based off of all male victims, assuming that none of the abusers were male. They’re trying to say that even their estimate of 34% is likely an over estimate of how many women are abusing people.
Not that that means men aren’t getting abused or what have you, but I don’t think it was a spin job. Just a breakdown of the numbers.
Yes, I understand that, which was why in the comment I linked to I was careful to be much more precise, including both the numbers of male victims with male perpetrators (which according to the CDC was low enough in 2011 to be statistically insignificant) and the number of male victims with female perpetrators.
And this is still very much a spinjob. The tone of their comment is chiding and patronizing while acting like they’re just “correcting the record”, minimizing and undermining the CDC numbers I’m quoting as much as they can even as they arrive at a more imprecise number only slightly lower than mine.
If you’d like an actual breakdown of the numbers, please refer to the comment I linked to above, which goes into much more detail with the numbers from the CDC report.
I’m a bit wary of the 2011 stat for male victims with male perpetrators. Not that I don’t believe women make up a significant number of abusers, nor that it should be ignored, but the idea that men on men assault is that low seems out of place with other factors, like child abuse cases, prison/military cases, same sex couples/assault, or even medical facility cases. If we take the 40% of rapists are women, and the remaining 60% are men, I honestly can’t imagine that only a fraction of those men hurt other men. Enough to out weight female perpetrators? I don’t think so, at least not from any statistics I’m seeing (most recent I found was about 12% for male child abuse victims specifically, which is still quite “low” since that would leave the remaining 88% perpetrators as female(or other?) Not to mention men are less likely to report rape, let alone penatrative rape (thanks society). I don’t know if there’s any number that would make me go “Oh, it’s not that bad,” but I don’t think men on men violence is as uncommon.
But numbers are numbers. Probably just my own bias trying to work around it 🤷🏿♀️
I’m a bit wary of the 2011 stat for male victims with male perpetrators.
Yeah, honestly I felt the same way when I first looked at the numbers, but they seem to be confirmed in the CDC 2015 and 2017 studies as well. I even tried to find independent numbers of, for example, male on male sexual assault in prisons to make sure I wasn’t accidentally excluding relevant data.
It’s also worth mentioning that, as flicker said, it’s impossible to know the huge amount of male- and female-perpetrated and male- and female-victim cases that go unreported each year, which would certainly result in significantly different numbers, though it’s impossible to know exactly how they’d be affected.
::: TW: Discussion of sexual assault, rape, penetration, math
Ooooh, actually, I made the mistake of looking at where that claim came from, and it came from a comment they made. In it, for evidence of their math, they link to this article. The article is… something, but I’m setting that aside because the claim the article makes is patently incorrect; the data comes from this surveillance study at the CDC. (Got the link from the article, trying to leave an obvious path here.)
The claim is that the numbers are artificially uncoupled because the rape statistics for men don’t include forced penetration of another person, where the male is the victim. However, this is a line directly from the Results paragraph-
“An estimated 43.9% of women and 23.4% of men experienced other forms of sexual violence during their lifetimes, including being made to penetrate, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and noncontact unwanted sexual experiences. The percentages of women and men who experienced these other forms of sexual violence victimization in the 12 months preceding the survey were an estimated 5.5% and 5.1%, respectively.”
Emphasis mine.
The main premise of the Time article, that the report doesn’t include being made to penetrate is false. The 40% number isn’t backed up here, either, and the thing that the Time article is linking for it’s evidence is a summary of a series of phone surveys! It’s kind of an update-to-the-data thing… Why bother citing a random summary when we can just refer to the wholesale data the CDC was updating?
Since we clearly value the CDC reporting (since that was the only source used in the previous Time article), I’ll use them!
Here’s a webpage, from the CDC, titled ‘About Sexual Violence.’ Surprising perhaps no one, it states unequivocally the following:
Still concerned that the number here isn’t representing men being forced to penetrate someone? Well that CDC page has, after that sentence, a citation of a study- one done also by the CDC- but the weird thing is, they didn’t hyperlink it. That’s okay, they included the name of the study and the people who did the study, so I was able to find a PDF of the information, and now, you can view it here if you like as well. For clarity’s sake, this is titled, “The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2016/2017 Report on Sexual Violence.” And in it, it defines sexual violence-
Why is this important? Because if you add together the 12.6 million men who reported being made to penetrate someone in his lifetime to the 4.5 million men who reported completed or attempted rape victimization at some point in his lifetime you’d get 17.1 million. We’ll assume that every single one of those victimizations was a woman assaulting a man with zero male on male aggression.
Your claim was that 40% of all rapes were female. Let’s roll this math forward.
Same page, 33.5 million women claim completed or attempted rape at some point in their entire lifetime (I have chosen to leave out any other types of sexual violence against women, to try and make this a more even thing, because I am actually trying to get as close to a good-faith number here as possible). Hm. Total victims here, 50.6 million, of that 50.6 million, we are generously saying 17.1 million are male (no overlap, straight math, all assaults and penetrations are counted separate).
33.79% of all victims of physical contact, sexual assault, were male, leaving 66.2% to be female. This does not support that 40% of all rapists are women.
Do I think that male numbers are underreported? Yes. I also think female numbers are underreported. I never reported any of the terrible things that happened to me, and I’m a woman- I know other women who have said the same thing. But misrepresenting these numbers helps no one, and inserting an article where someone claims erroneously that these numbers don’t reflect reality, and using that as your only source, really doesn’t help. If we want to help, we have to provide factual, no-nonsense information, and we have to provide resources for survivors, not skew information to try and make the awful, awful reality look different than it is.
TL;DR- No, it’s not 40% of rapists are women. Closer to 34%, and that’s assuming a lot of things to favor a higher number being perpetrated by women.
Edited to add- I forgot a sentence that was kind of important, and also I cleaned up the language a bit. And then I edited it because I realized I’d left some language in there that, without the bit I cut that was after it, looked like I was minimizing rape, which was not my intention.
:::
Wow, what a spinjob, all to conclude that the number is ackshually just 34% instead of 40% when you use the CDC’s lifetime data instead of their year-over-year data like I did in my calculation. This is to be compared, of course, to all of the “95% of rapists are men” signs and infodocs drawing from the CDC’s incredibly misleading “rape” figures, but it doesn’t sound like you’d be quite as concerned about that much more prevalent, much more inaccurate, and much more damaging discrepancy.
Anyhow, based directly on the CDC’s year over year data from the three years they’ve released the report, as I detailed in my other comment, yes, 40% of rapists are women, and I think it’s pretty disgusting how much effort you were willing to go through to wiggle out of so few percent, all just to minimize male victims of rape as much as you can.
There’s a part where they explain the 34% is based off of all male victims, assuming that none of the abusers were male. They’re trying to say that even their estimate of 34% is likely an over estimate of how many women are abusing people.
Not that that means men aren’t getting abused or what have you, but I don’t think it was a spin job. Just a breakdown of the numbers.
Yes, I understand that, which was why in the comment I linked to I was careful to be much more precise, including both the numbers of male victims with male perpetrators (which according to the CDC was low enough in 2011 to be statistically insignificant) and the number of male victims with female perpetrators.
And this is still very much a spinjob. The tone of their comment is chiding and patronizing while acting like they’re just “correcting the record”, minimizing and undermining the CDC numbers I’m quoting as much as they can even as they arrive at a more imprecise number only slightly lower than mine.
If you’d like an actual breakdown of the numbers, please refer to the comment I linked to above, which goes into much more detail with the numbers from the CDC report.
I’m a bit wary of the 2011 stat for male victims with male perpetrators. Not that I don’t believe women make up a significant number of abusers, nor that it should be ignored, but the idea that men on men assault is that low seems out of place with other factors, like child abuse cases, prison/military cases, same sex couples/assault, or even medical facility cases. If we take the 40% of rapists are women, and the remaining 60% are men, I honestly can’t imagine that only a fraction of those men hurt other men. Enough to out weight female perpetrators? I don’t think so, at least not from any statistics I’m seeing (most recent I found was about 12% for male child abuse victims specifically, which is still quite “low” since that would leave the remaining 88% perpetrators as female(or other?) Not to mention men are less likely to report rape, let alone penatrative rape (thanks society). I don’t know if there’s any number that would make me go “Oh, it’s not that bad,” but I don’t think men on men violence is as uncommon.
But numbers are numbers. Probably just my own bias trying to work around it 🤷🏿♀️
Yeah, honestly I felt the same way when I first looked at the numbers, but they seem to be confirmed in the CDC 2015 and 2017 studies as well. I even tried to find independent numbers of, for example, male on male sexual assault in prisons to make sure I wasn’t accidentally excluding relevant data.
It’s also worth mentioning that, as flicker said, it’s impossible to know the huge amount of male- and female-perpetrated and male- and female-victim cases that go unreported each year, which would certainly result in significantly different numbers, though it’s impossible to know exactly how they’d be affected.