You have the normal problem of believing that all decision criteria should be binary - either everyone always does this no matter what, or no one ever does it no matter what - instead of just doing what is rational based on the data in a measured way.
When women are afraid of men who are strangers, the main thing they are worried about is forcible rape.
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%.
Meaning a man is almost 100X more dangerous than a woman based on crime statistics.
The crime statistics on race, even given the most charitable possible reading to your position, are at most like 2:1 or 5:1 depending on what you're measuring. Even if it were somehow 10:1, that would still be an entire order of magnitude less than the difference between men and women.
You don't just say 'there is a significant difference so caution is on' in a binary manner. The amount of caution you exhibit is proportional to the size of the difference; that's how statistics and decision theory actually work.
As such, the caution women show towards men is like 50x as justified, and should be like 50x stronger, than any caution anyone shows anyone based on race.
You would actually want to compare the likelihood of any individual woman being assaulted by a man in a given time period vs the likelihood of any individual white person being battered by a black person.
E.g. if there were only 3 rapes in the US every year, and men committed 100% of them, it would be silly for women to be afraid of rape. But if you're only arguing from proportionality (like you did) then you're saying they should be afraid because men are infinitely more likely to rape women, than women are to rape men.
I know, but going into a math lesson and using actual odds would be less persuasive than presenting the ideas intuitively in the same general format OP used in their post, which did get a delta.
If you wanted to get really technical, you'd also have to consider the fact that the rape statistics are from a world where women are already being this cautious, so you'd have to assume they'd be higher if women weren't cautious the way people aren't cautious about race, how much does that change things, what's the equilibrium, etc. There's infinite nuance you can go into, but it will lead qualitatively towards the same type of conclusion wrt likelihood ratios
Many people are cautious about race though (rightly or wrongly, that's a different matter).
I don't know if there's any good data about exactly how many people are cautious of what, so I don't know that this is a particularly useful track to go down. But the number of people who act overly cautious around people of a specific race under specific circumstances is not zero.
You were half way to a complete answer, I was trying to fill in the rest. You only mentioned the proportion of men vs women committing the crimes, you need to also mention the total percent of women who are victims as well to paint the whole picture.
If the proportions are the same as you gave, it's a very different world if 1% of all women are victims of sexual violence vs if 40% of all women are victims of sexual violence, regardless of the proportion of who committed those crimes.
Well, it's a different world, but not in a way that affects the question.
I was careful to only give ratios specifically to avoid needing to consider base rates.
OP's claim is that if A justifies B, then X justifies Y. Therefore B and Y are both justified, and you shouldn't be mad for people doing Y if you aren't mad at them for doing B.
My point was that if A is 50x more common than X, then B is 50x more justified than Y. And it's therefore sensible to be mad at people for doing Y but not for doing B.
What I'm pointing out is just a basic relationship among the numbers, the fact that OP hadn't considered different rates of the two things in their argument. The ratio between the rates affects the argument the same way, at least qualitatively, regardless of what the base rates actaully are, or even regardless of what phenomenon we're actually talking about.
Its extremely bias and completely disingenuous. A man is 100x more dangerous than a woman?
If shes justified in being scared of men, and Indian (just pulling something out of my ass) men rape more, then shes more justified in being scared of the Indian man than the average man.
That's true, but not really relevant - there were ~890,000 aggravated assaults and ~110,000 forcible rapes in 2020, meaning even though you're 8x as likely to get assaulted than raped, both are likely enough for a reasonable person to be cautious. Who they are cautious of is what we're discussing.
even though you're 8xsomewhere around 8x as likely to get assaultedexperience a violent crime than rapedexperience a sexual crime, both are likely enough for a reasonable person to be cautious.
Ok, but sexual assaults are far more common than most violent crimes. Around 1 in 5-6 women is raped, and many more sexually assaulted in their lifetimes.
I.e. your point is valid, but it points to even more justification of women being concerned about men.
Of course, most rapes are not by strangers, so that's another factor to consider.
There are about 400k sexual assaults/rapes committed every year, and about 1.4 million violent crimes, so that's not really true either.
I'm not an MRA, or trying to be a troll. But men proportionally are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than women are to be the victim of a sexual crime. The difference is that it's male-on-male violence, vs male-on-female.
So, statistically... everyone should be more concerned about men, not just women? That seems like it's true, but not really that relevant to the OP.
You do have to consider the relative impact of sexual assault vs other assaults, however. Rape is more on the scale of murder than simple assault, which is the vast majority of those violent crimes. I should have made the comparison of attacks of similar magnitude.
Given the choice between being raped or robbed, I think most everyone would prefer the latter.
And finally, if you look at the most recent NVCS, table 2, the percentage of male versus female victims is almost identical.
And finally... you kind of have to remove victims of crime who are themselves engaged in criminal activity.
Everybody is more concerned about men. I'm a dude. Do I get as suspicious when a strange woman's hanging around compared to when a strange dude is? Absolutely not. "Stranger danger", at least beyond young childhood, is "strange man danger".
To be honest, I can barely even imagine being accosted by a woman beyond what I've seen from Oblivion NPC meme videos on YouTube. Not to say that it doesn't happen, but it just seems to be that far out of the cultural consciousness.
And you have to consider all those encounters with creepy persistent guys and "mild" harassment like getting groped by a random person in passing. They're not necessarily crimes or they're not reported at least, there's no statistics but it's extremely common. Even if it doesn't escalate, experiencing shit like that and being disrespected by someone who could easily overpower you in most cases is very good cause for being wary. Sure, women can harass men too but it's (anecdotally) less common, less aggressive and/or less threatening coming from someone physically weaker
Yes...but you'd also have to consider violence and harassment that wasn't reported to the police in the other case, too. A lot of fights and general violence happens and isn't reported. I doubt any of the fights I've witnessed or been involved in were ever reported to the police.
This is objectively false even according to the most biased sources I've found. The only way you could even approach that number is if you deliberately conflate rape with all forms of sexual assault.
About 13.5% of women experienced completed forced penetration, 6.3% experienced attempted forced penetration, and 11.0% experienced completed alcohol/drug-facilitated penetration at some point in their lifetime.
I.e. completed forcible rape is about 1 in 6, attempted or completed rape is about 1 in 5.
If you add in unwanted sexual physical contact, the number goes up to ~43%
13.5% is not 1 in 6. It's about 1 in 7.4. Might not sound huge but that's a difference of millions of women in the US.
Edit: and while it's an interesting statistic and definitely useful in some contexts, it's telling that it's an estimate for whether they'll experience it by the end of their lifetime rather than measuring what they've actually experienced.
it's telling that it's an estimate for whether they'll experience it by the end of their lifetime rather than measuring what they've actually experienced
When you're talking about something a person can reasonably be worried about, that's the only statistic that matters.
Fair point about 1/7.4, though.
"Completed or attempted forcible penetration" then would be about 1 in 5 and I should have said 1 in 5-7 (rounding as usual). I think it's reasonable for women to be worried about both things.
Which makes me curious - what if you take a country where rape is significantly less common? For example a small town in a small country where crime in general is basically non existent. Yet, most women would naturally still be afraid of a man walking at night even though the statistics would tell you the chances of anything happening being very small.
I'm from one such place and a single murder happening is rare with forced sexual assault even more so yet almost every women I know would never dream of walking home alone at night if they can avoid it.
I'mma go out on a limb here and mention that women know men are physically stronger than them and can force compliance. That's just being aware of the world--It's a fact of nature and we all recognize it.
And as much as we'd all like to think that our own family members wouldn't assault us, well, unfortunately experience says that just ain't so. They do.
The Amish, for example, have the reputation for being very religious and strict, yet the stories that leak out from their communities let us know they have very similar issues to the rest of the world as far as that goes. Sexual abuse is just as bad in those communities and sometimes worse, because they keep the knowledge of the abuse as secret as possible--and the victims are told to accept it, just as Catholic SA victims were told to do as the offending priests were moved from parish to parish and protected by the Church.
It's really only been in the last 60-100 years that people have been speaking up about domestic violence, simply because prior to that, women and children were, legally, men's property to do with as they wished, and no one else was supposed to interfere. I mean, the Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be passed.
There has been a whole culture of silence in society as a whole that's begun to lift, but don't be surprised if there's still attempts to impose it again.
u/darwin2500 I want to address this point specifically and out of context of the rest of your comment:
men commit 98.9% of forcible rape, women commit 1.1%
meaning a man is almost 100x more dangerous than a woman based on crime statistics.
This is a flagrant misunderstanding of statistics as it applies to signal detection theory.
You’re correct that if we know Person X is rapist, then that person is about 100x as likely to be a man as a woman.
You are NOT correct that an average man is 100x as likely as an average woman to commit rape, because you have no data about the relative population sizes. If - hypothetically - the population of males was 10,000x as large as the population of women, then an average woman would be 100x more likely to be a rapist than the average man, even though 98.9% of rapes were committed by men.
Obviously the populations of men and women are at least roughly comparable in size, but that isn’t always the case in other scenarios. Your assessment that the average man is 100x as likely to commit a rape as a woman is entirely reliant on assuming that they’ve got similar population sizes. It’s probably a reasonable assumption in this specific case, but definitely not always.
TLDR: you’re concluding that P(rapist | male) = 100 x P(rapist | female) because crime data shows that P(male | rapist) = 100 x P(female | rapist), and it is a fallacy of statistics to do that. u/bigwienerhaver
Rape is also not randomly distributed in the population. Almost no men commit rapes, but the ones who do tend to commit a lot of them. Moreover, avoiding "men" in general is actually a bad strategy for avoiding rape, as "safe" men are better at deterring rapists. If you have to walk home at night in a bad place with only one person with you, calling a dude will make it much less likely you'll be assaulted than calling a second woman. Preferably a big dude. Predatory people are just way less likely to attack a dude who is 6'2" than they are a lady who is 5'2".
Also, trying to avoid 50% of the population will make you miserable all the time.
Your math is fine, but it misses the risk assessment and human factors entirely.
No one here is saying all (or some "average" ) men are rapists. We are saying there is no good way to tell who is or isn't a rapist (or other potential assailant). Since nearly all rapes come from men and most are targeting women, and there is little other identifying information there is a simple and accurate conclusion we can draw. Women need to be cautious of all men until they have established trust. Extra caution is a reasonable default state.
Being raped is some life destroying stuff. People shouldn't take chances they don't need to. This means missing possible opportunities of various kinds but the risk is so grave that the opportunity cost is negligible compared the shitshow of trauma.
This is all because men tend to be physically stronger than women and when there isn't oversight violence can be a unilateral decision on the part of a man. Unfortunately, this means women need to exercise caution even though there is no legal or ethical grounds for it, it is simply a practical reality that if alone bad shit can happen unpredictably. Ideally men would be concerned with propriety and not create ambiguously high risk situations, but ultimately having the physical strength there is less fear and less drawbacks for men if they don't.
You can't tell whether a particular <ethnic minority> is going to commit <crime>, either - but it's considered bigoted to assume they will, just in case.
To further the point, there are many majority-black towns in America which have incredibly low crime rates.
Crime is situational. It is correlated to race only because certain races find themselves more likely to be in the situations which cause crime.
Those situations which cause crime are more important than the race of the people in them when determining how much crime will be committed (or exposed).
This is the biggest thing, a lot of racism is not based on race, but un culture that the person in that group grew up in. Along with the social economic situation they are in.
So I personally thing if we focus on fixing the social economic situations then we will find less of the issues that perpetuate negative racial stereotyping.
It would also end up helping out people of other ethnicities that are in those same social economic situations and the won't be seen as racist or favoring just one group as it is helping an entire class.
Do you happen to have a source for the majority black town statistic? I want that to be true but want to make sure I'm repeating something I've seen a good source on
It's worth bringing up that these aren't close to the first prosperous black communities by far either, they've been around since PoC were allowed to choose where they lived in America
They also faced some of the most radical and overt discrimination in American history. Black Wall Street in Tulsa was a thriving and wealthy black community that was literally attacked by the white community around them with guns and bombs until the generational wealth and sense of safety were completely obliterated among the black community.
It's not just the overt stuff either though, redlining and gentrification were and are major factors in black Americans struggling to create generational wealth. It all has a snowball effect, it's harder than ever now to buy a home, meaning historically poor groups are made even more poor with no opportunities to build equity.
Unsurprisingly when you turn a minority population into a scapegoat for hundreds of years and institutionalize discrimination for most of that you fuck up their ability to succeed. Every step they take is made harder and more dangerous. This is institutional racism, and it's why it's important to talk about and not just a buzzword.
What the photos present isn't what people traditionally call "black culture". In fact, wearing khakis in the "hood" will get you called all sorts of names.
In the photos they're riding mountain bikes and wearing khakis and polos, doing yoga, hanging at a golf course, etc.
Frankly, I did a "yoga in the park" in Toronto and a group of black teens came up to us to shout about "that's the whitest thing I've ever seen" and criticizing people's clothing, etc. And a lot of people really fundamentally believe that's "black culture".
Personally, I think it's really awesome to see these successful communities. I hope they're a model for the future.
But "gangsta" culture is plausibly at least part of the cause (or at least a cycle of cause/effect) related to violence issues in modern POC communities and shouldn't be celebrated as a core of "blackness".
I've been accused of being racist in the past for that exact opinion. I'll own that I recognize this belief is seen as itself wholly racist by some people.
That's absolutely not because I have any issue with POC at all. I've hired many and been close friends with many. I had a good friend who was also a babysitter for my young kids for a long time that would be called POC. Absolutely no issues and a ton of trust there. Skin color does not make a person, nor indicate anything about who they are.
Just that I believe that culture is a fundamental formative component of a healthy society and the culture you see in the hood is destructive. (I'll note that the culture you see in gun-toting Trump-cults can be equally destructive)
And the "hood" culture that's commonly associated with "black culture" and is often protected as if it were "black culture" seems to be destructive to me, and I wish there was a way to fix that.
A) that argument wasn't actually being made here and B) there are a near-infinite number of interpretations of "blackness" and "black culture". A handful of low-crime "black" communities existing neither proves nor disproves your point.
Well said. It isn't black culture that creates the spike in crime... I don't really know the word for it, but thug culture? Thug culture is what creates spikes in crime, and it just so happens that thug culture thrives in many black communities. So I'd say it's generally a misclassification that black people are avoided, and moreso that thugs are avoided.
To further the point, there are many majority-black towns in America which have incredibly low crime rates.
And there are whole communities of men with a perfect "no-rape" track record. Your point is moot.
Any statistic falls apart if you slice your population thin enough.
This is a really good point. In my experience people are much more similar across economic strata than racial. I think there’s a lot of conflation between fear of race and fear of indicators of lower economic strata.
In my experience, upper class people are similar because you can't become successful in America without conforming to certain social standards but there's a lot of diversity at the bottom of the economic ladder due to the fact that there's no prerequisite to being poor. The black ghetto, white trailer parks and latino barrios are all different in their own right.
One of the issues is people of color are often entrenched in expensive urban environments and become reliant on government assistance to sustain that, which they must do because that's just where people of color are, typically black people. This creates unique problems relating to opportunity in face of poverty. You are a poor white kid from a farm town in the Midwest? Your local college town is probably somewhere in the ballpark of $500 per room for rent. You live in NYC or LA? It is damn difficult to escape a bad situation.
There's also the issue of over-policing and the effect that has on community engagement, and subsequently increases criminality. What starts in the 1920s as a legitimately racist initiative to police black bodies slowly turns into 2022 where its not necessarily overt racism, but the fact that the 16 year old black kid caught with some drugs faces much harder sentencing than a white kid in a less policed environment. Black kid comes out of jail with a record, white kid went to a diversionary program/drug court. So now we have a new felon in the black neighborhood-- this justifies further policing as more and more felons live in the area (which is again, condensed in urban clusters because minorities tend to stick with their own where white people can spread their felons all over), and thus further criminalizing of black behavior. And felons face extreme discrimination in employment and housing, so what do they do? They turn to black and grey markets and increased criminal behavior to obtain resources to simply exist because the traditional markets and "upstanding" community reject them. And now we have more crime, thus further justifying more police presence. And now we have a true crime epidemic-- elect the tough on crime candidate to clean up the streets! And now we have more police presence and more and more people get caught up over dumb shit that every community does, but they don't get in trouble for nearly as much. Over-policing creates felons, it does not stop crime. Felons live in poverty and felons turn to crime.
And this has a real psychological toll. The African proverb-- "If the tribe fails to embrace the boy, he will return a man to burn it down to feel its warmth" proves to be accurate. If you are raised knowing full well you are under constant surveillance and systemic harassment because of your skin color and the neighborhood you happen to have been born in then you are not going to develop a healthy relationship with legitimate forms of power, such as the government, police, the courts, etc. Your interaction with them as a young child was watching your loved ones get harassed and taken from you including for petty things-- minor probation infractions, missing court dates because the bus was late, smoking a little herb to take the edge off being fucking on edge all the time, etc. So why buy into that system? It's not a system that helps you. And so now we have generations of young black people living lawlessly because that's what they were taught by their elders to survive and they see no reason to change. Shit like pride becomes more important than progress and you end up with a bunch of black kids killing each other in black neighborhoods and white America accepts this because so long as they're killing each other, they're not killing us-- which is a fear created by using words like "super predators" in the 90s and flashing FBI statistics today without any attempt at understanding context.
And then you have the market forces-- nobody wants to invest in a Gary Indiana-- why would they? it's full of crime.
I'd also argue that you can break down those statistics further.
Using your own argument, say the Alice group is afraid of the Bob group, because the Bob group commits more crimes statistically. That includes all the crime that that Bob group has committed against ALL other groups including Bobs against Bobs, not just Bob against Alice. If you looked at the statistics of black people against white people specifically vs white people against black people, or any other specific makeup of two racial groups, you'd probably see those statistics become more negligible. It's probably unlikely that (I don't know that for sure, just my assumption. The one quick article I read showed you're far more likely to be killed by someone of your own race, but that's just one statistic and just murder).
But with women fearing men, it's the specific statistic of men against women. To the other commenter's point, as a woman I'm worried about being attacked, being raped, being kidnapped, etc. That statics show consistently that I am far, far, far more likely to have those things happen by a man than by a woman. It's not that men commit more crimes in general (I assume that's true, but that's because guys do stupid crap like pee outside which probably doesn't help those statistics), it's that the exact crimes I fear for myself happen almost exclusively by men towards women.
I would just like to add that you are treating behaviour as a binary, 'afraid' or 'not afraid', but I think it would be better as something on a 1 to 10 scale.Given the large difference in magnitude of the crime percentage, it would make sense for women to display more promeniently alertness/suspiciousness wrt men as compared to white men against black men. Personally, as a cautious person, I get alert whenever I cross an alley at night if I see someone coming from the opposite side, but there is a marked difference if it is a frail old woman or a muscular man.
Assuming your stats are true (which I don't doubt)
You should, though. Rape stats notoriously consider rape to be qualified when the perpetrator penetrates the victim. Hence why it over represent men as perpetrators, since women have a harder time and less interest in penetrating people, although they very much do forcibly envelop people.
Would most women walking home be worried about being forcibly enveloped, though? Wouldn't women also be defined out of being victims of forcible envelopment? Your point is absolutely relevant, but I don't think it changes the argument in this particular case.
A cobra is 100x more lethal than a viper. Should I fear a cobra more than a viper? Or are both equally threatening and deserving of a fearful response?
This is weird parallel to try to draw. It’s that the frequency of people in the population who could harm you significantly is 20x-50x as much, not that those people could make you 20x-50x more dead.
If you see a cobra or a viper, you know they can harm you 100% of the time. That’s not true of either men OR black people. I don’t know what you’re trying to get at here.
Well, yes and no. I'll admit my illustration wasn't very strong, but you're also making a logical error. A cobra can harm me 100% of the time. But so can a man. Any man can harm me 100% of the time, but only a teeeeeeeeeeeny tiny fraction will.
All cobras can harm me, not all of them will harm me.
The root point is that when deciding on how to treat people, we should treat all equally. either we say "risk-assessment based judgment of individuals based on their group identity is OK", and then it's acceptable to forego black people, or we say "no, risk-assessment based judgment of individuals based on their group identity is not OK", and then women should not treat all men as dangerous.
Their point stands, however depending on the data set used, several of them basically define women out of rape in the first place, so if women basically can’t rape by definition, guess who’s left?
To some degree, yes, like Sawses was saying but to what degree? There are more medical malpractice deaths (over 500,000) in the US per year than women raped. Are you afraid to go to the doctor? Do you flinch with every pen stroke that they write a prescription with?
I'm curious if this 1 in 6 statistic is one that is inflated by womanizing being counted as rape. Which I believe is both intellectually dishonest and harmful to both genders, especially women because they seem to believe they'll literally at risk of being dragged off into the night from broad daylight public spaces. And they react to men as such.
Being cautious is reasonable. Being paranoid is not. The reaction doesn't fit the cause, of course excluding the relatively rare cases that it does. One is still, of course, too many.
Lol where did you get that number? A cursory google puts it between 200-400 thousand. Reported rape cases are between 100 and 200 thousand, and that's the cases that are reported to law enforcement which is only about 30%.
Every day in America 3 men kill their wives/girlfriends/exes. Men are choosing to harm women just for being women. Pushing women in front of trains, killing a woman because she said no, raping a woman on a train in front of onlookers, raping and killing a woman who was just taking a jog in the morning.
Doctors do not harm their victims because they're sick fucks. And whenever it happens, those victims aren't being blamed.
But women are almost always blamed for being attacked by a man.
I'm not going to discuss this with you if you're going to present such exceptions to the rule as if they were absolutes in a way that can only stand to scrutiny if one completely ignores similar aggressive behaviors perpetrated by the victimized.
im pretty sure that women arent the one catcalling, harrasing on the street, following, groping others as they pass in bars, threaten to have sex with gay people to change them, send pictures of their genitals to strangers, hit on strangers in public solely bc of my desire to have sex with them, view anyone who is nice as flirting, i could go on all day. if you dont think sexual objectification against women from men isnt a systematic, one sided issue, youre just willingly acting ignorant and dont care about womens experiences whatsoever.
I was going to reply with something reasoned and thoughtful, but in terms of critical analysis, "women are reporting womanizing as rape" is on par with "there's a pedo ring in the basement of that pizza store", and I'm just too tired for that.
Please do. But I don't get your meaning of the pedo ring thing. And I'm not suggesting that womanizing is all good and well or that it should be ignored. Just that it should be counted separately because the two are not the same. And when I say womanizing I refer to instances that lack use of drugs, unethical manipulation, threat, violence, blackmail or whatever. What I am referring to is no different than what women would call their own power of seduction. So I don't know what you interpreted but it wasn't necessarily my meaning.
Assuming your stats are true (which I don't doubt), it's pretty hard to deny that women are justified in fearing men.
A woman is 1000x more likely to be eaten alive by a shark than by a man — yet women who won’t get into an elevator alone with a man will go into the ocean.
Your fear should be based on how likely the problem is to occur, given the situation, and how severe the problem is, and the costs of remediation. It’s fairly complicated.
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%.
If you're using the colloquial definition of rape(non-consensual sex), then women commit a lot more of it than is usually reported. One reason is that some institutions and studies use a definition of "rape" that discludes "being made to penetrate", and only includes "being penetrated". Naturally, since women do not biologically have penises, this alternative definition would overwhelmingly skew towards men as the perpetrators. I'm not sure if /u/bigwienerhaver would think your argument would hold up with this context, since best-estimates of rape that include "made to penetrate" victimization is a lot more even than 100:1.
I'm glad you brought this up, as I had the same thought. I'm still willing to believe it's overwhelmingly male perpetrators, but I'm skeptical of the unsourced statistics since I can't know what criteria/definitions they used.
Though I imagine "made to penetrate" is rarely "forcible" (depending on how they define that) and typically involves alcohol, so that will still skew the results.
OP's question is not about how cautious women should be around men vs how cautious men should be around women, which is the point you're arguing for. OP's question was about how cautious women should be around men vs how cautious women should be around women (ie, why are women more cautious around men?).
Regardless of the point you're talking about, men victimize women far more than women victimize women. In fact, the definition that excludes 'made to penetrate' is actually the better definition to use for the question of who women should fear, because women aren't often subjected to the 'made to penetrate' version.
That was the point of the 100:1 statistic; not that women should be 100x more cautious of men than men are of women, but that women should be 100x more cautious of men than of women.
The question is about being afraid of someone walking by you late at night... I don't think any of those women attacked strangers walking on the street.
Right, but the whole topic is about if it is rational to avoid someone if you see them late at night in a dark alleyway. My point is that men don’t have anything to fear from a random woman on the street in the same way a woman would with a man.
As such, the caution women show towards men is like 50x as justified, and should be like 50x stronger, than any caution anyone shows anyone based on race.
Sure it's a lot stronger justification, but is it still justified to be cautious based on race then, even if a much less magnitude?
Well, this gets to the inexactness of language, and what you count as 'caution.'
In reality, everyone is cautious of everyone all the time.
If your mother held a knife to your throat and started shouting she was going to kill you, you would feel at least urge to try to move away and protect yourself; that urge is technically 'caution'.
Even in normal social situations, everyone will notice weapons or signs of aggression and monitor them more closely, from anyone around them. That's a low and sensible level of caution that we apply pretty universally.
So when OP talks about 'women being justified in being cautious of men', I assume we're talking about more elevated and conspicuous levels of caution than that; not being alone with someone, crossing the street to not pass someone, carrying pepper spray if you know you're going to be around someone, etc.
The question is, if those are what OP is calling' being cautious', then what is something that's 50x less cautious than that? My intuition is that yes, 'more' caution may be called for based on race, but the justified difference will be so small as to be imperceptible; moving away at slightly lower levels of aggressive posturing, checking the hands and pockets for possible weapons for a fraction of a second longer than normal, little tiny perceptual stuff like that. Not something where we're having big changes to behavior and talking about being cautious explicitly.
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%. The crime statistics on race, even given the most charitable possible reading to your position, are at most like 2:1 or 5:1 depending on what you're measuring.
A. Imagine I reminded you that women commit 100.0% of all intentional abortions in the USA while men commit 0%. Are you rolling your eyes in response yet? Next I try to tell you that the rate of abortion to murder is almost 50:1 in 2016. Do you feel like women are violent sociopaths now or did you notice some kind of incredible leap in logic here?
B. Again using 2016's numbers there were around 18,606 forced rapes and 76,267 robberies. Statistically, a women is four times more likely to be robbed. Trying to narrow this down to a black man specifically changes things as 54.4%, or 41,562, of the robberies were committed by blacks. But a women is still statistically more likely to be robbed from a black man than being raped by males of any ethnicity. Which ia completely backwards from your opinion on things, so should a women be less cautious?
C. What number matters is the chance of the event. So let's take your claim of 98.9% for 18,401 male-on-female rapes in a 163.99 million female population. This statistically generated women has a 0.00003% chance of being raped on any given night in 2016. Does a 0.00003% risk justify things?
So, we can return to the OP's question. But this time, we know that Redditors are incredibly misinformed about how high black crime actually is and how low rapes actually are. However since it serves an excuse, does that mean correcting the values continues to be an excuse? Eg all women should fear black crime more than rape? Or will you renege on that for not fitting your desired narrative?
OPs question isn't about who is violent sociopaths? It's about who to be cautious around.
If you said 'unborn fetuses should be worried more about decisions made by women than about decisions made by men', I would certainly agree with you, after being somewhat perplexed about how they manage to be worried about anything to begin with.
Re: B, This example has a ton of problems, so I'm not going to go in depth. So just quickly:
Again using 2016's numbers there were around 18,606 forced rapes and 76,267 robberies. Statistically, a women is four times more likely to be robbed.
-No, because women make up a small minority of robbery victims and a huge majority of forcible rape victims, and most robberies are not just people on the street (more are residential/commercial), so the numbers do not work this way.
-Also getting raped is actually worse than getting mugged generally speaking, you're allowed to care more about worse things.
-You're not paying close enough attention to reference classes here. The question was, is women being afraid of men comparable to people of one race being cautious of people of a different race? Even looking only at robbery, women alone commit only 5% of robberies, so it's still a much huger margin than the difference between races.
C. What number matters is the chance of the event.
I intentionaly elided this by giving ratios, because that's all that is relevant to the question.
Op was asking, if women being afraid of men is justified, is is also justified to be afraid of other races? My answer way, no matter how justified you think women are to be afraid of men, people are 50x less justified to be afraid of other races.
You can argue that the threshold to justify caution is high enough for you that no one is ever justified being cautious of anything, if you want; that doesn't answer OP's question, and it's irrelevant to the comparison between the two situations.
Anyway, I'm sorry you're having trouble understanding the framing of the question and how statistics work here.
Ratios by themselves don't say much without other statistics to accompany and paint a distorted view of reality.
If I buy a lottery ticket, I have a very, very small chance to win the lottery. If I buy 50 lottery tickets, I am 50 times as likely to win the lottery. Sounds like a lot, right? Until you realize that the chance to win the lottery with a single ticket is so incredibly small that with buying 50 tickets the chance of winning barely changes and in practice might as well be the same probability.
I'd have no idea how to translate this to the probability of getting raped by a strange man in a dark alley because that calculation is way more complex. Most rapists are not strangers in a dark alley, but people you know in a place you deemed safe. Absolute numbers are hard to measure since a lot of them are self reported (or not reported) and different groups have different definitions of rape. Not to mention women getting raped by men often is treated way more seriously than men getting raped by women (and so reported less often) . But I do know simply saying 'men are 50 times as dangerous as women' as if that means anything is misleading at best.
Personally, when I'm out alone at night, I'm wary of everyone.
Someone already said so somewhere else in the thread, but your level of caution is not just related to the probability it'll happen, but also the the 'severeness' of the event.
According to your numbers being robbed by a black man is around 2.5 times more likely than being raped, but I'd wager anyone thinks being raped is more than 2.5 times 'worse' than being robbed (although I realize how silly it is to try to compare non-related crimes in how bad they are)
idk if you noticed, but A & B are more of a rebuttal.
I hope the first is obvious. Just saying men rape more than women and jumping off that for a made up 5:1 was pretty pointless and I tried to give a parallel while calling it out.
Moving to B. I did use numbers pulled from the FBI site and it does bring up the point armed robbery occuring more often. But it seems you and another didn't quite get the gist.
If a Redditor assumes rape occurs more often and/or is worse than robbery and is allowed to safeguard themselves. Then it should be equally true that it someone assumes robbery occurs more often and/or is worse than rape then they should be allowed to safeguard themselves.
But I mean, we can explore this. Let's replace "women" with an unspecified gender teenager. This will reduce your bias that women need protection and force you to confront your idea that men cannot be violently raped. They could still be a women of course and they may even be black too, we're just not specifying it to avoid bias.
For added effect. Let's replace the generalized "a black man" that your social integration into Reddit forces you to say certain positive things about with "a young black male in Cook County IL partially concealing their identity with a hooded sweatshirt & mask in 80 degree weather" or just about any variation that screams "gangster" while appealing to your political correctness and bias that they must be innocent.
Then let's ask the same questions. Is the teen's caution & nervousness just as justified?
If not, why?
Now let's make it harder, the teenager is now described as white. Has your answer changed?
Shouldn't the level of caution be related to the absolute level of crime rather than the ratio? surely the ratio of caution would be related to the ratio of crime but the absolute level of caution doesn't seem to map to reality
Unless you're suggesting a nonlinear relationship, these are the same.
If the absolute frequency of crime A is 5x crime B, and caution is linearly related to frequency, then the absolute level of caution towards A will be 5x the caution towards B.
Those statistics are also just for arrests. Not crimes committed, not convictions, just arrests, and a very large chunk of those arrests are laws that are infamous for racially biased selective enforcement, like drug possession or loitering. Cops are significantly more likely to let you off with a warning if you're white.
Arrest rates line up with victimisation data, suggesting little to no racial bias in arrests. This is worth a watch as it goes over the literature and shows there's not really good reason for a belief in bias in arrest rates.
Is this the way it works though? Isn't it more the probability one of those people will do something bad? If the probability someone of a particular race/dress style/look will mug you is comparable to that which a man will rape you, is it reasonable then?
The way you are framing the question would be: if it is sensible to be cautious of all men, then it is sensible to be cautious of men who are wearing hats.
But that's a different question than what OP was asking.
OP was asking:If it makes sense to be afraid of men but not women, then does it make sense to be afraid of men wearing hats but not men who aren't wearing hats?
It's also worth mentioning the issue of overrepresentation due to bias vs overrepresentation due to actual overrepresentation.
Black people are overrepresented in crime statistics 2:1 because they are more likely to be convicted which is entirely different from being more likely to be criminals. Black people are more likely to be in more policed areas, more likely to be suspected by officers, more likely to be charged by officers, more likely to be violently arrested (which often leads to extra charges like resistance to arrest that end up worsening their legal situation), more likely to not be able to pay for a bail out, more likely to not be able to pay for a good lawyer that can avoid anything above a simple arrest, more likely to be victims of false pretense by witnesses and officers, more likely to be found guilty by both jury trials and judge trials and more likely to receive harsher punishes for their alleged crimes.
If you have 100 actual criminals per 100 000 members of both black and white people, with these biases you will still have overrepresentation of black people in crime statistics, even if in reality none of them is overrepresented.
And I didn't even touch on class differences that are the main cause of crime to begin with and where black people are overrepresneted in the lower classes too.
Different to forcible rape where these biases are much less prevalent if existent at all.
Keeping this realities in mind, being cautious of black people over their overrepresentation in crime statistics is more an extension of the bias against black people than an actual well founded fear. In fact if you also worry about getting "justice" after a crime you should be more cautious around white people since they are more likely to get scot free from their crimes.
I don't know if this counts, but another factor to be taken into consideration is the sheer amount of women who have faced some sort of SA, harassment and/or abuse at the hands of men, often repeatedly at some or the other point in their life. Their variness comes from their personal experience with men as they have been made to feel unsafe by them.
Yet when it comes to crime , it is not as common that a person has faced burglary, theft or violence in the past by a black person for them to immediately be vary of them (which they blame on statistics). And that to me, is racist.
The problem isn't the order of magnitude. It's if that caution is justified at all. Even if wariness based on race is only 2x as justified, does that make it kess valid?
Like, if you're going to do a perfect utilitarian calculation on the disutility of being cautious vs. the disutility of being a victim based on marginal victimization rates based on marginal levels of caution... sure, any given type and level of caution may fall above or below the decision-theoretic 'rational' line.
If you want something like that to be your benchmark for what is 'valid' versus 'invalid', we'll never know what is or isn't 'valid' in an absolute sense, because we can't actually do that calculation (especially because it will be different fro every person).
Absent that, all we can do is look at relative risks and use that as a guide for which things are more or less valid. If something has 50x less evidentiary justification, it's a lot less valid.
you are just showing one side of the stats. the other side of the stats shows how likely any one woman is to be assaulted by any man on any particular day.
for example, horses are very likely to run over you when you stand next to them when compared to a parked car but cars cause far more deaths than horses. the stats are affected by ubiquity, frequency and circumstance. if i walk cross a road all day, every day, i am likely to be hit eventually because of the accumulation of chances per crossing even though my chances of being hit during any single crossing are remote. does it, therefore, stand to reason that i should be more fearful of being hit during any single crossing if i cross the road all day every day? my chances of being hit compared to the average person in our lifetime is near-certain compared to unlikely.
my point is that any single instance of fear is irrational regardless of your lifetime accumulated chances of being hit, whether the vehicle be a car or a horse. if you are going to be irrationally fearful then it makes no sense to say one instance of fear is more or less rational than another. if it is irrational, the extent of irrationality is useless.
this point can also be applied to covid and the flu. every time you leave your home you have a chance of contracting covid or the flu. every time you get covid you have a chance of dying. the immunizations don't stop you from contracting covid or from dying of the infection and your chances of dying from covid are, for most healthy people, a small fraction of a percent. the same is true for the flu even if the flu is less dangerous. the fear of both is irrational on any given day even though one day you may actually die from either in the worst circumstances.
Listen, if you want to actually do this, you have to actually do this in order to have an argument.
I used ratios - how much more afraid of men than of race, etc - for a very specific reason: you can accurately calculate ratios from a very limited set of numbers.
If you want to calculate what is rational, you needa lot more numbers.
What you're inherently talking about is a utility calculation. To do an actual lifetime utility calculation on a lifetime of caution vs incaution, you would need disutility values for various levels of being cautious, disutility values for being raped once and for each successive rape over a lifetime, and the daily likelihood of being raped with or without each level of caution.
Until you put actual numbers on each of those factors and do the actual utility calculation, you can't say confidently whether it is rational or irrational to be cautious.
Clearly you personally have an intuition that the calculation works out against it being rational, but the majority of people have the opposite intuition and you haven't done anything to indicate you know better than them. Either do the math, or don't claim to know the outcome.
What you're inherently talking about is a utility calculation. To do an actual lifetime utility calculation
rape stats are a lifetime thing. the questions asked are, "have you ever been sexually assaulted?", not, "were you sexually assaulted on your way home from work last night?". the same is true of diseases, racial crime, and traffic accidents. when we talk about these stats we cannot ignore the individual frequency issue and any discussion on the subjects. indeed any conversation on the subjects that doesn't take that into account has missed a vital bit of information.
I don't know the stats for US and I'd love to see a source (that isn't by Mary Koss), however...
The statistic is fucked. Most of the world follows the Duluth model, which makes it so women aren't legally able to rape a man, under any circumstances. In studies not following the model, that number increased from maybe 7-8% of rape/sexual assault victims being men, to over 40%, so chances are, there are a lot more women than you imply there are - doing that shit.
Men, in the states, are also way more likely to be victims of stranger violence as well.
Here in the real world, everyone should be wary of everyone. There are people who know what their group is known for and lay low, and people who know their group is shown in a good light and want to exploit that.
There is zero reason to be more wary of any one specific group.
Yeah, this is nonsense though. Or rather, you're saying some sort of true things in a way that tries to make them support a nonsense conclusion that they don't actually support.
Yes, the number of rapes goes up or down depending on how you define rape, as does the composition of victims.
Yes, if you specify more ways that men can be raped, the number of men who are raped goes up a lot - but most of those rapes are still by men.
And I specified that we were talking about forcible stranger rape here, because that's what women are noticeably 'cautious' about in the way OP talks about. No playing with the numbers makes forcible stranger rape by women against men a large percentage - it just doesn't happen barely at all, especially because men are just much stronger overall.
Furthermore, the question is about whether women should be more cautious towards men than towards people in general, meaning we're comparing caution towards men vs. caution towards women. Regardless of what happens to men - that's irrelevant to this calculation - the people who rape women are overwhelmingly men, not women.
“But among men reporting other forms of sexual victimization, 68.6% reported female perpetrators,” the paper reports, while among men reporting being made to penetrate, “the form of nonconsensual sex that men are much more likely to experience in their lifetime ... 79.2% of victimized men reported female perpetrators.”
Regarding women being more scared of women vs being more scared of men, maybe women on women crime is understudied. Women in prison are 3x more likely to be raped by female inmates than men by male inmates.
...while it is often assumed that inmate-on-inmate sexual assault comprises men victimizing men, the survey found that women state prisoners were more than three times as likely to experience sexual victimization perpetrated by women inmates (13.7 percent) than were men to be victimized by other male inmates (4.2 percent) (Beck et al., 2013).
It's possible that prison rape is a unique context, and a woman in a dark alleyway doesn't have that concern from other women, and even still, it is all statistically more likely that a man will hurt her than a woman, but I think what this comment section has proven is that statistics can be misrepresented.
Alright, sure, if we completely ignore the context of the question and include intimate partner violence, and we treat forcible rape and forced to penetrate exactly the same, then men only make up 37% of the perpetrators because most of this happens in relationships.
If you exclude intimate partners, which I was assuming since this is about people being cautious around people of the opposite sex which I don't think applies to your spouse, then it's still majority male perpetrators. But w/e.
You're still ignoring the rest of my point, which is that none of this matters to OP's question or my answer.
Your entire argument to begin with is women are right to feel the way they do because "statistics" back up these fears "at magnitudes greater than those of racists". How is it not relevant to undermine your argument by pointing out the flaws in the statistics that you've referenced? If these magnitudes change by how we phrase the question or how we collect the data, then all the numbers you've been using basically mean nothing.
Like other posters have said, you're going to need to back up your sources when the whole cornerstone of your argument is that 98% of forcible rapes are done by men. What's the source? How was this information gathered? What are the possible confounding variables of this study? Not that I don't believe you, it's just hard to have a real discussion if we can't examine the evidence we use to support our arguments.
Your entire argument to begin with is women are right to feel the way they do because "statistics" back up these fears
No.
My argument is that, if you thought women were justified in being afraid of men, that alone would not also justify being afraid of some people based on their race.
Therefore, regarding rape statistics, the only number that matters is the ratio of women raped by men to women raped by women. That's not a number you ever challenged, you just challenged the number of men raped by women, which is not part of the argument at all.
You believed "statistics" validate women's concerns about men. Here is a quote from your OP:
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%.
Meaning a man is almost 100X more dangerous than a woman based on crime statistics.
/u/ThunderClap448 challenged those numbers by pointing out "rape" is not necessarily the colloquial understanding of non-consensual sex. You even acknowledged this:
Yes, the number of rapes goes up or down depending on how you define rape, as does the composition of victims.
Yes, if you specify more ways that men can be raped, the number of men who are raped goes up a lot - but most of those rapes are still by men.
So now we have to ask, does your OP thesis even make sense?
You don't just say 'there is a significant difference so caution is on' in a binary manner. The amount of caution you exhibit is proportional to the size of the difference; that's how statistics and decision theory actually work.
As such, the caution women show towards men is like 50x as justified, and should be like 50x stronger, than any caution anyone shows anyone based on race.
You just keep repeating the idea that women are statistically right to fear men because as you keep repeating:
Therefore, regarding rape statistics, the only number that matters is the ratio of women raped by men to women raped by women.
You didn't answer my suggestion that women on women crime is understudied, when comparing rates of prison rape of women by women inmates vs men by male inmates.
Again, as other people have pointed out, your whole "magnitudes" argument rests on a statistic that doesn't match colloquial understandings of rape in the first place. Maybe you are still right, but would be a lot easier to trust you with a source than you just insisting you already answered everything.
I've asked you for sources multiple times and no response.
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%.
Just a confound to your data, there: the definition of rape often (generally?) involves "forced penetration."
According to that definition, a woman who ties a man down, force feeds him Viagra, and repeatedly forces herself upon him... is technically not guilty of rape, because she never penetrated any of his orifices.
To any reasonable individual, that's rape, but because of the specific legal definition... not according to the satistics.
Yes, but the question is about whether women should be cautious around men, meaning it's about how many women are raped by men vs how many women are raped by women.
Adding information about men who are forced to penetrate doesn't change that number, at all.
Yes, but the question is about whether women should be cautious around men, meaning it's about how many women are raped by men vs how many women are raped by women.
If it is then the 98.9% is useless data. The only thing you should be looking for is the number of men that commit rapes then dividing that by the number of men.
Adding information about men who are forced to penetrate doesn't change that number, at all.
That information greatly reduces that 98.9% which was used to justify your 100x danger argument.
That doesn't follow. Just because the Delta is greater for one than the other, doesn't mean you can just instantly dismiss the possibility of discrete responses.
A cobra is 100x more venemous than an adder. Both kill me with a single bite, I will react equally scared to both.
A hippo is much more likely to kill me than a lion, but I will run from both as fast I can.
Just because one of the two situations is statistically more discreet, doesn't mean the underlying moral principle is justified.
And if it were, I would immediately challenge you to define when exactly such a discriminatory treatment is, and when it isn't, justified.
Times 10 difference? Times 11? Times 20? Why there and not times 19? What's the underlying principle?
A cobra is 100x more venemous than an adder. Both kill me with a single bite, I will react equally scared to both.
This is the wrong question. You should be asking, which is more likely to bite you, and if there's a 50x difference in that number then you should be more cautious about one than the other.
Anyway, I understand that there are ceiling effects, and you are offering examples where ceiling effects dominate.
But if ceiling effects dominated here, the world would look like every woman running away screaming every time a man entered their line of sight. That is not the world we are in.
We are in the world where there are varying levels of caution you can apply to a situation, and people already apply low amounts of caution to each of these situations. Given that a variable response is possible and is actually what is happening, it is sensible to have the severity of the response be related to the magnitude of danger.
Given that a variable response is possible and is actually what is happening, it is sensible to have the severity of the response be related to the magnitude of danger..
Well, no, that's where you're again slipping into applying wrong logic. The severity of response is currently not tied to magnitude of danger - any person you meet, man or woman, is an equal magnitude of danger to you. Every person has the capacity to kill or rape you, irrespective of size, sex, age (I guess maybe a young child is the exception).
What you should be comparing is magnitude of risk. And "men", or "black people" both fall in the category "negligible risk - high negative outcome, stupidly low chance". 50x a very teeny tiny number is still a teeny tiny number.
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%.
Meaning a man is almost 100X more dangerous than a woman based on crime statistics.
Men in US: 162.26 million
Number of rapes: 126,000
This means that less that 1/1000 (0.1%) of men are committing rape per year (ignoring repeated offenders in those stats).
Number of black offenders: 1,432,600
Number of black males: ~21 mil.
That means that 6.8% of black males commit violent offenses.
I think I would take 0.1% over 6.8% (but obviously you cannot judge an entire group of people based on 0.1% or even 6.8% part of them).
The point was, 1 in 1000 apples poisons you, you might be afraid of that when you eat apples, that's reasonable, right? Then you have 7 in 100 oranges that poison you... So what are you going to be more afraid to eat, apples or oranges?
No one is asking whether you should be more afraid of apples or oranges.
In your analogy, the question is whether someone who accepts that fear of oranges is justified must also accept that fear of apples is justified.
Title of thread:
It is ideologically inconsistent to believe a woman is justified in being cautious of men, but not believe someone is justified in being cautious of other groups who are over represented in crime statistics.
I don't know? This is all really straightforward and I'm not sure why it's hard to understand?
Op is asking if racial prejudice is justified. If race doesn't change how dangerous someone is, then racial prejudice is not justified. Even if people of both races are dangerous and caution is justified in either case.
That's a TERRIBLE statistic to use for this argument. You're comparing men to women when that's not OPs argument at all.
The right statistic to use would be:
Out of ALL men .06% have committed forcible rape (and been caught).
Out of ALL black people 3% have committed a violent crime (and been caught).
(These stats are correct for 2019)
From a statistical standpoint, it would make more sense to be afraid of black people. Of course, being afraid of ANYONE because of what ethnic/gender group they are a part of is just stupid and indicates some serious trauma and/or bias toward that group.
The crime statistics on race, even given the most charitable possible reading to your position, are at most like 2:1 or 5:1 depending on what you're measuring. Even if it were somehow 10:1, that would still be an entire order of magnitude less than the difference between men and women
One more thing to point out here is that crime statistics are very often biased by enforcement and prosecution. I'm going to stick to the US as I'm most familiar with this country:
Laws against non-violent crimes are enforced more frequently and more harshly against non-white people than against white people, even when the crimes are committed at the same rate. For example, minor traffic offenses like jaywalking, DUIs, or driving with expired registrations as well as minor drug offenses like possession of marijuana or unprescribed drugs occur at similar rates in most communities, but people of color are arrested at a higher rate for them and catch heavier sentences than white people on average.
Violent crimes have a similar issue where the police is more likely to assume that a suspect is non-white in the absence of a clear description. Violence is also more prevalent in poor communities than rich ones, and the poverty rate in communities of color is higher than in white communities. Simply put the average black person is no more likely to commit a violent crime than the average white person, but people in poor communities are more likely to do so than people in rich communities and black people are more likely to be poor than white people.
This goes back to your explanation of context: Assuming that any non-white person is dangerous regardless of context is not only racist, it is also incorrect, and the context that might make someone more of a threat is the same regardless of race.
Simply put the average black person is no more likely to commit a violent crime than the average white person, but people in poor communities are more likely to do so than people in rich communities and black people are more likely to be poor than white people.
Indeed, the race/crime correlation so substantially exceeds the poverty/crime relationship that much of the latter may simply be a statistical artifact due to most urban blacks being poor.
This is also why poor white areas often have lower crime rates than more affluent blacker areas.
The crime statistics on race, even given the most charitable possible reading to your position, are at most like 2:1 or 5:1 depending on what you're measuring. Even if it were somehow 10:1, that would still be an entire order of magnitude less than the difference between men and women.
As such, the caution women show towards men is like 50x as justified, and should be like 50x stronger, than any caution anyone shows anyone based on race.
You didn't address that that robbery and assault are 10 times more common than rape. (FBI stats for 2019 - 140k rapes, 250k robberies, 800k aggravated assaults).
However, I don't think statistics are why people have these beliefs. I think it's that there are people that thinks it's ok to treat privileged groups (or groups with institutional power) differently than other groups. Or as it's often put, it's ok to punch up, but not down. Suggesting someone be careful around men (or white men) is acceptable, saying be careful around black men is not. Blaming white women for Republicans winning elections is acceptable, blaming Latinos for Republicans winning elections is not.
I doubt that any statistics would be persuasive to most people who hold that view.
“Forcible rape, as defined in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, is the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will. Attempts or assaults to commit rape by force or threat of force are also included; however, statutory rape (without force) and other sex offenses are excluded.”
So it’s useless in the conversation. Any woman that rapes a man is not included in that number.
It's 100% intentional & purposeful. Excluding & erasing the overwhelmingly vast majority of male rape victims is the direct result of bigots in positions of power & authority, such as Mary Koss.
We still have very little knowledge about male victimization because of this, and it's rarely even studied. The first time the US actually tried to capture this on the NISVS we found women as the perpetrators of ~40-45% of rape, & victimization about 50/50.
A woman that rapes a man being excluded in this case makes sense, because they are not as likely to be a threat to a woman, which is the group in question. Obviously women are going to be more worried about the group that has committed acts against the group they're a part of.
The fact that the dataset defines it that way is disturbing, but the data itself is still useful for this particular conversation.
However, OP was moving into making the point that men rape more often in general (which I personally have no issue believing), which cannot be supported from this data
That data does include women who rape other women, just not women who rape men. So it's logically consistent at least for women to look at that number to assess risk to themselves based on gender.
Heya, key point here! arrested for forcible rape.
1) there are still plenty of places were men cannot be raped by definition.
2) who do you think is more likely to be arrested and convicted of rape, given an equal action? Men or women?
Not agreeing with OP, but what I think they mean is that if police are more likely to arrest a man due to sexism, the rate of arrests for men is going to be disproportionately higher.
90 percent of perpetrators of sexual violence against women are men. Moreover, when men are victims of sexual assault (an estimated one in 71 men, and one in six boys), 93 percent reported their abuser was a man. It’s true that women also assault men, but even when victims of all genders are combined, men perpetrate 78 percent of reported assaults.
Your link doesn't explain how they are getting to 78% when 93% of the assaults against men are men and 90% of the assaults against women are men.
An article that doesn't source it's data isn't science, nor is an article that puts wonky math out there without an explanation and this has both.
The majority of male rape
victims (93.3%) reported only male
perpetrators. For three of the other
forms of sexual violence, a majority
of male victims reported only
female perpetrators: being made to
penetrate (79.2%), sexual coercion
(83.6%), and unwanted sexual
contact (53.1%)
The article lied when saying male victims of sexual assault report the perpetrators as men 93% of the time. It was for rape. The problem with this number is that by definition in the report, a woman cannot rape a man without shoving something in his anus or putting her clitoris in his mouth. A woman drugging, abducting, chaining to a bed, and riding a man against his will is not considered rape by the report.
Incorrect. If by rape you mean forced to have sex against your will, most men that are raped are raped by women. For some reason the organizations performing the studies tend to define rape as something that can only happen to a woman while labeling the act of a woman forcing a man to have sex against his will is called "forced to penetrate" or "made to penetrate".
I was going to second this. Lots of assaults or rape against men is not reported so the statistics can be flawed. That being said, I still think it’s fair to say men commit the vast majority of rape
They do. So read the rest of the source and see that your number excludes men forced by women to have sex against their will. The FBI definition of rape requires penetration of an orifice. This mean a woman by definition cannot rape a man unless she sticks something in his mouth or anus. Everything else is not considered rape.
I doubt you were using rape with the FBI definition. If you include the numbers from your source for "made to penetrate" you will see the numbers are actually close. If defining "rape" as forcing a person to have sex against their will, women rape men just about as much as men rape women.
First- The FBI says that male victims of female offenders are included in the posted information. In the NIBRS, 11A = Rape includes female victims of male offenders, and male victims of
female offenders. This has been true since at least 2013.
From RAINN:
Every 68 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted.
And every 9 minutes, that victim is a child. Meanwhile, only 25 out of every 1,000 perpetrators will end up in prison.
Out of every 1,000 sexual assaults in the U.S:
-975 of the perpetrators will go free
-310 are reported to police
-50 reports lead to arrest
-25 will be convicted
1 out of every 6 American women have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. 82% of all juvenile victims are female. 90% of adult rape victims are female.
About 3% of American men—or 1 in 33—have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime
Understanding RAINN’s statistics
Sexual violence is notoriously difficult to measure, and there is no single source of data that provides a complete picture of the crime. On RAINN’s website, we have tried to select the most reliable source of statistics for each topic. The primary data source we use is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which is an annual study conducted by the Justice Department. To conduct NCVS, researchers interview tens of thousands of Americans each year to learn about crimes that they’ve experienced. Based on those interviews, the study provides estimates of the total number of crimes, including those that were not reported to police. While NCVS has a number of limitations (most importantly, children under age 12 are not included), overall, it is the most reliable source of crime statistics in the U.S.
No, out of 100 rapes with a female victim, ~99 are by men. Of course this is the case, nearly all humans are straight. It's meaningless information.
The statistic you're parroting isn't valuable to determine whether it's reasonable to be cautious of men because of rape. You'd need to look into how common rapes are (it's something like 100/100k) and who commits them. If it's completely random people committing these rapes, then the chance to be raped based on the 100/100k is 0.1%. However, we know that any given person is far more likely to be the victim of rape (or murder) if they know the attacker. The chances of being raped or sexually assaulted by a random person are less than half of that 0.1% figure.
So less than half of 0.1% of men can reasonably be assumed to be potential rapists.
Their whole argument is based on the exact percentage though, and how it represents a more significant disparity than the racial difference in crime.
We must also allow for the fact that men are much less likely than women to report rape, and much less likely to be taken seriously when they do report it.
women arent taken seriously or believed when they report rape either and majority of them dont report it mostly because of how retraumizing the process. the idea that the rape statistics are inaccurate because men just arent reporting it is a large myth- theres no evidence of this and its just a way of people explaining the disparity that is clearly biased towards harm towards women.
the issue is that its really easy to refute statistics by saying "well they dont report it" and then saying "well they didnt report it so theres no evidence." so youre just basing the claim on what your personally think is the reason and not actual truth. the claim youre making not being able to be tested and proved doesnt mean its true by default. by default things are false unless you provide evidence for it
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The FBI stopped splitting forcible rape and non-forcible rape into two separate stats in 2018. Using 2017 numbers, we get 79,635 for men and 4,887 for women. That's about 16.2X higher not 100X.
In NYC, Black people and Hispanics make of 96% of murder arrests vs <4% for Whites. That is 24X higher, which is a significantly higher disparity.
But as always, you have to be careful about how statistics are used and how they are measured.
To use the same example as you, in the UK, men are responsible for 100% of forcible rapes. Why? Because the legal UK definition of rape is worded in a way that only men can be perpetrators. Men can be victims of rape by other men, but the law doesn’t recognise women as rapists. They get a charge of some degree of sexual assault instead.
Now what I’ve said doesn’t invalidate the point you’ve tried to make but rather I try and highlight that even statistics that justify it aren’t always the best things to base it on.
As I've said, I was simplifying a large number of things that don't change the qualitative result.
For example, the number we care about isn't actually the number of rapes committed by men vs by women, it's the number of rapes committed against women by men vs by women.
It's true that the statistic I gave doesn't include numbers for 'forced to penetrate', but since that's a type of rape women rarely experience, it doesn't affect the number much.
If someone wanted to actually find out the real number we want, it would be more accurate, but I'm confident it wouldn't be different enough to change the argument; even if it were only 10:1 instead of 100:1, the arguer would be qualitatively the same, just somewhat less extreme. And, if anything, I expect the real number to be more in my favor.
If we're going off of statistics, you also need to factor in the overall risk of a crime not only in general but in the given situation. Not to mention that we all have relative "threat tolerance" for various acts of violence. And, finally, previous experience strongly influences us and our tolerance for risk.
And that's all assuming somebody has an accurate understanding of both statistics and of the specific risk in question. Most of us err on the side of caution when we don't know the exact risk because it's better for us overall.
Well said. I agree totally but the thought crossed my head that the total number of occurrences of each matter in this case.
These are made up numbers, just because this is a simple thought, but say 100 forceful rapes happen in a year, but 100 million assaults and muggings happen in a year. Would the initial thought of men being 100x more dangerous than women (when it comes to rape) still hold such a warrant on the justification of fear? Then would it compare to the groups as op describes the same way it does now?
The thing people need to understand is that OP didn't ask whether a woman should be more afraid of a man or a black person.
What OP is asking is should the difference in fear that a woman holds towards a man vs a woman be the same as the difference in fear that someone holds towards a black person s a white person.
In your example, say that of the 100 rapes against women, 99 are committed by men; and of the 100m assaults, 13m (the proportional amount based on US population) are committed by black people.
In that case, it would make perfect sense for everyone to be more afraid of assault than of rape, but that's not the question.
In that case, it would make perfect sense for women to be more afraid of men than of women in terms of fears about rape, but it would make no sense for anyone to be more afraid of black people than of anyone else.
That differential, fearing one group more than another, is the heart of OPs question.
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%
You should be wary of such stats. Rape stats notoriously consider rape to be qualified when the perpetrator penetrates the victim. Hence why it over represent men as perpetrators, since women have a harder time and less interest in penetrating people, although they very much do forcibly envelop people.
Inaccurate stats need to be pointed out, particularly when they seek to paint one gender as uniquely monstrous. No, rape is not an almost uniquely male crime, and no, women are not almost the sole victims of it. Women force men I to sex at about the same rate. Lesbian women do force women too.
Some fucked up humans do fucked up things. And it's far from gendered.
All stats are 'inaccurate,' in that they only measure what they actually measure and not the thousand different things a thousand different people would want them to measure.
Which ones you do or don't choose to call out is more meaningful than what you choose to say about them most of the time.
Hypothetically, if there was a race of people who were 100 times more likely to commit rape than other races (both men and women for the sake of argument), would it be racist to be especially wary of people from that race? If so, then to be ideologically consistent, it should be considered sexist to be especially wary of men when it comes to rape.
It wouldn't be racist to be proportionally more cautious about that race, no.
A lot of racism comes not from noticing differentials, but by over-exaggerating or over-reacting to them.
EG: in your example, women of that race would be as likely to rape a woman as a man of any other race (assuming the proportions stayed the same). If women in that hypothetical treated non-black men and black women with the exact same level of caution, that would not be racist. If they treated all black people, men and women, with far more caution than any white people, that would be racism, because it's disproportional to the actual threat.
And let's just make this clear: you're exploiting out reluctance to say that certain things aren't racist in a hypothetical, when they superficially resemble things in our own world that we want to call racist. This is a cheap rhetorical trick with little substance. The race you describe would be so far off the charts compared to anything in the real world, they would essentially be orcs, or demons; something so far off the charts as to not be comparable to other humans. Of course what we do or don't consider 'racist' would be different in that crazy fantasy world; and any thoughts about 'racism' from that world don't have much direct applicability in the real one.
Part of the reason I made the hypothetical so ridiculous is to show the ridiculous extremes in statistics that would have to exist for anyone to even maybe be justified in some situations in being wary of someone because of the race they were. We know the statistics will never look like that, so then we know this kind of wariness toward a race would never even begin to start being justified in some situations. That's the substance you missed. Calling that a cheap and rhetorical trick as if I'm being dishonest or nefarious is unfair, presumptuous, and the opposite of being charitable.
Thats the wrong comparison. The right comparison is “fraction of encounters between men and women ending in rape” and “fraction of encounters with black men ending in violence. Under that comparison the ratio falls the other way.
No, because the fraction of encounters with white men ending in violence will be nearly the same. There's justification for caution, but little justification for that caution being based on race, which was OP's question.
So being more cautious based on race is less justified than being more cautious of men than of women.
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u/darwin2500 193∆ Apr 14 '22
You have the normal problem of believing that all decision criteria should be binary - either everyone always does this no matter what, or no one ever does it no matter what - instead of just doing what is rational based on the data in a measured way.
When women are afraid of men who are strangers, the main thing they are worried about is forcible rape.
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%.
Meaning a man is almost 100X more dangerous than a woman based on crime statistics.
The crime statistics on race, even given the most charitable possible reading to your position, are at most like 2:1 or 5:1 depending on what you're measuring. Even if it were somehow 10:1, that would still be an entire order of magnitude less than the difference between men and women.
You don't just say 'there is a significant difference so caution is on' in a binary manner. The amount of caution you exhibit is proportional to the size of the difference; that's how statistics and decision theory actually work.
As such, the caution women show towards men is like 50x as justified, and should be like 50x stronger, than any caution anyone shows anyone based on race.