Microblog Memes

::: 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.

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