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Posted by on Jan 8, 2013 in Damned Lies and Statistics | 2 comments

Another disturbing infographic


The above graphic shows what 120 rapists look like when distributed quasi-randomly among 1,882 male respondents from a mid-sized urban commuter university. The data are taken from this 2002 paper by Lisak and Miller.

These are self-reported rapists, who responded in the affirmative to one of the following four questions:

  1. Have you ever been in a situation where you tried, but for various reasons did not succeed, in having sexual intercourse with an adult by using or threatening to use physical force (twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.) if they did not cooperate?
  2. Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did no want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances (e.g., removing their clothes)?
  3. Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm; holding them down, etc.) if they didn’t cooperate?
  4. Have you ever had oral sex with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm; holding them down, etc.) if they didn’t cooperate?

Of the 120 total self-admitted rapists or would-be rapists, 21 admitted attempted rape (Q1), 97 admitted to rape by intoxication (Q2), 11 admitted to rape by force or threats (Q3), and 12 admitted to oral sex by force or threats (Q4).

It’s probably fair to assume that the actual rate of rapists (including would-be rapists) in the general population is somewhat higher than Lisak and Miller found here, because they were relying on men to honestly self-report criminal behavior  given assurance of anonymity. Probably some respondents were not only serial rapists but also accomplished liars, and thereby go undetected not only by the criminal justice system but also by academic researchers. So the roughly 1-in-16 figure should be thought of as a lower bound.

Probably the most useful finding here is that alcohol and drugs are by far the most favored means of vitiating consent among those who admit to attempting or committing rape, and that this is part of a larger pattern of victimization wherein victims are unlikely to report and prosecutors are unlikely to prosecute. See page 81 of the report for some practical policy changes which should help the justice system respond to such so-called “difficult to prosecute” cases.

 

 

ETA: Inspired by this original graphic, but of course you’ve probably already guessed that.

 

  • rg57

    Thank you for drawing our attention to the study.

    I see these additional things in the study, and the diagram:

    (1) Rapists need to turn themselves in. So we should say that. Most won’t, but maybe a handful will do it. Stranger things have happened.

    (2) People who are raped need to report it a lot more often (like always), if not for their own benefit, then for the next person. There isn’t anyone else who can do this every time. At minimum there will be a record, but ideally their rapist will be in jail or prison, where hopefully the raping can be reduced or stopped. Perhaps once we get pot-heads out of the courts and prisons, we’ll have room for rapists.

    (3) These researchers went out of their way to exclude female rapists from the study for no apparent reason, presenting rape as something that only men do (even though their questions were genderless), without even regarding this as a limitation of a study of “rapists”. Trustworthy researchers would have had to note this omission, even if they regarded it as justifiable, and the fact that it was not even mentioned is worrying.

    (4) It’s easy to manipulate graphics to send a subtle messages that either differ from the study or emphasize its flaws.

    The first different message (light-red/translucent men vs dark-red/opaque men) is that all men are just “other” rapists waiting to happen, merely rapist algorithms that haven’t terminated in a rape yet. But the study was not longitudinal, nor did it appear to ask participants to guess about the future. This study provides no data to suggest men are rapists waiting to happen. Based on this, I’d have chosen something like green, where there is now pink, and called them what they are: “non-rapists”.

    A second different message is that there are somewhat more admitted rapists than there are. Representing 6.4% by distributing it throughout 100% makes it look anywhere from 10-20% at a glance. While this tells us something about illusion and the origins of prejudice, it obfuscates the data.

    A third message, this time emphasizing a flaw, was hinted at in the report and in this blog post as well, but not followed up on, so the numbers are absent from the report and chart. It noted that the men who didn’t indicate rape might be lying, and assumed all the admitted rapists were telling the truth, without going into the math. But if you trust what they say about their methods, and assuming I did the right math for them, a more accurate chart might use the pink for the 230 or so men (12.2% of 1882) they suspect of lying about not being rapists, and perhaps a green for the 1532 men they believe are honestly not rapists.

    A final message also emphasizes a flaw, and that is simply omitting the fact that women also rape. The study didn’t tell us how many rape, nor how often. Regardless of the numbers, this is necessary information. In the meantime, I suppose I’d just represent that with a question mark of size equal to the rest of the chart.

    • http://www.skepticink.com/backgroundprobability/ Damion Reinhardt

      It did say how many and how often, in fact, there was actually a histogram breaking out how many and how often on page 79, entitled “Figure 1. Number of rapists who committed single and multiple numbers of rape.” Are you sure that you read the correct study?