Passion guided by reason on The Commentary

[Passion guided by reason]

PgbR> "(For lifetime calcs, you probably can't make such generous assumptions, or you might wind up calculating that half of men commit rape in their lifetime)."

A similarly generous assumption (in line with your other calculations) would be that rape perp numbers are dominated by non-repeated rapes (ie: most don't reoffend), so @ 1% per year, the lifetime total would be in the range of half of all men, more or less.

If you scaled it back to guess that the lifetime average was 2, that could wind up calculating that 1/4 of all men were rapists sometime in their life - as compared to 1/6 of women being sexually assaulted in a lifetime. I don't think that's a good estimate.

Whatever multiplier you use to convert annual to lifetime, the lifetime figure is the most relevant to end your calculation with, not the per-annual estimate.

But I think the 1%/yr figure is likely substantially inflated to begin with, so any lifetime totals calculated atop that would be suspect as well. I understand the rhetorical reason to use generous assumptions, *if* one can show that EVEN IN THAT EXTREME CASE the final number is still tiny - but when calculated for a lifetime it's not so tiny and so could lead to your argument backfiring on you, so a more realistic annual rate is needed.

Churn doesn't come into this.

(Aside: as a confounding issue, some commenters use "sexual assault" as if it was synonymous with rape, but many states distinguish that as a separate offence with a far broader definition, to include even such things as briefly but deliberately brushing against a clothed female breast. They have different laws for sexual assault and for rape. So stats about prevalence need to be very carefully parsed for the definitions being used. Activists will use this confusion to distort people's understanding. Do you know which your 1%/year is attempting to estimate? ie: which crime's stats did you use as a base?)

The CDC reports:

> "Sexual violence is common. Over half of women and almost 1 in 3 men have experienced sexual violence involving physical contact during their lifetimes. One in 4 women and about 1 in 26 men have experienced completed or attempted rape. About 1 in 9 men were made to penetrate someone during his lifetime. Additionally, 1 in 3 women and about 1 in 9 men experienced sexual harassment in a public place."

How strict or loose do you think they needed to make the definitions to get these numbers?

[Steve QJ]

“ A similarly generous assumption (in line with your other calculations) would be that rape perp numbers are dominated by non-repeated rapes (ie: most don't reoffend), so @ 1% per year, the lifetime total would be in the range of half of all men, more or less.”

Right, that’s what I was saying. In order to just keep adding 1% every year, you first of all need to keep assuming that there are no repeat offenders over the course of 50 years. This is a poor enough assumption over one year (I made it in order to leave no room for quibbles about my final figure), but over 50 years it’s ridiculous.

And the 1%/yr isn’t *likely* dramatically inflated, it’s *deliberately* and clearly inflated, by me, to make a point. You can see the inflations I make at each point in the calculation. So if making a lifetime calculation, you can’t start from that dramatically inflated point (the figures came from Statista.com which seems to estimate above FBI figures based on past years).

But yes, churn comes into this because the category of man isn’t static. So even if you *were* trying to make a lifetime calculation from that inflated point, you couldn’t get there by simply multiplying by the number of years, right? Otherwise, if we found that 2% of men committed rape in a given year, and tried to calculate over 50 years, wed discover a serious problem.

And at the very minimum, you’d need to start with a (still dramatically inflated) figure of 0.27% of men per year.