Inspired, a month and a half on, by other posts by my co-conspirators on language usage, I’ve been thinking about how we in the movement(s) so often talk past each other, without always immediately realizing it. We use the same words to mean different things. To help clarify this issue, I present a list—not exhaustive—of phrases and concepts that, contrary to occasional usage if not popular opinion, are not, in fact, identical:
- Masculism ≠ misogyny
- Feminism ≠ misandry
- Masculism ≠ antifeminism
- “Male privilege” ≠ conspiracy by men
- “Patriarchy” ≠ conspiracy by men
- “Female privilege” ≠ conspiracy by women
- Male privilege exists (in some areas) ≠ female privilege doesn’t exist
- Female privilege exists (in some areas) ≠ male privilege doesn’t exist
- Greater equality ≠ sexism against men
- Sexism against men ≠ greater equality
- Gradual recession of male privilege ≠ matriarchy
- Reduction or elimination of an aspect of male privilege ≠ sexism against men
- Women have sexual autonomy ≠ women are in charge
- Rape ≠ false rape accusations
- Some men are raped ≠ no women are raped
- Some accusations are erroneous ≠ most (or even many) accusations are false
- Some accusations are false ≠ many accusations are false
- Some accusations are true ≠ all accusations are true
- Due process of law ≠ personally defaulting to doubting the accuser
- Most victims are female ≠ no victims are male
- Most victims are female ≠ no perpetrators are female
- Many perpetrators are men ≠ all (or even most) men are rapists
I’ve mingled “people say p when they mean q” and “when some people say p, other people hear q” and “people attack (defend) p in order to attack (defend) q” but they all somewhat overlap anyway. I welcome contributions in comments. I think.
aliarasthedaydreamer
Ami Angelwings
Hershele Ostropoler
Cheradenine
jlandrith
kaija24
2020
noahbrand
Cliff Pervocracy
ozymandias
Shora
sirgabe
figleaf
John Hawkins
No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz? 
As the main person who defends them in the comments I gotta say thanks for the last three.
That said I found the commas a bit hard to read. Maybe not-equals signs would make it easier?
masculinity, violence
masculinity, power
masculinity, dominance
femininity, weakness
femininity, subservient
something is masculine, that something is not feminine
something is feminine, that something is not masculine
something is a part of my masculinity/femininity, that something is part of all masculinities/femininities
treating the accused as a human, treating the accuser as subhuman
treating the accuser as a human, treating the accused as subhuman
I have experience as a(n) X therefore my views are valuable, I have experience as a(n) X therefore my views are more objective.
…I am such a geek, I read a(n) as “a of n”.
@BlackHumor: Just for you 🙂
YAAAY!
Can I have a pony too? 😀
@desipis:
Yes. Also, misandrist ≠ not misogynist and misogynist ≠ not misandrist. Saying “it’s sexist against both men and women!” like this is surprising or odd sets my teeth on edge almost as much as “opposite sex.”
The existence of my experiences does not disprove the existence of your experiences (and vice versa).
In discussions of X your input does not matter because you’re Y (where X = a characteristic like gender, race, etc… and Y = a subset of that X like male, gay, etc…).
Guilty by X Association (lumping all the Y’s of X together just because they are all Y’s) is generalizing bullsh!t.
I don’t know the code for the not equal sign so:
Non-feminist does not equal Anti-feminist, woman-hater, misogynist, etc…
Non-MRA does not equal Anti-MRA, man-hater, misandrist, etc…
“Most victims are female ≠ no victims are male”
Most victims are female == women need to carry a disproportionate burden of fear
Equal numbers of male and female victims == women don’t need to carry a disproportionate burden of fear
Arguments that support equal numbers of male and female victims =! misogyny
Arguments that support equal numbers of male and female victims == freedom for women from fear
Arguments that support most victims are female == support for a belief system that women are defined more by being acted upon then acting
Arguments that support most victims are female == support for traditionalist notions of gender
Either you don’t know the code for the DNE sign or you’re wrong. (except for number 3)
Relative numbers of victims mean nothing, and certainly not anything you’ve said. If 1 in 6 women is raped it doesn’t matter if all men are raped or no men; a random woman should still, if she’s rational, be fearing rape just as much no matter how many men are raped.
BlackHumor:
Hershele Ostropoler:
You missed a couple:
Reduction or elimination of an aspect of male privilege, sexism against men
Some accusations are erroneous, most (or even many) accusations are false
One I’d add to the list:
Criticism of feminism ≠ antifeminism
There are also a few in your list I’d take issue with.
Male privilege exists (in some areas) ≠ female privilege doesn’t exist
This of course is literally true. However discussions of male privilege as though female privilege didn’t exist, which take place against a dicoursive backdrop in which female privilege is routinely denied, are hugely problematic.
Some women are raped ≠ no men are raped
This is actually an inversion of the inequality in your list, and, like its antecedant, it is literally true. But if you talk about rape as though it were something that only happens to women, then you are perpetuating a culture in which a victim’s visibility depends upon their sex, i.e., a state of gender inequality.
Some accusations are false ≠ many accusations are false
Some accusations are true ≠ all accusations are true
Why the difference here?
I’d add
“respect ≠ accolades”
Is it me, or do we need separate words for earned achievement-based respect and baseline “you get it for being a person” respect? Watching Dear Woman, it seems that the former, when equated with the latter in a creepy enough manner, can be so, so much more creepy than straight-out assholishness.
@typhonblue:
Those are all empirical statements. Data showing the proportions of victims to be equal aren’t misogynist, but only if that’s actually the case. I don’t know if it is or not, most efforts to gather data either way have run in to some sort of problem, but there is an underlying reality that has to be taken into account. If women are victimized disproportionately, neither that fact (again, if it is factual) nor pointing it out is misandrist, although certain possible ways of dealing with the fact are.
TL;DR: Rape statistics aren’t subject to logical argument.
Moreover, I would say that if women are disproportionately affected, arguing that the numbers are equal is misogynist. And if the numbers are equal, arguing that women are disproportionately affected is misandrist.
And as BlackHumor said, a certain degree of fear and of precaution-taking is about absolute, not relative numbers.
@Tamen: Because I have not, thankfully, seen any claims that all rape accusations are false. But the statement “some accusations are false” doesn’t equal “all accusations are false” either.
I suppose I should have added:
Accusers should be believed initially outside the context of the justice system ≠ all accusations are true
(Also: Accusers should be believed initially outside the context of the justice system ≠ accused rapists aren’t entitled to a fair trial within the justice system)
@Daran: I don’t disagree with what you said in that comment; in fact, it’s what I was getting at, albeit in lossy, short-attention-span-friendly list format. But to expand:
If you want to attack the erasure of female privilege — I don’t really like the word “privilege” here, both because of its connotations and its history. If you want to attack the erasure of ways in which society gives women qua women an often invisible advantage, the way to do it is not to erase ways in which society gives men qua men an often invisible advantage; the claim that there are no such ways can be made, but it should be debated on its own merits, and if society does give men an advantage in some ways, that says nothing about whether society gives women an advantage in others.
I don’t think swapping out the words “men” and “women” makes the statement an inversion. Counterpart, perhaps. But to move on from the semantic arguments, again, men and women both suffer rape, but to attack someone saying “men are raped” as though they’re saying “women are never raped” is wrong, and to say “women are raped, ergo men are not raped” is also wrong.
So I’m not wholly clear on what I said here that you’re taking issue with.
@Hershele
“Rape statistics aren’t subject to logical argument.”
They most certainly are when people proclaim absolutes based on extremely shoddy data.
And if relative rates have no purpose in regards to prevention, why bother with them at all?
@BlackHumor
“If 1 in 6 women is raped it doesn’t matter if all men are raped or no men; a random woman should still, if she’s rational, be fearing rape just as much no matter how many men are raped.”
You’re proscribing how women should respond to rape advocacy.
Let me tell you how *I* responded to it. Until I realized that there was no solid evidence that men were less likely to be raped I carried a huge amount of fear; the moment it sunk in that it was a human problem and not a problem directed at me because I was female a weight lifted off me. It was a euphoric experience. I did not have to fear rape any more then a man did. And I didn’t have to tolerate the smug, puffed up chests of chivalrous men as they told me about all the dangers I had to face as a woman. The subtext being how much I *needed* them to save me.
Call me irrational if you like. Call me *hysterical* if you like.
I don’t really care about how the facts made you feel.
I know the theory of evolution made a lot of people feel crappy (because there’s historical evidence of people resisting the theory because they felt it was insulting to be related to apes). But that doesn’t matter one iota; it’s still true no matter how crappy it’s made people feel, and your feelings don’t supercede the truth. The universe has no obligation to change the facts to make you feel better.
Even if you’re right it’s not going to be because it makes you feel good, it’s going to be because men actually get raped as often as women. I’m not convinced that’s true; all the evidence I’ve seen save one piece says it’s not, and everyone I’ve seen arguing it has seemed to be arguing for personal reasons rather than because the evidence convinced them. But if it is it’s going to be because it corresponds to the facts and not because the universe has decided that your feelings are important to it.
—-
In fact, I’m going to go into philosophy here: if you make your happiness depend on certain things being true, or anything else you can’t control, you have lost it already. If you can only be unfraid if a statistic turns out in your favor you are not truly free from fear; you are just not afraid at the moment. But the universe could make you fearful again just by changing the statistic, and random chance is not a thing you want to depend on.
If you don’t want to fear men, you don’t have to fear them. Period. No matter what any statistic tells you.
@ BlackHumor
“The universe has no obligation to change the facts to make you feel better.”
Advocacy is a funny thing. It has verifiable effects on _people_. No, the ‘facts’ don’t need to be changed to make people feel better, but advocacy should be questioned based on its effect on society.
If you are advocating a position that is not factually supported(all of the studies that support non-parity in rape statistics are deeply methodologically flawed–for example severely undercounting female-on-male rape) you are promoting an unfounded culture of fear. You are shoving women into the fear-box unnecessarily.
Shoving women into the fear-box should be avoided at all costs. Shoving women into the fear-box is an unequivocal evil just like shoving women into literal legal boxes is an unequivocal evil.
It’s so fucking bad that it should be avoided unless absolutely and utterly necessary and based on the strictest standards of evidence.
None of the statistics you cite that you use to justify shoving women into the fear-box and slamming that lead down on their pleading faces in any way fulfills that strict standard of evidence. To me they are as flawed as all the ‘statistics’ that women’s wombs will atrophy if they’re educated.
Show me one statistic that:
1) Includes all forms of female-on-male rape in language that speaks to male victims.
2) Used male interviewers for all male interviewees.
3) Avoided the use of screening questions with criminal victimization language.
” I’m not convinced that’s true; all the evidence I’ve seen save one piece says it’s not, and everyone I’ve seen arguing it has seemed to be arguing for personal reasons rather than because the evidence convinced them.”
And you’re not arguing for personal reasons?
“If you don’t want to fear men, you don’t have to fear them. Period. No matter what any statistic tells you.”
Then what does that say about women who do fear men? Sounds like it’s entirely their own choice to do so.
@typhon: I will totally admit that the evidence for my side is uncertain, but I refuse to ignore the evidence until it’s so mountainous it can’t be ignored just because your feelings might get hurt.
If you feel like the evidence isn’t sufficient to draw a conclusion, that’s fine; I can respect that. But don’t accuse me of being evil just because I don’t agree.
Though everyone has biases and that includes me, I have sincerely tried to base my conclusion on the evidence. By my reading of it, three or four weak studies are more likely to be true than one weak study, even if they were really in conflict, which I don’t think they are.
Anything you do is your choice. The evidence does not, ultimately, make you afraid. You make you afraid, and whether or how you choose to factor the evidence into your fear is your choice.
I know men are much more likely to be assaulted by a stranger and I don’t react one bit to that. No attention to it, no preparation whatsoever. I’d rather have some guy actually mug me once than live in fear of being mugged all the time.
Oh, and I should add to that last paragraph:
And the opposite choice is totally valid too! But don’t pretend that the evidence forced you to make it.
@Blackhumor
“And the opposite choice is totally valid too! But don’t pretend that the evidence forced you to make it.”
Promotion of disproportionate fear for women compelled me to feel disproportionate fear.
It’s funny how you’ve suddenly found my agency, as a woman, in determining my level of fear when it comes to the stats commonly promoted by rape-advocacy but you don’t seem to be able to understand women’s agency in determining their level of fear in terms of men’s behaviors.
What’s the difference?
Women are entitled to their fear–and men have to accomodate that–when it comes to men’s behaviors in public. But women are not entitled to their fear–and rape advocates don’t have to accomodate that–when their fear is a result of promoting stats that are, in your own words, ‘uncertain.’
“I’d rather have some guy actually mug me once than live in fear of being mugged all the time.”
I agree with the sentiment. But I’ll also add that you aren’t subject to a continual campaign pointing out and promoting your unique vulnerability to being hurt by X so you don’t really know what it’s like to be the subject of a continual campaign pointing out and promoting your unique vulnerability to being hurt by X.
So… check your privilege, please.
Finally, what possible purpose does promoting the greater risk of women to rape (particularly when said risk is ‘uncertain’) have except causing women to live their lives in disproportionate fear of it?
I think you misunderstand TB’s objection. The studies which find higher rates of female victimisation are not merely “weak”. They are precisely the studies which place a thumb on the pan on the female side. Now if when I use a set of balancing scales, you see me with my thumb on the pan on the ostensibly heavier side, then you have no basis for concluding that this side really is heavier. Three or four such weighing, or three or four hundred, all with thumbs on the pan are no better than one.
Now you can legitimately argue that studies showing parity also leave a thumb in the pan. But if so, that leaves us with no credible evidence one way or the other, regarding the relative frequencies of male and female victimisation.
But if there is no credible evidence one way or the other, what accounts for the strongly-held beliefs of many on this topic, or even the weakly-held beliefs of those such as yourself? I suggest that there are two cognitive biases at work here. First is the tendency for people to believe what they’re told, especially when they’re told the same thing over and over and over again. Second is the tendency to believe that reality comports with ones own ideology.
So if your ideology is that women are oppressed by the patriarchy, and you hear over and over and over again that women are overwhelmingly the victims of rape, the two biases will align, and it will seem to you to be an established and unchallengeable fact. On the other hand, if you have the converse ideology that men are the oppressed class, as I think many MRAs do, but you still hear over and over that women are raped more, then the biases conflict and the psychological process is more complex. It will probably not occur to you initially to question what you’ve been told over and over and over again. But the more people of a similar ideology you associate with, the more likely it is that someone in the group will question it. Gradually you will begin to hear people questioning it, and perhaps gainsaying it, over and over and over again, and the effect of the orthodox repetition will become undermined.
Typhonblue:
Some years ago, I did a brief and thoroughly unscientific survey of the campaign literature of Take Back the Night. My conclusion is worth quoting:
@ Daran
“Now you can legitimately argue that studies showing parity also leave a thumb in the pan.”
I’d like to see those legitimate arguments that those studies overcount male victimization.
“On the other hand, if you have the converse ideology that men are the oppressed class,”
How about if you have the ideology that putting women in the fear-box is, in and of itself, an oppression?
@ Daran
“Several of the sites had the usual washing bill of dubious statistics, but the women’s risks were only ever compared with men’s when they were higher.”
And here’s the rub.
What possible purpose could this serve? This stuff is deliberately designed to generate disproportionate fear in women and putting women in the fear-box is a form of social control. Is there any purpose to the hyperinflation of women’s fears besides the social control of women?
I rarely believe misogyny is purposeful, but I’m seriously starting to wonder when it comes to this.
I’m not convinced that 2 is a significant problem. The National Violence Against Women Survey did half their male subjects with male interviewers and half with female. It described the difference between the two subsamples as “small”.
I would restate 3 as
3) avoids framing the issue in terms of criminal victimisation
Whether or not such framing takes place within the screening questions, the introductory rubric, or elsewhere in the survey instrument.
I’d add:
4) avoids framing the issue in terms of personal safety.
6) Offers both “abuse” and “conflict” as alternative framings
5) Surveys institutional residents as well as householders.
7) Uses a properly randomised representative sample.
The only one I can think of is that the “convenience” sample of students in the IDVS is likely to be biased toward social studies students, and that women who are to a greater or lesser degree angry at men may be overrepresented. These women may be more likely than the female population at large to abuse men.
Additionally, I suspect, that men are on average and with wide variation less harmed than women by objectively similar abuse. This certainly seems to be the case in respect of physical injury. I suspect it to be true of psychological injury, which is harder to quantify.
If my suspicions are correct then the near exclusive focus upon the frequency of abuse, and comparable disregard for its effects is a thumb on the pan, even if there is no overcounting.
@ Daran
“This certainly seems to be the case in respect of physical injury.”
According to another poster more recent research into DV has found more parity in injury rates. Certainly severe injury(minus fatalities) has parity.
“I suspect it to be true of psychological injury, which is harder to quantify.”
Why? I posted research a while back into ‘intimate terrorism’ endured by men that found them to have an extremely high rate of PTSD. Further other studies have found sexual abuse perpetrated by women to be either as or more harmful then sexual abuse perpetrated by men.
http://female-offenders.com/Safehouse/2010/09/toptenmythsaboutfemalesexoffenders.html
Women (and men) are always entitled to their feelings, and people shouldn’t make them unduly uncomfortable. But facts are worth more than your right to be a dick on a bus. The facts should always be protected at the expense of other people’s feelings; you should not be a dick on a bus because it hurts people’s feelings.
I don’t have to say that feelings are worthless to say that they’re not worth some things.
Okay.
I’m not actually saying anything about the presentation of the facts; maybe it is bad, I sincerenly don’t know. I’m just saying that the people who do that don’t have their facts wrong.
Finally, what possible purpose does promoting the greater risk of women to rape (particularly when said risk is ‘uncertain’) have except causing women to live their lives in disproportionate fear of it?
First, who said “promoting”?
But to your point, what’s the purpose of arguing any fact? You need an accurate picture of the universe to do anything useful. If you’re right, than resources for rape victims are massively misdistributed (even if I’m right they’re slightly misdistributed, but that’s another issue). If I’m right, your view of the facts would end up underfunding the majority of rape victims in order to underserve the minority. Either way, what we do is informed by the facts, and people informed by the wrong set of facts would take the wrong set of actions, which could really hurt rape victims.
—-
@Daran: I’d rather keep on whether claiming a higher rate of rape among women is bad, which is at least tangentially related to the thread, than derail into debating the evidence for higher rates of rape among women.
But very shortly: I maintain that the studies that show higher rates of rape among women are merely weak, not worthless. One of them certainly wouldn’t be enough to say anything, but since there are many of them with many different methodological flaws I don’t think that the flaws of any one of them are sufficient to deny the conclusion without significant amounts of counterevidence. And you don’t have significant amounts of counterevidence; you have one study, which has plenty of its own methodological flaws.
“Finally, what possible purpose does promoting the greater risk of women to rape (particularly when said risk is ‘uncertain’) have except causing women to live their lives in disproportionate fear of it?” should be in blockquote; I’m not sure why it’s not.
Oh there are many studies, alright. What there aren’t many of, is nationally representative surveys. The plethora of studies tend to refer to the same survey data over and over: The National Violence Against Women Survey and the National Crime Victimisation Survey, and occasionally similar surveys from other countries.
The NVAWS found that one in six women and one in thirty-three men had suffered a completed or attempted rape, but before I discuss these findings, let me begin with a personal anecdote. I was raped some years ago by my partner at the time. I have never mentioned this to anyone else before now, so remember folks, this is where you heard it first.
It was at her home. We had been drinking all evening and we were both quite drunk. I was really tired to went to bed. I can’t remember whether I fell asleep, and was woken by her, or if she came in while I was just drowsing, but come in she did. She lay on top of me, fondled me, took my penis in her mouth, all the time demanding sex, ignoring my repeated verbal objections. She wouldn’t let me get up; she wouldn’t stop. Eventually I gave up resisting, and instead concentrated upon getting an erection, not because I wanted sex, but by giving her what she wanted (vaginal sex), I would eventually be left alone.
Some people might dispute my characterisation of that event as rape, but reverse the genders, and I think the overwhelming number of feminists would agree that it was. More to the point, according to the operation definition used by the NVAWS, my female counterpart would be counted as having been raped. Specifically she would have answered yes to the following question from that survey:
Has a man or boy ever made you have sex by using force or threating to harm you pr someone close to you? Just so there is no mistake by sex we mean putting a penis in your vagina.
My bold, to emphaise the elements of the question that would have been met by the reversed gender version of my rape.
So that makes me one of the one in thirty three men who has suffered a completed or attemted rape, right? Wrong! It makes me one of the thirty-two in thirty-three who hasn’t. That question was asked only to female survey participants and there was no corresponding question asked to males. Moreover, none of the other questions, asked to survey participants of both sexes, could I have answered affirmatively. The survey instrument was incapable of recording the rape that happened to me.
Now you might be thinking that the gap between one in thirty-three and one in six is pretty big, and that victims of the kind of rape that happened to me would have to outnumber those of the kinds of rape against men that the instrument does record by a factor of more than five to invalidate the survey. You may also believe that the victims of the kind of rape that happened to me probably do not outnumber record recorded rapes by that factor. But what you believe is irrelevant. The validity of the finding that female rape victims outnumber male ones depends upon the proposition that unrecorded male rapes do not outnumber recorded ones five times. If that proposition is false, the finding is invalid. And there is no evidence that the proposition is true. How could there be, when the rapes at issue were never counted?
To summarize: The validity of the NVAWS’ finding that female rapes outnumber male depends upon the truth of a proposition which is not merely unproven, but for which there is no evidence whatsoever of its truth.
There’s another problem. The proposition can be restated as follows: unrecorded male rape are not more than about 80% of female rape. The finding can be restated as: recorded and unrecorded male rape are less than 100% of female rape. To summarise: The validity of the finding depends upon the truth of a proposition which not only unproven and evidence-free, but also not very different in character to the finding itself. In order to validate the finding, we must first assume the truth of something not very different from the finding itself. It almost begs the question.
Ah, bugger. I screwed up what I wanted to embolden. It should have been this:
Has a man or boy ever made you have sex by using force or threating to harm you or someone close to you? Just so there is no mistake by sex we mean putting a penis in your vagina.
@ Brian
“If I’m right, your view of the facts would end up underfunding the majority of rape victims in order to underserve the minority.”
Why in god’s name would it do that? You have services. You open these services to men and women, no mention of who gets raped more. You serve whomever calls or walks through the door regardless of gender. If more women walk in, more women get served; if more men walk in, more men get served.
The only issue I can see in terms of funding services is in training therapists regarding the problems unique to each gender. I can’t imagine that would be too difficult.
“Either way, what we do is informed by the facts, and people informed by the wrong set of facts would take the wrong set of actions, which could really hurt rape victims.”
And also non-rape victims who are subject to a campaign of fear; and non-rape victims who are subject to a campaign of demonization. And rape victims who are rendered invisible due to gendered advocacy.
If the advocacy is gender neutral you loose nothing. Nothing at all. No one looses. No one is underfunded because funding is determined based on need not gender. No one is made to feel more guilty or more fearful. No one is ignored.
It’s so practical, so simple and everyone wins.
@ Daran
Essentially what I’m hearing is that BlackHumor has zero proof of what he’s asserting if he bases it on the NVAWS. In fact all he’s relying on is assumption and belief.
In that context, the IDVS survey is an infinitely superior source.
To use a less charged example, letsay we wanted to know the relative population of blue jays versus, oh, barn swallows.
We have two studies. One that counted blue jays using the agreed upon description but only counted barn swallows when they were actually in a barn.
Then we have another study that counted both blue jays and barn swallows based on their universally agreed upon descriptions. But they only did it while looking out of college windows across the world.
Which is the better study for deciding upon the population of blue jays versus barn swallows? What if we wanted to find out which species was more endangered in order to fund recovery efforts?
Which would you choose?
That’s the NVAWS. What about the NCVS? The latter find significantly fewer rapes than the former, about half as many for females and less than a third of those happening to males, despite covering a larger age range – 12 and up for NCVS vs. 18 and up for NVAWS. If NVAWS is accurate, then NCVS undercounts both sexes, but men more than women. Why might that be? The question is particularly pertinant given that the survey does not suffer from the flaw discussed above. My rape would be counted.
There are several possible explanations of the general undercounting, but none of those discussed in that link explain why men should be particularly undercounted.
What I think is going on here is that the subjects are aware that they are taking part in a crime survey. They are therefore much less likely to consider an incident that happened t them to be responsive to the questions if they themselves don’t view it as a crime. I conjecture that, in a culture which defines rape and sexual assaults as crimes perpetrated by men against women, victims of incidents which do not match the stereotype are less likely to so construe it.
You might argue that this is an unproven conjecture, and you’d be right. I can’t prove that men are less likely to report than women. This however reverses the burden of proof: Either the NCVS massively undercounts rape of both sexes, or it does not. If it does not, then NVAWS massively overcounts, that is to say, subjects are reporting incidents in large numbers that simply didn’t happen. If that is the case, then NVAWS is outright invalid and your claim about multiple studies supporting your conclusion collapses, at least in respect of those that depend upon NVAWS data. A survey that massively undercounts, by contrast, can still have some validity – the incidents that it does record are incidents that really happened. If NCVS undercounts then the validity its finding that female rapes outnumber male rapes depends on the proposition that male rapes are not significantly more undercounted than female rapes. This proposition is unproven, unsupported by evidence, and as discussed above, there are arguments that it may be false.
No, I don’t agree. The main problems iwth IDVS are 1. unrepresentative convenience sample, 2. They only consider violence between intimates. 3. They don’t consider casual hookups.
It’s as if a group of farmers decide to survey their own properties (which have an unrepresentative number of barns) for barn swallows and blue jays. It would be fallacious to infer from their aggregated data that swallows of all species exceed jays of all species.
Typhonblue, responding to my conjecture that women suffer more harm from DV
Yes, but I’ve heard that women are harmed more over and over and over again. 🙂
Seriously now, I heard it from Strauss and Gelles. This is an argument from authority, but 1. They really are authorities. and 2. They do not appear to have ideological biases that cause them to minimise male victimisation.
I agree that it would be better to research this myself than rely on authority, but I don’t have time to research everything.
I don’t doubt this is true. Intimate terrorism isn’t however representative of all IPV.
NCVS finds less rape than NVAWS which in turn finds less than CTS2. I think both NCVS and NVAWS undercount rape of both sexes, NCVS for the reason given in my earlier comment, NVAWS for a similar reason: It framed the issue as one of personal safety. Incidents which did not leave the victim fearful are less likely to be reported.
CTS2 in my view undercounts the least, but its the relatively trivial incidents which it catches and the others miss. Its these, I contend, which are less harmful to men than women
http://female-offenders.com/Safehouse/2010/09/toptenmythsaboutfemalesexoffenders.html
I propose the following internet law: Any site which posits a list of claimed “Myths” together with their corresponding “facts” is presumptively bullshit.
From the site:
In the list of references are two different publications by Denov dating to 2004. The second is easily disposed of: It’s a study of the victims of child sexual above. It tells us nothing about the effects of violence between intimate partners.
The first is this book. Although the title does not stipulate that the women it discusses are specifically child sexual abusers, I can find nothing in the text that Google makes available relating to offenses against adults. Nor can I find anything in the somewhat rambling methodological discussion to tell me how the sample of victim interviewees was found, and how many there were. She does however state the following on pages 58-59:
…you know, that’s a good idea. I’m sorry for assuming, then.
BUT point still remains that who gets raped more has a large effect on who gets more resources for rape.
Which is why I’m not saying anything about advocacy at all! I agree that gender neutral advocacy is good regardless of who gets raped more. All I am saying is that women do (seem to) get raped more.
@Daran: Two things:
One, the US is not the only country that collects statistics on rape. For example, the British Home Office finds essentially the same ratios as the NCVS in its very NCVS-like survey. This is part of why I say I have three or four
studiessources of data backing me up.The other is that good data has been taken on sexual abuse in children and that also finds lower rates of rape for men, though not as much lower as the crime surveys find by far. One example from the 1 in 6 website which is definitely not behind a paywall found 16% of men and 25% of women had been abused as children Another one found 14% of men and 32% of women, so the numbers are consistent.
Two, I find it very improbable that 90% of men who have been raped don’t think of it as a crime, even assuming that there are no women who don’t think of their rape as a crime, which is demonstrably not true from the difference between the NVAWS data and the NCVS data. Counting them you have to assume that almost every single man who is raped doesn’t think of it as a crime. Even knowing that male rape isn’t taken anywhere close to as seriously as it ought to be, it still seems vastly improbable that such a massive majority of male survivors would think their rape wasn’t a rape.
While none of this directly measures the ratio of rapes between adult men and adult women, and the surveys that do have problems of their own, I think I can say the evidence is clearly pointing in one direction.
Little warning here: I have a post in moderation, and I did not see the post Daran says is in moderation right now before writing it. I don’t think that’s going to affect its validity but obviously I can’t know for certain until I see his post.
BlackHumor: From the 1-in-6 ssite you linked to:
That’s 84% who didn’t think they had been sexual abused. That is pretty close to 90% I’d say.
It also said:
Pingback: How to really solve the gender inequality problem - Page 4
I love this basically.
@typhonblue:
Men would almost certainly be underserved by that. You think Daran would have walked through the door? There are people who would erase his experience; how would he know he wouldn’t have encountered him after wlaking through the door?
I’m not sure we can have accurate numbers — men are less likely to disclose even anonymously; more prone, I think, to retroactively rewriting an incident in their minds so it was consensual after all; more likely to think that if the act was possible they must have wanted it; more vulnerable to a script that tells them they wanted it whatever they may have thought at the time.
Nonetheless, the actual incidence, likely reported on no survey but God’s, is whatever it is, and it is not misogyinist, or misandrist, or generally sexist, or egalitarian for that matter.
@ Herschel
“Men would almost certainly be underserved by that. You think Daran would have walked through the door?”
If the resources created gender-neutral advertising? Far more likely then what’s happening now.
“Nonetheless, the actual incidence, likely reported on no survey but God’s, is whatever it is, and it is not misogyinist, or misandrist, or generally sexist, or egalitarian for that matter.”
No, it isn’t. But presenting ‘uncertain’ statistics, or flawed statistics or massaging statistics to ‘show’ a greater risk to women is misogynistic.
@ Brian
” This is part of why I say I have three or four studies sources of data backing me up.”
You have four sources that don’t count barn swallows unless they’re in barns.
Thus they aren’t sources on the actual population of barn swallows.
Actually it’s worse then that.
The NVAWS doesn’t count barn swallows unless they’re in barns.
The NCVS(And the British crime survey) doesn’t count barn swallows unless they never leave a barn.
Neither of these two surveys actually count the number of barn swallows. So they can’t be used to compare the population of barn swallows to blue jays.
Continuing to use them to do so is dishonest.
@Tamen: And I already established that in order for men to be victimized just as much as women, nearly 95% would have to not report it once you consider all the women that don’t either. By the difference between the NVAWS and the NCVS about 66% of women don’t consider what happened to them a rape. (Around 300,000 rape victims for the NVAWS vs. around 100,000 for the NCVS)
So 85% is surprising but still not enough.
@typhon: To use your analogy, if I had five measures comparing barn swallows to blue jays, and I knew they were all flawed in various ways, but four of them said that there were more barn swallows, I think I could be fairly safe in saying that there are actually more barn swallows than blue jays. Not certain, of course, but sure enough that I could reasonably pick a conclusion.
If I have a survey that only counts large blue jays but most barn swallows, and a few surveys that only count birds I catch, and several surveys that only count bird chicks, I can’t say for certain that there are more barn swallows than blue jays because I haven’t actually counted a random sample directly. But I can still make a reasonable guess that there are more barn swallows than blue jays, because it’s more likely that there are actually more barn swallows than blue jays than it is that there is a large hidden segment of small adult blue jays that I can’t catch.
@ Blackhumor
“To use your analogy, if I had five measures comparing barn swallows to blue jays, and I knew they were all flawed in various ways, but four of them said that there were more barn swallows, I think I could be fairly safe in saying that there are actually more barn swallows than blue jays. Not certain, of course, but sure enough that I could reasonably pick a conclusion.”
You have two measures that support your position that blue jays out number barn swallows. Ones based on the NVAWS methodology and one based on the NCVS methodology.
The NVAWS methodology only counts barn swallows when they live in barns. The NCVS only counts barn swallows if they never leave a barn. Each of these surveys say that barn swallows are significantly smaller in population then blue jays.
Then you get another methodology that only counts barn swallows and blue jays outside of college windows. It finds that the populations are equal.
You’re saying we should dismiss it’s findings because it’s ‘unlikely that there is a large number of barn swallows that are uncounted when we don’t look for barn swallows outside of barns or dismiss them as barn swallows if they ever leave barns.’
Then you add in other surveys that find that barn swallows don’t particularly like barns and are rarely found in them. (84% of men sexually abused as children did not consider what happened to them to be abuse. Considering social norms that number is likely a base minimum when it comes to adult men sexually abused as adults disregarding their abuse as abuse. Much less being able to call it ‘criminal’.)
Thinking that studies that only count barn swallows in barns and when they never leave barns as accurate appraisals of the barn swallow population in light of all the contrary evidence is… starting to appear purposeful.
Sigh.
I don’t consider consensual sex with anyone 15 or older abuse.
I wonder how much abuse falls out of both studies if 15 and older statuatory rape is taken out?
@ BlackHumor
“@Tamen: And I already established that in order for men to be victimized just as much as women, nearly 95% would have to not report it once you consider all the women that don’t either. By the difference between the NVAWS and the NCVS about 66% of women don’t consider what happened to them a rape. (Around 300,000 rape victims for the NVAWS vs. around 100,000 for the NCVS)
So 85% is surprising but still not enough.”
You’re mixing up some stuff here.
First of all, what Tamen is talking about is that 85% of men who were sexually abused as children don’t count it as abuse.
If we’re talking about criminal surveys, men not only have to consider what happened to them abuse, they also have to consider it criminal.
Further, the statistic about how few men will report abuse is irrelevant for an instrument incapable of capturing it in the first place, as Daran points out.
The NVAWS does not capture female-on-male abuse to any reasonable extent. It simply doesn’t. It totally ignores barn swallows that are outside of barns.
In order to convince anyone that *that* doesn’t significantly undercount the number of barn swallows, you have to have evidence then when you count barn swallows *outside of barns* that additional counting doesn’t significantly increase the population of barn swallows.
The only evidence you can thus point to are surveys that have counted barn swallows inside and outside of barns. (The parity in sexual abuse found by the IDVS is not a novel statistic, all sources that use the CST2 find similar results.)
These surveys indicate that barn swallows are significantly undercounted when only counted in barns.
Just to recap.
Tamen comes through with a figure of 85% of men sexually abused as children not counting their abuse as abuse.
In order for a raped man to turn up on the NCVS, he would have to jump through the following hoops:
1) Consider himself sexually victimized when sexually victimized _as an adult_.
2) Consider himself criminally sexually victimized when sexually victimized _by a woman_.
3) Consider himself raped when raped by a woman.
If only 15% of men acknowledge sexual victimization when they are sexually victimized as children (and society is far more aware of the possibility of the sexual victimization of male children then male adults) then even less will acknowledge sexual victimization when they are sexually victimized as adults. And still fewer will acknowledge sexual victimization when they are sexually victimized by women. And perishingly few will acknowledge rape when they are raped by a woman.
maybe I haven’t read your blog enough to comment here but this one:
Due process of law ≠ personally defaulting to doubting the accuser
is incorrect. Under US law for for crimes, “innocent until proven guilty” is the standard, and can correctly be construed as “doubting the accuser.” However, how this standard tends to be applied in practice in the case of rape is f*d up and special because it tends to carry the more than the usual amount of bias that the crime didn’t happen at all, or that it was carried out with the assent of the accuser, which is usually a last ditch line of defense in less taboo crimes. It’s allowed precisely because it is playing by the rules.
Did you just mean that your assertion that due process of law is always in order not the same thing as picking a side?
@Arsepolitico
“However, how this standard tends to be applied in practice in the case of rape is f*d up and special because it tends to carry the more than the usual amount of bias that the crime didn’t happen at all, or that it was carried out with the assent of the accuser, which is usually a last ditch line of defense in less taboo crimes. ”
Confused here. The problem with rape is actually politically neutral. The problem is the evidence for rape is, in cases that don’t involve weapons, inebriation or extreme force, exactly the same as the evidence for consensual sex.
Muggings and murders are obviously different; stolen goods and bodies exist and are not generally considered evidence of consensual activities.
So the usual defence for rape can’t be ‘s/he didn’t do it(because in other crimes the fact that a crime occurred is pretty much inarguable)’ but has to be ‘it didn’t happen at all’ or ‘s/he consented.’ I mean I suppose it could be ‘s/he was raped but it wasn’t the defendant that did it.’ But then the rape itself would have to be seen as a given, which would require more proof then what’s consistent with consensual sex.
Could you explain how this situation can ever be otherwise?
@ BlackHumor
“Which is why I’m not saying anything about advocacy at all! I agree that gender neutral advocacy is good regardless of who gets raped more. All I am saying is that women do (seem to) get raped more.”
I missed this somehow. If you’re not using your position to advocate a non-gender neutral approach to rape advocacy then our argument is purely academic.
@ Blackhumor
Not to belabor the point but if your position is that we should promote a gender-neutral rape advocacy, then I’m not concerned about your personal beliefs regarding who is raped more.
I appreciate anyone who’s willing to say that the risks of terrorizing women and ignoring male victims is not worth the possible benefits of gendered rape advocacy. Even if they don’t believe our current knowledge supports a position of equity.
BlackHumor:
I doubt anyone disputes that. But perceptions about who gets raped more also has a large effect on who gets more resources for rape. If those perceptions mismatch reality, then the result is likely to be that resources are mismatched to need.
I can give a concrete example of this. A couple of years ago, I reviewed the survey data on war-related sexual violence in Liberia. Of the several surveys that had been undertaken, only one surveyed men. It was also the only one that used reasonably sound methodology. This survey found that men and women were victimised in about equal numbers.
Four years prior to that one, two other surveys were conducted under the auspicies of the World Health Organisation, for the express purpose of assessing the healthcare needs of victims. These only surveyed women. Why? Because they just assumed that the victims would be female.
If would be nice to believe that, despite only assessing the needs of female victims, despite apparently not even being aware of male ones, the ensuing service provision caters for male victims as well as it does female. It would be nice to believe, but I don’t think it very likely. Do you?
Nobody disputes that women seem to get raped more. The point at issue is why? Does this seem to be the case because it really is the case>? Or does it seem to be the case because there are systemic and systematic social processes which operate to erase male victimisation?
What Typhonblue and I are trying to show you is that there are indeed social processes which operate to erase male victimisation. In particular, these processes affect the surveys from which we obtain statistics. Responding, as you have been, that “there are lots of surveys” means nothing if these processes affect all of them.
I already acknowledged that “similar surveys from other countries” are “occasionally” referenced.
It’s hardly surprising that the British Crime Survey produces similar findings to its American counterpart, when they both use essentially the same methodogy. What happen is that a surveyer says to the subject: “I’m going to ask you about crimes you may have suffered during the past year … In the past twelve months has anyone hit you?” You or I would probably answer yes, if our partners had done sp, but we’re exceptional people who think about these issues a great deal. The average Bob or Jill in the street has probably never given these issues a moment’s thought in their lives. They will have in their minds a model of what a criminal assault is – perhaps being mugged or beaten up in the streets. It will probably never occur to either them that the clout they got from their partner the month before is responsive to the question. This is why surveys which frame the issue as “crime” record far less domestic violence that those that don’t use this framing.
But Bob and Jill are not similarly situated. Jill will have recieved societal messages telling her that the violence she suffered actually is a crime after all. The message for Bob is that domestic violence is violence against women. The terms are used interchangeably.
In short, Jill is told that the clout she got is a crime. Bob is told that it isn’t even violence. Then a surveyor comes along and asks them about their experiences of violent crime. Is it any wonder then, that Jill reports more than Bob?
This paper uses data from the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which uses a deeply flawed survey instrument. Among its many failings are that it asks both male and female subjects: “Apart from other sexual experiences you have already told us about, did a boy or group of boys about your own age ever force or threaten to harm you in order to have sexual contact”. This is a gateway question. If the subject answers yes, several followups are asked to ascertain the nature of the assault. There is no corresponding question about girls about the subject’s own age
This means in particular, that in heterosexual relationships between children about the same age, that is to say, in the majority of all dating relationships between teens, girls abused by their partners are counted, while boys abused by their partners are not. The only female perpetrated abuse that this instrument can detect is that pepetrated by adults or by children more than five years older than their victims.
This one uses the “unpublished” Traumatic Events Survey. I have not been able to locate an online copy. Do you think I should just trust that it doesn’t exhibit similar flaws to those of every other instrument except CTS2?
Indeed there will be many women who don’t think of what happened to them as a crime. It’s a well established finding, dating back to Koss’ survey in the 1980s that many women who have had experiences meeting the legal definition of rape did not label it so. After twenty or thirty years of being told over and over and over again, that rape and sexual assault are “violence against women”, is it really that implausible that the proportion of women so labeling their experiences might exceed the proportion of men by a factor of ten or more?
I’m not sure you’re really “getting” the psychological process involved. Consider the following imaginary dialog:
Jill: Have you ever stolen anything?
Bob: No.
Jill: Not even a pen or paper from work?
Bob: Well, yeah. Everyone does that.
Jill: But it’s still stealing, though. Isn’t it?
Bob: I guess so
In this dialog Bob “knows” that petty pilfering from ones employer is stealing, in that when asked “is petty pilfering stealing” he answers affirmative. But at the same time he doesn’t think of it as stealing. It’s not what he thinks of when asked about stealing.
Why is this so implausible in a culture which discusses “rape” as though it only happened to women, indeed one which uses the terms “rape” and “violence against women”, interchageably?
Yes it does. The evidence is that every survey that finds more female than male rape or sexual abuse has flaws which might cause it to significantly undercount male victimisation.
@typhonblue:
I will say that the risks of terrorizing women and ignoring male victims is not worth the possible benefits of gendered rape advocacy.
This is in case no one else will. And you know I’ve never felt the need to claim that each sex or sexual orientation is victimized to the same extent in all possible types of victimization.
Oh crap. “two other surveys” should have linked to this post.
Can a mod please fix my borked markup before approving my comment?
Typhonblue
The third is not true. They could answer the followup question afirmatively even if they didn’t label their experience rape:
Incidents involving forced or unwanted sexual acts are often difficult to talk about. Have you been forced or coerced to engage in unwanted sexual activity by—(a) Someone you didn’t know before—(b) A casual acquaintance—OR (c) Someone you know well?
Strictly speaking he doesn’t have to consider it a crime. He could conceivably answer “yes” even if he didn’t so consider it. But come on. It’s a crime survey. What do you think is more likely?
Suppose there is a group of teenagers and I want to know whether there are more girls than boys. If I had five measures comparing them and I know that they were all flawed in various ways, but four of them said that there were more girls than boys, do you think you could be fairly safe in saying that there were actually more girls than boys?
Suppose that the flaw in the first meant that it only counted children less than 5’6″ tall, and the second only counted those with hair longer than six inches. The third counted only those with a large hip to waist ratio,. the fourth only counted those whose heels were more than three inches. The fifth, the one that didn’t say that there were more girls, only counted those whose names were late in the alphabet.
All flawed, and all flawed in different ways. Do you still think your conclusion would be safe
Hershele Ostropoler (quoting Typhonblue)
Hershele Ostropoler
I can certainly understand not liking the word for reasons of connotations and history. I don’t like it myself for just such reasons. But isn’t a “way in which society gives [members of group X] qua [members of group X] an often invisible advantage” precisely how most feminist and anti-oppression treatments of the subject define the word “privilege”?
And isn’t eschewing the phrase “female privilege” which by that definition means precisely “the ways in which society gives women qua women an often invisible advantage” one of the methods some feminists use to erase them?
I agree of course, but I’m not sure how this relates to anything I have said.
I’ll happily concede that “inversion” might not be the right word. Exactly what is the right word here isn’t a discussion I’m particularly interested in.
I don’t actually think we do disagree about anything. it’s just that what you said didn’t quite come through to me, and possibly vice versa.
@Arsepolitico: If the only piece of information I have is “Pat has accused Sam of rape,” absent further evidence one way or the other I’m going to tend to believe Sam raped Pat. As long as I’m not a juror at Sam’s trial, that’s fine, or if it’s not fine, the reason it’s not fine is not directly about due process of law. “Sam hasn’t gone to trial yet, so you’re not allowed to assume Pat’s telling the truth” is an unsound argument. “Sam hasn’t gone to trial yet and so cannot be lawfully deprived of life, liberty, or property” is perfectly sound.
@Daran:
It is. And it’s too often used to beat people over the head: “you have privilege, your argument is irrelevant.” Furthermore this specialized meaning gets conflated with what the word means outside the ivory tower and raises people’s hackles. I’m sufficiently used to the jargon usage that I’m prone to forget that, and I’m hardly an academic. Call it feminist theory blogosphere privilege 🙂
So the word is a problem, but I think there’s something to the concept. And I can’t make anyone else stop using the word, but I can avoid using it if I’m trying to communicate. I’m not aschewing the phrase “female privilege,” I’m trying to avoid the word “privilege” entirely.
It’s the discussions of ways in which society bla bla bla advantage that assume it’s one-sided that the item you posted was against. Again, lossy format. “Male privilege exists (in some areas) ≠ female privilege doesn’t exist” is one of those for which people (wrongly) say the first as though it proves the second, and consequently people (wrongly) attack the first as though that constitutes an attack on the second.
As for the rest, I’m not refuting, I’m trying to agree. And doing a hell of a job of it, apparently.
@ Daran
“This one uses the “unpublished” Traumatic Events Survey. I have not been able to locate an online copy.”
Give me a cite and I’ll get it for you. If I can. 😉
Suppose you don’t have that information. Suppose instead you have the information that “Sam has accused Pat of making a false accusation”. If you have that information and no other, what do you believe?
Suppose you have both information. What then?
As best I can tell we agree completely on absolutely everything. This may be an internet first.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22Traumatic+Events+Survey%22+author%3Aelliott&btnG=Search&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=&as_vis=0
I should add that what I’m specifically interested in the the survey questionnaire.
@ Daran
Unfortunately the cite for the survey itself is:
Elliott, D. M. (1992). Traumatic Events Survey. Unpublished psychological test. Los Angeles: Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
An unpublished psychological test is rather unpromising.
“The two sexual abuse items are: (1) “Before the age of 18, did anyone 5 or more years older than you ever kiss or touch you in a sexual way or have you touch them in a sexual way,” and (2) “Before the age of 18, did anyone less than 5 years older than you use physical force to kiss or touch you in a sexual way, or force you to touch them in a sexual way?” Additional items assess how often these acts occurred, the subject’s age at first and last time it occurred, whether any event included oral/anal/vaginal penetration, total number of individuals who perpetrated these acts, whether any of these individuals were family members, and how upsetting the subject found the event to be at the time it occurred.”
From here: http://www.johnbriere.com/CAN%20csa%20cpa.pdf
Depending on the specific wording of the ‘oral/anal/vaginal penetration’ I imagine the survey respondents may have been given the strong impression that the survey instrument was intended to capture situations where they were penetrated rather then enveloped.
For example, did it state ‘were you orally/anally or vaginally penetrated’ or did it state ‘did someone force you into oral, anal or vaginal sex?’
By way of comparison the IDVS uses questions from the CST2 such as:
“57. I used threats to make my partner have oral or anal sex.
“58. My partner did this to me.”
Which can be found here: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID45-PR45.pdf
Considering that this is all based on someone’s unpublished survey, you may have to actually contact the people in question to find out the exact wording.
Incidentally, the fact that they are so coy with the methodology of the Trauma Events Survey is really… odd.
@ Daran
Is it usual for people to use a survey instrument that there is no reasonable way of accessing?
Not available on the internet ≠ no reasonable way of accessing. You could probably get a copy by emailing one of the researchers involved.
I just don’t have the time or inclination to do so.
@ Daran
“Not available on the internet ≠ no reasonable way of accessing.”
Actually, not being able to access it through academic databases is unreasonable. At least in the field I’m researching in.
Is it reasonable for sociologists to use an instrument that people can only access through them? Also, it sort of makes me suspicious that I can’t find a review _anywhere_ of this instrument that clearly lays out its methodology.
I’m not in the field but I have never seen this before in mine. Usually researchers take pains to either clearly lay out their methodology or point to another document that clearly lays it out.
Transparency and all that.
@Daran 12:01 (ton of posts to reply to, so in the interest of brevity I’m only going to reply to this one and hope it summarizes my argument):
The problem with that analogy is that you’ve specified flaws that bias all your measurements one way. But the flaws in the actual survey instrument are not (all) known to bias the measurements in the way we’re concerned about, and even when it seems likely that they do we’re not sure how much they bias it. You’re begging the question; we know all the studies are weak, but we don’t know they’re biased in a way that would cause them to report more women are raped.
But I would still, in your analogy, tend to believe that there are more girls in the class even though it’s flawed, for two reasons:
1) No survey in any field will ever be perfect and if we had to wait for perfect data before drawing a conclusion we wouldn’t be able to say anything at all.
2) It’s likely that at least one of those four studies does not have the bias we think they have. (For example, we know one of the child abuse surveys seems to be biased towards women… but as far as we can tell the other isn’t, and it reports even more of a difference.)
—-
@Typhon: Some leads on those statistics:
This study is linked in the original paper as an explanation of their measurement. I gather it’s homebrew (that is, the writer of the study wrote the measurement) which probably explains why it’s not published.
This study I also found on 1in6 gives statistics in the same range (from the abstract), but it’s behind a paywall and does not list which study it’s using to measure in the abstract. It might be useful to find out where these researchers get their data from.
And finally, this study is also referred to on 1in6 (as the cite for the 16% report rate) and seems generally relevant to our interests.
Thank you for aiding us with your magic paywall-hopping powers! 😀
I have the last study(I’ll get the others later).
That study was essentially divided into three parts. The first part was a general survey on the *rate* of child sexual abuse for both men and women. The second part was an examination of how often people with documented histories of child sexual abuse reported it as an adult. The third one was on construct validity.
The first part found the following:
“For all three, women reported higher rates than did men. More than one third of the women considered any of the experiences to have been sexual abuse, compared with 11% of the men.
Almost three times the percentage of women than men in the sample reported that before age 12 someone had bothered them or tried to have sex with them against their will (26% vs. 9%), and about four times more women than men reported having had sex with an older person (15% vs. 4%)”
The second part found this:
“Approximately 16% of men with documented cases of sexual abuse considered their early childhood experiences sexual abuse, compared with 64% of women with documented cases of sexual abuse.”
“More of the sexually abused women reported having had sex
with an older person (40%) than did physically abused or neglected
(15%) and control (8%) women. More than half of the
women with documented cases of sexual abuse (55%) reported
having had sex against their will, in contrast to significantly
fewer of the women with documented cases of physical abuse
or neglect (27%) and female controls (17%).”
“Men with documented cases of sexual abuse do not report a
higher incidence of these sexual experiences in childhood (42%)
than do physically abused or neglected (48%) or control (45%)
men.”
Specifically men with documented cases of sexual abuse reported 0.0% for sex with an older person; 5.8% of the men with documented cases of physical abuse or neglect reported sex with an older person; 2.6 of the control. Sex against their will was 15.8; 14.1; 3.0.
So men with documented histories of child sexual abuse weren’t ‘captured’ relative to men without a documented history of child sexual abuse by this instrument.
That strongly suggests that whatever instrument they used, it’s not capturing the extent of sexual abuse of men.
Your first two links link to the same source. Also I don’t think it’s a source for the Traumatic Events Survey but the Traumatic Symptom Inventory.
What? Darn, I got my tabs confused.
This should be the other one.
And the original study definitely seems to imply it’s got some kind of commentary on the TES.
Eeh, just realized my pronoun is ambiguous. The “it” in my third sentence is the study in Typhon 10:30, not the “this” in my second sentence.
I’m not understanding your point. Are you claiming that in addition to flaws which bias the surveys into underreporting male victimisation there are additional flaws which bias the survey into underreporting female victimisation? If so please point out these flaws
Or are you saying that in addition to flaws which bias the surveys into underreporting male victimisation, there are additional flaws which lead to general under- or overcounting, but do not discernibly bias the survey one way or another? If so, then so what? Surveys which are invadlid because of biasing flaws don’t suddenly become valid because they also have other flaws.
What do you mean, we don’t know? How can asking about male on female rape, but not asking about female on male rape not bias the the studies in this way?
I think that is the best example of the appeal to consequences fallacy I have ever seen.
It’s also a splendid example of a false dilemma. “Accepting the findings of biased instruments” and “waiting for perfect data” are not the only choices before. We could instead wait for a survey instrument without discernable biases. In fact, we don’t have to wait. We already have such an instrument. It’s called CTS2 and when its used it finds similar rates of male and female victimisation.
Why is that likely? If all the instruments we can examine have flaws which bias them in one direction, except one which gives markedly different results, is it not likely that other instruments which we can’t examine have similar flaws if they given similar results to the biased instruments?
And why should we should give greater weight to the possibility that among those whose intstruments we can’t see, their might be some which aren’t biased, than we do to certaintly that there are studies using instruments (CTS2) which we can see do not have biasing flaws.
At this point, I have to say, it really looks like you’re clutching at straws.
@Daran: I’m saying not all of the flaws in the studies are known to bias them towards underreporting male victimization. At least, not exclusively; I remain unconvinced that the gigantic difference in the NCVS can be entirely explained by men reporting rape less (though clearly men are underreporting more than women the extent they would have to be underreporting more is still implausible), and there are at least two of the child rape studies that as far as we know have no bias in that area at all.
And even in the ones you’ve pointed out, just because a question would intuitively seem to bias a survey doesn’t mean it actually will. To extend your analogy, if I counted the number of boys and girls under 5 feet tall, it would seem obvious that it would bias my results severely towards women, but actually it wouldn’t result in any kind of bias at all, at least not any that’s relevant to the question we’re asking.
To know for certain a question is biased, you need to ask it of a population with known properties and see if it causes a result significantly different from the true one. Since we can’t do that, we have to make do with speculation, which is certainly not more reliable than two replications of the same result.
The CTS2 has known biases, which Amp has already gone into in detail. Whether they affect what we’re talking about or not it’s just plain dishonest to claim that the CTS or any other survey has no biases at all.
There is no such thing as an instrument without a bias. If you can’t see them, that’s worse than if you can, because it doesn’t mean there are no flaws, it means you don’t know what they are.
You can’t ever have a survey that has no biases, because people are weird and language is imperfect and so however you ask the question it will affect the answer people give you. Tiny and difficult to suss out things can have pretty gigantic effects on a test of actual ability. Who knows what it could do if you’re trusting them not to lie?
So one study is always weak even if it seems perfect; replication by other methods and other researchers is required for a result to be solid enough to draw conclusions off of. Which means I’m not going to take the IDVS too seriously until somebody replicates the results somewhere without using the CTS2.
BlackHumor: Unless I’ve mistaken then Ampersand has critiqued CTS. CTS2 is a revised version of CTS and the revision address some of the critique against CTS. One would do well to not treat CTS and CTS2 as interchangable.
if I counted the number of boys and girls under 5 feet tall, it would seem obvious that it would bias my results severely towards women, but actually it wouldn’t result in any kind of bias at all, at least not any that’s relevant to the question we’re asking.
This doesn’t make any sense and the link you provided does not help your assertion. By bias I assume (since you didn’t specify it more clearly) that one of the gender make up more than 50% of the resultset.
The link you provided said this:
And by eyeballing the chart in that article the distribution of men and women who are 5″ (=1.52cm) is 1 in 6 is a man.
The only ways you can be right are when we’re talking about heights less than 4″8′ which is 143cm then you’re correct – there are approximately the same number of women and men at or below that height – or if we are talking about height is exactly 5″6.7′ then there is also approximately en equal number of men and women with that exact height.
Yeah dwarfism seems to affect men and women about equally, but above this height (yet below 5 feet) women are disproportionately represented for the US.
@ Daran
As far as I can tell the study “Accuracy of Adult Recollections of Childhood Victimization:
Part 2. Childhood Sexual Abuse” pretty much negates the methodology used in that study and any other with similar studies as reliable for capturing male victimization. It’s right there in the study. Unless I’m deeply mistaken.
Therefore any studies based on the same methodology cannot be relied upon to capture male victimization to any extent.
In their conclusion they state: “For researchers, the underreporting of childhood sexual abuse poses a serious concern for epidemiological research, especially that which involves a large proportion of men.”
We thus have to remove those ones from the pool of studies that we’re using to determine if males or females are more likely to be raped.
If anyone wants the PDF I can email it to them.
The more I read the more it looks like the CST2 is a far more reliable instrument. Not only does it capture female victimization that isn’t captured by other instruments, it also captures male victimization that isn’t captured by other instruments.
Finally, if feminists are going to repudiate the CST2 then they better stop referring to the rates of sexual and domestic abuse found by the CST2.
@ Brian
“To know for certain a question is biased, you need to ask it of a population with known properties and see if it causes a result significantly different from the true one. Since we can’t do that, we have to make do with speculation, which is certainly not more reliable than two replications of the same result.”
Have you missed my posts on “Accuracy of Adult Recollections of Childhood Victimization:
Part 2. Childhood Sexual Abuse”? The study did exactly what you said and concludes that any survey based on similar methodology (apparently all of the ones you’re using to ‘prove’ that men are abused less then women) are not reliable for capturing male abuse. It’s a cautious conclusion, but also inescapable.
“Which means I’m not going to take the IDVS too seriously until somebody replicates the results somewhere without using the CTS2.”
Amp has only dealt with the CTS. Not the CTS2, which directly addresses many of the problems he had with the CTS.
Even if we allow that a blogger can present a comprehensive review of said instrument, he hasn’t actually done so.
“Which means I’m not going to take the IDVS too seriously until somebody replicates the results somewhere without using the CTS2.”
They have replicated similar results with every population studied by the CTS2(that included the questions on sexual abuse.)
@ Brian
Also, the NVAWS used the CST2 methodology except that they _omitted_ several categories of female-on-male sexual abuse. As Daran pointed out on one of his posts–can’t remember where–this is an extremely unusual practice. To arbitrarily change an established instrument without explaining why.
Therefore if you have a problem with the CST2 then you must also have a problem with the NVAWS.
That leaves us with… nothing. Absolutely zero evidence that men or women are raped more.
@Tamen:
Oh, it does fix many of the problems, but not all of them. Including the most serious problem, that it’s not true that someone who hits their partner a lot is necessarily what we generally mean by abusive (a couple that brawls often is unhealthy but they’re not trying to control each other; furthermore there are some rare and not-so-rare situations where you could injure your partner without it saying anything bad about the relationship), and it’s certainly not true that someone who never hits their partner is always not abusive. So asking about acts of violence as a way to measure abuse already makes the CTS and derivatives imperfect.
Before I said that I actually went and added the numbers in the chart for people under 150 cm tall. Go add them yourself if you don’t believe me; women do have an edge, but it’s very slight (53/47).
You are correct that it’s only once you go down to the next bracket that it gets exactly even; the reason I picked 5′ and not 4’8″ is that I wanted a clean number.
That obviously doesn’t count; it might just be a problem with the CTS2. You need to answer the same question using a different instrument to really be sure your replication is solid.
If I asked people “have you stopped beating your wife?” (or husband as appropriate), and didn’t allow answers other than yes or no, I could get a 100% spouse abuse rate no matter what sample I tested or how many times I did it.
@BlackHumor
“Asking about acts of violence as a way to measure abuse already makes the CTS and derivatives imperfect.”
How does it make it ‘imperfect’ when it comes to sexual abuse? Are you going to argue that people rape *in defence*?
Or that a rape *in defence* somehow doesn’t count as rape?
“under 150 cm tall”
150 cm is 4’11”, because 1 inch is 2.54 cm (149.86 cm to be exact).
Also, which instrument measures psychological violence BlackHumor?
@BlackHumor:
I agree with this statement, except insofar as the assertion about the CTS2 goes. IIRC the CTS2 (and I believe even the original CTS) does include verbal abuse, etc. in its questions. Of course, how various studies are using the CTS2 is another question, since they will make their own determinations about what questions actually constitute violence. But that is not a problem with the instrument itself.
Also, regarding one of Amp’s critiques that I find particularly disingenuous, and that you seemed to allude to: the CTS includes a preface to the questionnaire explaining that it is about relationship conflict. Thus it is likely that most reasonable people would not consider playful/accidental hitting, consensual BDSM, etc. when answering the survey.
You wouldn’t consider this mutually abusive? Or is it that per the definition of abuse you’re using, mutual abuse doesn’t exist (which is fine, but good to know).
BlackHumor: I stand corrected on the gender ratio being 53/47 based on the data-table presented in the article you linked to for people under 5″. I was fooled by the left tail of the chart. However, I now note that the site you linked to didn’t give any source for the height data and they even used this wording about the table data:
Which kind of made me wonder if the data is just made up or extrapolated. This made me want to look up better data and what I found was the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which should be an as reputable source as one can get. The total sampel size here was 10149.
I downloaded the data and did the queries and I got the following results for adults (18 and over) who were below 150cm:
Women: 217
Men: 4
If I however include children we get:
Women: 1157
Men: 1041
Which makes it very clear that the article you linked to also includes children in it’s datasets. If you and that article had made it clear that it included children from infants and upwards as well I certainly would be less surprised than I were to see the 53/47 ratio since boys and girls are about neck-to-neck in height until puberty with the girls on average hiting puberty a bit earlier than boys and the fact that the majority of people under 150cm are younger than 18.
And then on to the CTS2:
Since you don’t trust the CTS2 studies which show close to parity between genders when it comes to sexual coercive behaviour towards one partner as well as showing close to parity between genders when it comes to physical violence against one partner I must assume that the objections you raise against CTS2 could explain that parity which you don’t believe exist. Hence:
Are you here voicing the hypothesis that women are much more likely than men to injure their partner without it saying anything bad about the relationship?
Considering that some of these studies found that unidirectional violence were slightly more often initiated by women I find this assertion quite troublesome. Can you give me concrete examples (outside BDSM) where one part is hitting the other part a lot (and the other part is not using violence back) and it’s not abuse?
Well, they for sure aren’t physically abusive. Are your hypothesis that women are much less able or willing to exert psychological violence than men? CTS2 by the way also measures psychological agressions.
I also just have to ask: How would you then measure abuse without asking about acts of violence?
On the other hand, as Typhonblue has pointed out, none of the things you argue are weaknesses in CTS2 seems to be related when it comes to coercive sex because in my book using physical force to force one’s partner to have sex they don’t want to have is rape regardless. And using psychologically coercive methods to get sex the partner doesn’t want can range from rape (threats) to unethical (nagging and shaming). Or do you have another standard?