Rape Statistics

Following a depressing discussion with one of your colleagues, I thought I'd do a quick check of the numbers.  Needless to say, trigger warning if that's an issue for you.



According to the CDC's 2010 survey, 1 in 5 women have been raped: http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_FactSheet-a.pdf

I've heard 1 in 3, but not with a citation (that may include sexual harassment and other crimes that don't meet the CDC's definition of rape).  I've been finding claims that 1 in 4 women in college are sexually assaulted --- but, frankly, none that are backed up with up-to-date cites.

The article mentioning prison rapes that started the tangent from the death penalty discussion was Glazek's "Raise the Crime Rate."  In the article, he claims that, thanks to rape rates in prisons, compared with our mass incarceration practices, the US may be the only country to have more male rapes than female.

Tracking down his numbers proved to be a major PITA.  As near as I can tell, after digging around in the DOJ's press releases looking for his uncited sources (ARGH), he's misleadingly using the phrase "in January" in a January 2012 article to refer to data that came out last January (see Table 1), as discussed in this New York Review of Books article.  I spent part of the afternoon thinking he was an idiot, but it later occurred to me that perhaps n+1 accepted his article in December 2011, and only published it in 2012, and so the confusion is the result of a careless editor instead.

However, as this quite solid blog post points out (I have no idea who the blogger is, but her analysis seems to be good), his numbers are pretty questionable.  The 2008 National Crime Victimization Survey gives an estimate of 203,830 rapes nationwide (as I understand it, this data excludes prison numbers - but I wouldn't be absolutely confident of that without knowing a bit more about the model they use for estimation - the survey wasn't given out in prisons).  If you do the quick back-of-the-envelope on the 1.3:0.3 per 1000 rates of rape for men and women, that should be about 38,458 men and 165,371 women.  Note, though, that the 2010 survey I linked above estimates 1.3 million rapes in 2010.  Given that I doubt rape has so massively increased from 2008 to 2010, I suspect there must be some significant change in the methodology, but I'm not sure what it is and haven't run it down yet - if anyone knows, I'd be obliged.

As the blogger points out, you can't just compare even the 2008 numbers straight up.  The 216,600 from the prisons report includes "willing sex with staff," which is a bad thing but not rape as defined for the general population, so it's apples-to-oranges.  If you exclude that, you've got 150,900 left.  If you just multiply that by the ratio of men to women in prison (93.6% to 6.4% in 2012, and I'm about to tell you that that doesn't matter much and it's late so don't make me go find the historical data, please), you get about 141,242 male rapes in prison in 2008.  But --- and again hat tip to our blogger --- that assumes that rape rates are the same for male and female prisoners, which probably isn't the case.  I actually had a chart of rates in front of me at one point this afternoon but I stupidly didn't bookmark it and now my eyes are going crossed looking at this.  And anyway, indicates that the US probably doesn't have more rapes of men than of women, but even if my quick-and-dirty numbers are better than Glazek's quick-and-dirty numbers, it probably still supports his argument that the numbers end up so close almost entirely on the back of the prison numbers --- something is seriously wrong there.  I don't know if it supports his view that we should execute more people and castrate rapists instead of imprisoning them (in part, I think he's swallowing too much of the party line by assuming that mass incarceration has been the major driver of the lowered crime rate, as opposed to smarter violence suppression strategies like Ceasefire and the Boston Gun Project, and the shift from crack cocaine to heroin, but I'm not going to dig for numbers on that stuff right now), but it's hard to not come away thinking that something needs to get fixed.

All of this is me basically writing this down because what was supposed to be, "let me look up those numbers quick," turned into a long slog trying to track down reliable data.  Never take numbers anyone quotes you at face value!  And check mine!