The Supreme Court's Crucial Mistake About Sex Crime Statistics

The approximation is here: http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/ted_mail/0037.html

In that email, Ted Ts'o disputes the common knowledge that 1 in 4 women are raped. It does not, in my opinion, rise to the level of rape apology (though clearly, that is subjective), and attempts to explain that perhaps the "1 in 4 women are raped" statistic (that seems pervasive) is an exaggerated claim. His best piece of evidence, IMO, is that of the women cited in the statistic that results in the 1 in 4 claim, only 1 in 4 of the 1 in 4 even categorize their own reports as "rape". Whether that's right, wrong or indifferent is not mine to say, as I can see merit on both sides of the argument.

The article here, regarding recidivism of sexual offenders is doing the exact same thing as what Ted Ts'o attempts to do, which is to take a popular, but possibly wrong statistic, and give it more context which may render the original statistic moot.

The parallels are indeed close, which makes me glad that I did not initially downvote patzerhacker's comment without reading both articles. That said, I am not savvy to the nuances of either statistic, so I cannot claim to be authoritative on either, but as a non-interested, passive observer, it seems that Ts'o's branding as a rape apologist seems unfounded, from the information that was linked in the article, and Garrett's claims seem overblown, and predicated on the false dichotomy that because Ts'o doesn't believe A, he must believe B, which does not seem to be the case in his email.

There are some statements that I suspect make intuitive conclusions, and many of which I suspect are right (e.g., availability of birth control lowers the rate of abortions and unplanned pregnancies), but even those with which I agree are relegated to the portion of my mind that holds the "do not recite this" category of statistics.

I understand why people are so susceptible to it, and indeed, what makes the scientific method so damn hard to being with, is because isolation and controls in the real world are indeed very hard to come by, but I do wish that it was something we could do less.

Historically, victims of rape were more inclined to keep it to themselves than tell someone, because they were not believed; when they were believed nothing happened to the perpetrator; and sometimes the victims were made out to be deserving of the rape. This is not just true of women, but there are many stories of children who told their parents that people at their churches touched them and then the parents did not believe their own children (double victimization).

Lets take a single modern day accusation...Jameis Winston accused of rape by a freshman college girl. Just look online and you will find opinions on everything from: people assuming he is guilty because he is black she is white; people feeling its just another white girl making up lies about a successful black man; that the redneck town of Tallahassee was persecuting a poor black kid; that the good ol' boys club helped cover up a rape for the start football player; that she was just a drunk freshman slut or a gold digger; that he later didn't pay for crab legs from publix so he must be a rapist...it just goes on and on. The reality is there is one fact, no one knows what the hell happened, maybe even the two subjects don't know because of alcohol, but everyone has an opinion as to what happened instead of an honest conversation about prevention.

You generally won't have these types of controversies with genocide victims, because...well the victims are dead, and its hard to fake dead. Then again there are still many holocaust deniers around the world. Further, still there are many people who don't know there are active genocides taking place right now, and I'll tell you this I have talked to people about Darfur who claim that is not a genocide and I have to admit that makes me pretty damn uncomfortable.