Comment on Fr*nce
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 week agobut a woman and a man do not have equal chances of experiencing sexual assault.
On what evidence do you base this claim? I was under the impression that the actual rates are similar, but male-victims very rarely report SA.
kreel@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Statistics - National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC) share.google/s8pcZdJvkkp4HGsDZ
Looks like overall it’s about 2:1. And more to the original point, no more than 10% of claims are potentially falsified (or as little as 2%). I’ll admit, I didn’t have this data originally.
Which is to say - the harm to falsely accused men and the harm to legitimately raped or harassed women are on totally different scales.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 week ago
I’m not comparing the two. I’m addressing only the point that I quoted above:
Your link says 1 in 5 women (20%) experience rape, and 24.8% of men experience “sexual violence”. That seems to indicate that men and women experience SA at about the same rate. This is consistent with my understanding.
Your “2:1” claim seems to arise from “Nationwide, 81% of women and 43% of men reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or assault in their lifetime.”
I will focus on the word “reported”: It is my understanding that male victims of SA report their assault at much lower rates than female victims.
I would note that your overall thesis does not seem to rely on this particular point. You can abandon this point without detracting from your main argument.
kreel@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Agreed - overall this isn’t my point, but it’s a good thing to get calibrated.
Looking deeper, it seems like the stats vary along with specific criteria.
Another source: Sexual Violence Statistics - RAINN share.google/0MKSuQVWw2PWiZHhX
This puts the ratio at 1:10.
I think it’s probably true that men report fewer incidents, but the ratios are pretty far apart for rape. This website also makes the point that up to 30% of sexual assault for males occurs in childhood. Good stats for underreporting are hard to obtain but it seems like it’s something like 50% unreported for men. Maybe a bit lower for women. It just seems like a stretch to say that it’s equally likely for both genders. You’d have to go to extreme differences between the rates of reporting (3-5x).