| abstract
| - The linux.conf.au 2011 conference had a chat mailing list for attendees. This list had considerable discussion of the Sexual and violent references and images in LCA 2011 Keynote incident. Some of this discussion moved into general questioning of rape statistics and current definitions of rape. The context for use of rape statistics was that Jacinta Richardson used published statistics to estimate the proportion of LCA attendees who might be sexual assault survivors and perhaps thus particularly likely to be triggered by Mark Pesce’s use of violent and sexual imagery in his slides. ([1], later reposted on the Geek Feminism blog as Because sexual assault is more common than you think). Theodore Ts'o made statements (full email archived here) in which he argued that categorising statutory rape, child abuse, intimate partner abuse or rape without physical force with stranger rape of adult women with physical force is “hyperbolic and misleading”: If you look at percentage of women reporting rape since age 18 (taking out the child abuse and statutory rape cases, which they also treat in detail), it becomes 1 in 10 (9.6%), and of those over 61.9% were at the hands of their intimate partner, as opposed to an acquaintance or stranger… in 66.9% of those cases, the perpetrator did not threaten to harm or kill the victim. (Which makes it no less a crime, of course, but people may have images of rape which involves a other physical injuries, by a stranger, in some dark and deserted place. The statistics simply don't bear that out.)… over half of [a report’s] cases were ones where undergraduates were plied with alcohol, and did not otherwise involve using physical force or other forms of coercion. And if you asked the women involved, only 27% of the people categorized by Koss as being raped called it rape themselves. Also found in the Koss study, although not widely reported, was the statistic that of the women whom she classified as being raped (although 73% refused to self-classify the event as rape), 46% of them had subsequent sex with the reported assailant… Please note, I am not diminishing what rape is, and or any particular person's experience. However, I *am* challenging the use of statistics that may be hyperbolic and misleading Later in the thread Ts'o proposed a thought experiment (full email archived here) claiming to show that the (common law) legal doctrine mens rea means that rape cannot have taken place if both parties were drunken, and denying the ability of victims or researchers to identify rape if they cannot show mens rea: Now, actually, the way the law works is that not only does the being raped be not able to give consent, but that the rapist has to know that the the other person was not able to give legal consent. So if both Alice and Bob were drunk, there's no rape that has taken place, in either direction. Whew! So one of the problems with the Koss study is the women in question was only asked, did sex take place, and were you drunk and not able to give consent. She did not ask the question, did the other person legally know that the women was drunk. And given that the survey was asking undergraduates, and apparently on a campus where there was a lot of drinking and socializing going on, do you think that perhaps the numbers might be skewed by cases where both parties were drunk (and thus not legally able to know whether someone was legally able to give consent)? How many cases that might be, we won't know for sure, but it's certainly enough to call that survey flawed.
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