I’ve seen it asserted in many places that most women are constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped. Now obviously women in general aren’t always visibly on edge whenever they’re out in public, but some proportion clearly do feel that way, or at least claim to. Unfortunately this is the kind of thing which it’s rather socially difficult to conduct an informal poll on. Does anyone know of any studies or surveys or anything which might shed some light on the issue?
Edit: The most helpful thing turned up by a quick google scholar search was this. Table 2 on page 4 gives us a good rough estimate that ~38% of people worry “very/pretty frequently” about rape (this makes the rate for women possibly as high as ~76%, if we assume that men never worry about themselves or others being raped).
This paper seems to suggest that levels of fear of crime are about equal in males and females, although women are more likely to worry about rape specifically. It’s based only on 64 qualitative interviews in Britain, but it also points to this conclusion being predominant in the literature.
Unfortunately this is the kind of thing which it’s rather socially difficult to conduct an informal poll on.
You can start by asking your mother or your sister or your girlfriend. If none of them obsesses about being raped every time they venture out onto city streets...
Of course, this assumes a reasonably benign environment. If you live in inner-city Detroit, you should be aware of the dangers of going out of your front door, but that applies to both men and women. On the other hand if you live is a sleepy village with zero cases of rape during the last hundred years and you still are “constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped”, a psychiatrist might be a good idea.
You can start by asking your mother or your sister or your girlfriend. If none of them obsesses about being raped every time they venture out onto city streets...
“Obsesses” already implies excessive concern.
I’m not sure what a good survey would include, but questions about what precautions one takes, or how one feels about going out versus being home might be a start.
The problem is how to get the data without contributing to the atmosphere of fear. Because that atmosphere really does harm quality of life for a lot of women, and is not in any real way helpful at mitigating the danger, because it hardly ever comes with usable advice or strategies attached.
I suspect the most common and useful strategy is the “Girls come in pairs and groups” thing. Which has the advantage of not being a stressor in the way turning yourself into Nicola Griffiths Aud would be, and also likely pretty darn effective—Hard to get raped if your bestie is kicking your assailant in the kidneys.
On a much better tangent: Aud is awesome, and I am really confused noone has made her into a series of blockbuster movies yet.
The true ratio is probably somewhere between 0.76 and 0.38
Before starting to speak of the true ratio, you really should examine your data source a bit more carefully.
Your link leads to a non-academic article which quotes numbers from opinion surveys and there’s little information on those. In particular, the question of how representative their data sample was is kinda important. To make an obvious observation, people living in big cities probably (correctly) fear crime more than people living in rural communities. Therefore the reported average fear of crime will be greatly affected by how urbanized your sample is.
Another point is that your Table 2 does not give numbers about people who worry about rape. It gives numbers about people who worry about “yourself or someone in your family getting sexually assaulted or raped” (emphasis mine). And “sexual assault” is a fuzzy term which might, depending on who and how you ask, include things like catcalls and leery glances. And boyfriends. Plus, to continue my example, probably every parent with a teenage daughter answered “pretty frequently” to this question.
P.S. Also the numbers are from 1993. The overall crime rate in the US has dropped hugely since then.
Yes, I’m aware that these sources are far from perfect. I just did a quick google search and threw out the the first numbers I could easily get my hands on, as a quick sanity-check. Obviously it’s far from a definitive answer.
You’re free to look for better data; I’ll probably do a little more poking around myself.
However I’ll give you my data-less biased priors :-)
I expect you to find some data. Much of it will be bad because it tends to be produced by Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and these people are not known for their statistical acumen or precision of analysis. Almost all of it will be biased because a study that doesn’t show how bad it is to be a woman in an oppressive patriarchy of male chauvinist pigs is unlikely to be published. Whatever remains (if anything) will show high variance and inconsistency.
If you are interested in the subject I’d like to repeat my suggestion: ask women around you. Real, live women. You don’t have to talk to them about rape—ask them if they are afraid to be on the street alone. afraid to leave the house. afraid to be near male strangers. Listen to what they say.
If you are interested in the subject I’d like to repeat my suggestion: ask women around you. Real, live women. You don’t have to talk to them about rape—ask them if they are afraid to be on the street alone. afraid to leave the house. afraid to be near male strangers. Listen to what they say.
Do you really believe that the quality of most studies on this topic is so poor that this extremely flawed research strategy you recommend is more likely to be reliable? That seems like an unjustifiably dim view of the relevant research community.
I don’t disagree that asking women you know is one easy way to get evidence on this question, but I would think that even a pretty poorly conducted scientific study would constitute superior evidence.
Well querying it in sample sizes that are much smaller and less random than even the shoddiest academic study is, by comparison, indeed “extremely flawed”.
I said this below as well, but it’s fairly well buried now so I’ll repeat it here for others’ benefit:
Your hypothesis that any research on fear of rape will be systematically biased towards the claim that the vast majority of women are frequently, distressingly afraid of rape is strongly contraindicated by the fact that the arbitrarily-chosen (i.e., they were open access) research sources I cited at the top of this thread support the opposite conclusion.
(To clarify: I really don’t care very much about this question and as such I’m content to just go along with the rough approximations that a couple of old surveys provided. If someone was actually trying to get a really good answer I would suggest they look further and deeper. Published research would probably be a good start; given what I’ve seen so far, your hypothesis that it’s systematically and hopelessly biased to the point of uselessness is not persuasive)
Um… the particular method you suggested is an extremely flawed research strategy. Especially considering that one of your complaints about the research linked by Vulture was that the sample may not be representative. I don’t know about you, but the women I know well do not constitute a particularly representative sample of women in general.
Describing your experiment as “directly querying the reality surrounding you” makes it sound pretty dandy, but if you actually look at the specifics of the experiment, it’s subject to a host of biases.
It’s interesting that you seem to think that almost every source is likely to be biased… in the exact opposite direction from the results of the two arbitrarily-chosen sources above!
More than that, a poll about fears is likely to have a pretty high false positive rate—just considering the question is likely to bring up a significant number of instances of anything you fear at all, and if it is phrased as generically as “often” with no definition?
Getting at the true numbers would require.. Uhm. No, asking people to monitor their fears would be Nigh-certain to make them much more fearful (“log thoughts of sex” has been tried. The results that came back were blatantly a case of “dont think of a pink elephant” coloring everything) and thus would be deeply unethical. I think the cleanest lift would be a large collection of extensive daily journals, or outright annotated lifelogs. That would probably make your subject pool more introspective than the general population, but it should not skew these specific numbers much. Expensive, however.
Almost all of it will be biased because a study that doesn’t show how bad it is to be a woman in an oppressive patriarchy of male chauvinist pigs is unlikely to be published.
It’s interesting that you seem to think that almost every source is likely to be biased… in the exact opposite direction from the results of the two arbitrarily-chosen sources above!
At first glance that fear seems to be a result of the availability heuristic. Women are much more likely to be assaulted by someone they know, not by a random stranger that they meet when they go out in public. But the random stranger in public assault is the one that’s more well known in the popular consciousness.
I think “constantly” was a bit of obvious hyperbole on Vulture’s part, permissible in an informal comment but not in a survey question that is meant to produce useful results. I have heard from some women that they are frequently concerned about the possibility of being raped, but I doubt there is anyone who is literally in constant fear of rape.
Unless the intent of this poll is just to mock Vulture’s original phrasing, I’d suggest changing the wording of the question.
Unless the intent of this poll is just to mock Vulture’s original phrasing, I’d suggest changing the wording of the question.
The intent was to illustrate how easy it is to create a poll. I would like people to create polls more often when they wonder about something that could be instead estimated using a poll.
I apologize for the wording, but it seems unfair to change the words when some people have already voted. Anyway, the whole poll is hidden deep in the comment tree. It would be better to do it again, in a top-level comment, in the Open Thread (to reduce selection bias). And it would be better done by someone who treats this hypothesis more seriously; they will find a better wording.
None of the women I know in real life “experience a constant physical danger” whenever they leave the house.
Presumably we’re not talking about being hit by a bus.
I’ve seen it asserted in many places that most women are constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped. Now obviously women in general aren’t always visibly on edge whenever they’re out in public, but some proportion clearly do feel that way, or at least claim to. Unfortunately this is the kind of thing which it’s rather socially difficult to conduct an informal poll on. Does anyone know of any studies or surveys or anything which might shed some light on the issue?
Edit: The most helpful thing turned up by a quick google scholar search was this. Table 2 on page 4 gives us a good rough estimate that ~38% of people worry “very/pretty frequently” about rape (this makes the rate for women possibly as high as ~76%, if we assume that men never worry about themselves or others being raped).
This paper seems to suggest that levels of fear of crime are about equal in males and females, although women are more likely to worry about rape specifically. It’s based only on 64 qualitative interviews in Britain, but it also points to this conclusion being predominant in the literature.
You can start by asking your mother or your sister or your girlfriend. If none of them obsesses about being raped every time they venture out onto city streets...
Of course, this assumes a reasonably benign environment. If you live in inner-city Detroit, you should be aware of the dangers of going out of your front door, but that applies to both men and women. On the other hand if you live is a sleepy village with zero cases of rape during the last hundred years and you still are “constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped”, a psychiatrist might be a good idea.
“Obsesses” already implies excessive concern.
I’m not sure what a good survey would include, but questions about what precautions one takes, or how one feels about going out versus being home might be a start.
The problem is how to get the data without contributing to the atmosphere of fear. Because that atmosphere really does harm quality of life for a lot of women, and is not in any real way helpful at mitigating the danger, because it hardly ever comes with usable advice or strategies attached.
I suspect the most common and useful strategy is the “Girls come in pairs and groups” thing. Which has the advantage of not being a stressor in the way turning yourself into Nicola Griffiths Aud would be, and also likely pretty darn effective—Hard to get raped if your bestie is kicking your assailant in the kidneys.
On a much better tangent: Aud is awesome, and I am really confused noone has made her into a series of blockbuster movies yet.
(emphasis mine)
This is known to be false (e.g. ask any father of a teenage daughter).
Right. It’s a deliberately excessive assumption that I used to obtain a ceiling. The true ratio is probably somewhere between 0.76 and 0.38
Before starting to speak of the true ratio, you really should examine your data source a bit more carefully.
Your link leads to a non-academic article which quotes numbers from opinion surveys and there’s little information on those. In particular, the question of how representative their data sample was is kinda important. To make an obvious observation, people living in big cities probably (correctly) fear crime more than people living in rural communities. Therefore the reported average fear of crime will be greatly affected by how urbanized your sample is.
Another point is that your Table 2 does not give numbers about people who worry about rape. It gives numbers about people who worry about “yourself or someone in your family getting sexually assaulted or raped” (emphasis mine). And “sexual assault” is a fuzzy term which might, depending on who and how you ask, include things like catcalls and leery glances. And boyfriends. Plus, to continue my example, probably every parent with a teenage daughter answered “pretty frequently” to this question.
P.S. Also the numbers are from 1993. The overall crime rate in the US has dropped hugely since then.
Yes, I’m aware that these sources are far from perfect. I just did a quick google search and threw out the the first numbers I could easily get my hands on, as a quick sanity-check. Obviously it’s far from a definitive answer.
You’re free to look for better data; I’ll probably do a little more poking around myself.
I’m lazy :-P and not interested enough.
However I’ll give you my data-less biased priors :-)
I expect you to find some data. Much of it will be bad because it tends to be produced by Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and these people are not known for their statistical acumen or precision of analysis. Almost all of it will be biased because a study that doesn’t show how bad it is to be a woman in an oppressive patriarchy of male chauvinist pigs is unlikely to be published. Whatever remains (if anything) will show high variance and inconsistency.
If you are interested in the subject I’d like to repeat my suggestion: ask women around you. Real, live women. You don’t have to talk to them about rape—ask them if they are afraid to be on the street alone. afraid to leave the house. afraid to be near male strangers. Listen to what they say.
Do you really believe that the quality of most studies on this topic is so poor that this extremely flawed research strategy you recommend is more likely to be reliable? That seems like an unjustifiably dim view of the relevant research community.
I don’t disagree that asking women you know is one easy way to get evidence on this question, but I would think that even a pretty poorly conducted scientific study would constitute superior evidence.
Yes.
P.S. I do love how directly querying the reality surrounding you is described as an “extremely flawed research strategy” X-D
Well querying it in sample sizes that are much smaller and less random than even the shoddiest academic study is, by comparison, indeed “extremely flawed”.
Well their not systematically biased, unlike the samples that someone with an agenda is likely to use.
I said this below as well, but it’s fairly well buried now so I’ll repeat it here for others’ benefit:
Your hypothesis that any research on fear of rape will be systematically biased towards the claim that the vast majority of women are frequently, distressingly afraid of rape is strongly contraindicated by the fact that the arbitrarily-chosen (i.e., they were open access) research sources I cited at the top of this thread support the opposite conclusion.
(To clarify: I really don’t care very much about this question and as such I’m content to just go along with the rough approximations that a couple of old surveys provided. If someone was actually trying to get a really good answer I would suggest they look further and deeper. Published research would probably be a good start; given what I’ve seen so far, your hypothesis that it’s systematically and hopelessly biased to the point of uselessness is not persuasive)
Um… the particular method you suggested is an extremely flawed research strategy. Especially considering that one of your complaints about the research linked by Vulture was that the sample may not be representative. I don’t know about you, but the women I know well do not constitute a particularly representative sample of women in general.
Describing your experiment as “directly querying the reality surrounding you” makes it sound pretty dandy, but if you actually look at the specifics of the experiment, it’s subject to a host of biases.
It’s interesting that you seem to think that almost every source is likely to be biased… in the exact opposite direction from the results of the two arbitrarily-chosen sources above!
More than that, a poll about fears is likely to have a pretty high false positive rate—just considering the question is likely to bring up a significant number of instances of anything you fear at all, and if it is phrased as generically as “often” with no definition? Getting at the true numbers would require.. Uhm. No, asking people to monitor their fears would be Nigh-certain to make them much more fearful (“log thoughts of sex” has been tried. The results that came back were blatantly a case of “dont think of a pink elephant” coloring everything) and thus would be deeply unethical. I think the cleanest lift would be a large collection of extensive daily journals, or outright annotated lifelogs. That would probably make your subject pool more introspective than the general population, but it should not skew these specific numbers much. Expensive, however.
It’s interesting that you seem to think that almost every source is likely to be biased… in the exact opposite direction from the results of the two arbitrarily-chosen sources above!
At first glance that fear seems to be a result of the availability heuristic. Women are much more likely to be assaulted by someone they know, not by a random stranger that they meet when they go out in public. But the random stranger in public assault is the one that’s more well known in the popular consciousness.
A poll: Are you constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped? Also, are you a man or a woman (however you define it)?
[pollid:579]
I think “constantly” was a bit of obvious hyperbole on Vulture’s part, permissible in an informal comment but not in a survey question that is meant to produce useful results. I have heard from some women that they are frequently concerned about the possibility of being raped, but I doubt there is anyone who is literally in constant fear of rape.
Unless the intent of this poll is just to mock Vulture’s original phrasing, I’d suggest changing the wording of the question.
The intent was to illustrate how easy it is to create a poll. I would like people to create polls more often when they wonder about something that could be instead estimated using a poll.
I apologize for the wording, but it seems unfair to change the words when some people have already voted. Anyway, the whole poll is hidden deep in the comment tree. It would be better to do it again, in a top-level comment, in the Open Thread (to reduce selection bias). And it would be better done by someone who treats this hypothesis more seriously; they will find a better wording.
We’re talking about being a second-class citizen in a society.