My blog is not just about commerce it is also about statistics and social process. I produced a public radio program for nearly a decade on the subject of social thought. I interviewed and recorded many hundreds of leading thinkers on the subject.
What always catches my eye in the social realm is when politicians, the media and large groups of people start focusing on an issue that seems to contradict existing data.
Have you noticed legislation and academic hysteria focused on rape on college campuses?
In my realm of data and statistics, every effort has been made to devise new questionnaires and new methodologies for measuring rape occurrence in the population. There is great feminist disappointment with existing numbers collected by the government.
I have begun wondering what this fuss is all about.
The first observation I must make is that college campuses are now 60% female. A major change in a 35 year period. From formerly dominant male campuses to female dominant. Whatever college men are doing, there are more women to complain about it. Or there are more women who have sex while drunk and then call it ‘rape’.
The most astounding fact about rape on college campuses, or anywhere else, is that rape has declined dramatically over the past two decades. In 1994 four out of a thousand women reported to survey researchers that they had been a rape or sexual assault victim. By 2010 these numbers are down to roughly 1 woman per thousand making that claim. Roughly a decline of 75%. Astronomic decline by any standard.
This decline parallels the decline in national crime rates. Today an almost equal number of women report that there was an attempted rape as claim a completed rape. The number of attempted rapes reported to survey researchers, one per thousand, never changed over two decades.
To get an understanding of how common rape is in our society, what one per thousand means, you can compare it to death rates. For every woman who reports a completed rape there are two women who died of a heart attack or cancer in the same year. And there is roughly 1 woman who died in an accident for every woman raped or sexually assaulted.
Rape has always been a problem related to age. There is almost zero probability that a woman over 35 will be raped. This suggests that, like crime in general, rape is an age related activity largely driven by males. It declined when fewer males were born to women who didn’t want to be mothers and declined further when the ones born were put in prison. (The two reasons for the big decline in general crime rates.)
Back to the question of why, at a time when rape of women has declined dramatically has preventing rape on campus become a public, academic and political issue?
My answer would be, number one: single women are a vitally important Democrat-Union Party political voting group and rape is a concern to them.
A second, and a lesser reason, is that there is a tendency among ‘women’ as a class to take advantage of their new found political and academic power to use the threat of rape persecution as a source of leverage over males. A fresh source of ‘power’ for women.
The reality I see in our society is that women remain second-class citizens because they do not demand first-class status. Therefore they exercise their ‘second-class’ power by claiming the right to punish any man with the charge of rape.
Yes I am a male. Yes I know that many women will accuse me of some horrible social transgression for writing this blog. Fortunately I am too old for the Fulminating Furies to threaten my income or livelihood.