Self-Explanatory
Nor would this statement from the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN) in a letter to the White House:
"In the last few years, there has been an unfortunate trend towards blaming “rape culture” for the extensive problem of sexual violence on campuses. While it is helpful to point out the systemic barriers to addressing the problem, it is important to not lose sight of a simple fact: Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime"You would think that the nation's largest and most respected survivor's advocacy group debunking rape culture would mean something. Apparently not, because you can't go two days without reading about the ubiquitous "one in five" statistic, which has been repeatedly shown as highly misleading.
I encourage everyone to read the original study that produced that figure. I won't go so far as to say (as many conservative pundits have) that the study was "highly flawed", but I will say as someone who has designed and conducted similar studies (and knows a good bit about research methods) that the conclusions many have drawn from its results are incredibly unfounded. The study was a self-response, web-based online survey. I've run a couple of these, and can say that half the time, people either won't finish or they will skip questions. Most researchers who care about getting good data will only resort to this design as a last resort. Additionally, if you look during the portion of the paper that discusses the survey itself, you can see that all the questions are pretty ambiguously worded; researchers thought this was the best route to take rather than specifically ask participants if they had been raped or sexually assaulted. While in theory this sounds like it would strengthen construct validity because it gives accounts of situations rather than relying on the participants' own personal definition of "rape" and "sexual assault", items were coded as such in the analysis. For example, "sex while intoxicated" was considered rape under the justification that one cannot give consent while intoxicated. True, but the majority of responses interpreted as "rape" came from this response or a couple others like it. In other words, while researchers designated participants' responses to be rape, many of the participants (both men and women) probably wouldn't consider themselves rape victims. Have you ever had sex while drunk? According to the interpretation of this study, you were raped. Have you ever had sex with a drunk person? Guess what; you're a rapist.
I won't even get into the problematic demographics of the study, which like most studies of this kind using college students as participants, was over 80% white.
Now here are some more figures from RAINN. Black women have a slightly higher rape/attempted rape prevalence rate (18.8%) than white women (17.7%), mixed-race women are higher than both (24.4%), but Native American women have the highest at 34.1%. Rape is a legitimate epidemic on reservations, yet I never hear ANYONE talk about it.
Rape on reservations is an empirically confirmed problem, but why isn't it a focus for activism? Short answer: the victims and perpetrators aren't white, so it doesn't fit in with the convenient assumption of rape as the weapon of white patriarchal hegemony. There is this dimension of (mostly) white women who seem
to think that the "oppressed" status of their gender due to rape culture's ubiquity negates any privilege afforded to them by their race. The fact that anyone even tries to make this assertion is fucking
laughable considering a century of demographic/sociological data that clearly
establishes race as a much stronger variable in predicting socioeconomic status
than gender. It is even more absurd considering that the majority who make this
claim are upper-middle class college-educated white people.
Look no further
than the viral "10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman"
video; white privilege is being able to afford to get offended when black and
Hispanic men catcall you when you walk through their neighborhood.
Furthermore, it isn't like these guys are just black and Hispanic men on their
lunch break, it's dudes loitering. Forget calling attention to how easily
the racial disparities in unemployment can be
seen just by walking through non-white neighborhoods, this is men behaving like pigs on camera. Street harassment isn't okay, and maybe you could go so far as to say that for these individuals, similar patterns of behavior might be why they can't hold down a job. Women shouldn't have to be fearful to walk around in public. But guys that catcall women are only slightly less pathetic than guys who drunkenly creep on/grope women at the bar. Call people out who behave as such, and tell them that it isn't okay... or just punch them in the face. I'm not a huge fan of cultural relativism, but in this case, ask yourself whether or not anyone who is inherently sexist will really change their behavior just because a white woman
got offended? Fuck no. Just take a minute to consider how much it sucks to live amongst people who treat women as such on a daily basis. These women are in the most unfortunate position possible because they literally can't afford to get offended for their own safety and livelihood. That is true oppression.
I'll probably come back to this later at some point, but these are just a few of the points I wanted to make in my previous piece today that felt much better addressed on their own. A note on the statistics: every study that has ever been done on how vastly underreported rape is compared to other violent crimes has confirmed that only a small fraction of rapes that occur are ever reported to police. The figures above are only a reflection of reported rapes, not the prevalence of how many are actually committed. Judging from the points I've made above and in other pieces, I think one can reasonably infer that non-white women are significantly less likely to report being raped, whether it be due to cultural stigma, fear, distrust of authorities, or all of the above. I find this unacceptable. I find it equally unacceptable that many who promote rape culture conveniently whitewash the fuck out of it, conveniently ignore situations that don't support their own understanding, then attack anyone who opposes their views as a rape-apologist or misogynist. I hope that I have sufficiently demonstrated that I am neither. I just don't like misguided agendas.
EDIT: 12/12/14 12:08PM-
Yesterday (or maybe the day before), the Department of Justice released the results of a study comparing the rates of rape and sexual assault victimization of college-age females from 1995-2013. Guess what? Women ages 18-24 who are not enrolled at a college or university are 1.2 times as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted compared to their student peers. Again, we can probably infer that the "student" sample was predominantly white and the non-student sample was predominantly non-white. However, contrary to my original hypothesis, students were more likely to NOT report being raped/sexually assaulted than non-students. This is probably the most troubling finding of all, and (I believe) accurately reflects the way many colleges and universities handle sexual assaults- keep it internal, don't get the police involved. Anyway, read the study for yourself. Either way, I think we can put the nail in the coffin for the "one in five" figure.
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