• Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
    11·
    16 days ago

    Which is to say - the harm to falsely accused men and the harm to legitimately raped or harassed women are on totally different scales.

    I’m not comparing the two. I’m addressing only the point that I quoted above:

    A male victim and a female victim have equal rights to justice but a woman and a man do not have equal chances of experiencing sexual assault.

    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·
      16 days 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 https://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).