I think I’ve mentioned this a few times during class, but if I haven’t you should read it anyway: Meet the Predators, which is a discussion of how rape is depicted in our culture verses how it actually tends to happen.
The way the studies discussed in the article were carried out is a bit counter intuitive: the researchers surveyed a population of college going men of diverse background and asked them if they had committed one or more rapes. Now, if you’re how they managed to get people to say that they’d raped, the questions were phrased in such a way that they were unambiguous but didn’t use words like rape or sexual assault. Being anonymous also helps.
Notable results from the study include:
-Around 95% of the reported rapes were committed by between 4-5% of those surveyed.
-Most rapists only targeted people (men or women) they knew.
-The rapists who used violence exclusively targeted people they knew, and the rapists who ever targeted strangers (less than a quarter) used intoxicants.
-The averaged number of rapes around 6 each.
-None of the men in the survey ever used violence to rape a stranger.
The take away from this should be that 1) most men aren’t rapists and 2) most rapists rape repeatedly.
Tomorrow I will try to follow up on this with what the study means in the broader context of rape culture.
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