General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: 'Men's Rights' Trolls Spam Occidental College Online Rape Report Form [View all]mythology
(9,527 posts)But I would imagine that in general rape, like most crimes, aren't committed by individuals who have never before committed the same crime.
The study I linked below says that half of the men who admitted to raping committed multiple attacks. Granted it's from Asian countries and not the U.S., but I can't imagine why it would be different here.
I don't think it's a semantic argument. I think it does a disservice to assume that only 3% of rapists go to jail because it creates a false idea of how prevalent rapists are. Which in turn impacts how we as a society should consider working to prevent rape. Recent statistics I've seen from the New York Times estimate that about 20% of women will be the victim of rape. I think different approaches would be used if roughly 20% of men have committed rape as compared to say 5% with each committing on average 4 attacks. If it's 20% each committing one attack then we have a more societal problem were as 5% we have a small enough subset that we could probably use a more targeted approach to those most likely to become rapists.
Of course that presumes we have enough data about who commits rapes, which we probably don't for a host of reasons ranging from under reporting, police ineptitude (not investigating or not having rape kits analyzed timely, etc), the difficulty of getting convictions and that it's hard to get honest answers if you ask men if they have raped in even anonymous surveys.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/09/10/2597861/united-nations-rape-study-asia/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/health/nearly-1-in-5-women-in-us-survey-report-sexual-assault.html?_r=0