This Rape Infographic Is Going Viral. Too Bad It's Wrong.

Slate ^ | January 8, 2013 | Amanda Marcotte

[grundle]

Yesterday, under the headline, "The saddest graph you'll see today," Dylan Matthews at the Washington Post published this infographic created by the Enliven Project to put the legal issues around rape, its prosecutions, and concerns about false accusations into perspective. The graphic quickly made the rounds on Twitter and Facebook, but unfortunately, while well-intentioned, it is also misleading in significant ways that can be used to undercut its basic message, which is sound: that false rape accusations are rare.

[skeeter]

I guess all those ‘unreported rapes’ are unreported to the police only, as the Enliven Project knows about them.

[gaijin]

The very general cop rule is, “Half of those actually perpetrated are never reported, and half the ones reported never happened...”

[gaijin]

I published the graphic, yup, I'm the Washington Post blogger who cooked up that page, and do you know what? You and I were MARRIED IN A PREVIOUS LIFETIME...!!!

It's completely untrue that I have a little shrine behind this door here, dedicated to you, with flickering candles, newspaper clippings, and a silver .38..!

Because it's BLACK, not silver..!

We'll be together....FOREVER...!

[gaijin]

Dylan Matthews, of the WaPo.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

Too bad it's wrong? Too bad it does not include this startling white-on-black data. So often false charges are made and shouted coast-to-coast only to be quietly acknowledged that the charges were false. I didn't see anything in the article about race.

These are US DoJ figures (see links below) and are separate from the FBI figures.

Criminal Victimization in the United States, [YYYY] Statistical Tables

Table 42: "Percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, by type of crime, race of victim, and perceived race of offender"
"Rape/Sexual assault"

Year of Stats	Total Rape/ Sexual assault	Race of Victims	% White Offenders	% Black Offenders	% Not known & other
1995	255,260	White	78.7	15.3
	38,330	Black	7.9 *	92.1
1996	216,710	White	82.2	8.8 *
	44,890	Black	13.5 *	80.2	6.3 *
1997	234,800	White	74.8	8.0 *
	43,890	Black	0.0 *	93.7	6.3 *
1998	225,330	White	77.2	9.9 *
	47,430	Black	7.2 *	68.9	23.9 *
1999	274,020	White	79.4	7.3 *
	67,890	Black	0.0 *	79.3	20.7 *
2000	199,360	White	81.5	7.0
	33,780	Black	7.0	79.7	13.3
2001	183,160	White	71.3	17.1
	29,980	Black	13.4	65.5	21.1
2002	134,140	White	76.0	13.1
	59,490	Black	14.2	85.8
2003	131,030	White	57.9	15.5
	24,010	Black	0.0	87.9	12.1
2004	139,900	White	65.1	8.3
	39,300	Black	0.0	89.8	10.2
2005	111,590	White	44.5	33.6
	36,620	Black	0.0	100.0
2006	194,270	White	50.6	16.7
	17,920	Black	0.0	43.0	57.0
2007	185,430	White	75.5	7.6
	12,780	Black	0.0	100.0
2008	117,640	White	74.9	16.4
	46,580	Black	0.0	74.8	25.2

*0.0 Estimate is based on 10 or fewer sample cases
May not sum to 100.0 % due to rounding

1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

[VoiceOfBruck]

The needle on my BS meter snapped clean off.

When I was in college in the 80’s, there were stenciled signs all over the sidewalks saying, “a woman was raped here.” Sure, I thought, right here on the sidewalk. Must have been inconvenient for all the other people to have to walk around them.

Notwithstanding the seriousness of rape and its high prevalence on college campuses, I really think these stray accusations weaken the message.

[STD]

What basic point have you shown us? I’m rather dense, so is this about race? I’m not surprised, because most sheep are white. Thanks for setting me straight in advance Will!

[A_Former_Democrat]

What would this punkass goofball know about anything heterosexual?

[WilliamofCarmichael]

I should have pointed out that US DoJ figures from which the table above was derived included victims who reported the crime and victims of rape who did not report the crime to police.

I think US DoJ interviews 75,000 victims of crimes and develops tables from the result. The FBI figures are totals of reported crimes only.

[dangus]

Really? The number of blacks raped jumped four-fold in one year in 2008, to 47,000, and whites accounted for 0.0% of those rapists? Really? Hard to imagine. Is this based on some crazy-ass statistical method?

[Baynative]

Is this the new Dan Rather ...Mary Mapes...?

[FreedomPoster]

He has conveniently linked his data sourced, which you seem to have completely ignored.

Sad.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

The article is not about race. It is about tons of unreported rapes and why so.

It is I who speaks of race; to wit, the Black victim - white offender figures obtained from US DoJ data. There are several years when the US DoJ tables show zero white offenders.

That is what I was talking about. Also the DoJ figures attempt to show both reported and unreported crimes -- FBI figures show only reported crimes.

So the chart in the article should match the comparison of the DoJ tables and FBI tables. I think that another point of the article is that the graph does not match the differences between the official figures. I did not include the FBI tables.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

I took the data from DoJ tables.. yes I believe that they interview 75,000 victims of both reported and unreported crimes and they do use statistical methods to interpolate their totals. I am not qualified to judge their methods.

[delacoert]

There is a line toward the end of the article that I'm having trouble understanding ...

Women who make false reports want sympathy, and as victims of real rapes can tell you, accusing a real man usually gets you very little

I can except the two thoughts separately, i.e.,

1. Women who make false rape reports want sympathy.
2. Accusing a real man of rape usually gets you very little sympathy

... but I can't understand what the writer is trying to say by combining the two. Am I supposed to think that women who make false claims of being raped without naming an assailant are more like to receive sympathy than real rape victims who name an assailant? or am I supposed to believe that women who falsely report being raped don't understand how little sympathy they're likely to get?

[Cyman]

To phrase a headline the way the MSM would if reporting their spin on a subject “ #1 Falsely Reported Crime: Rape”

[Boogieman]

It’s simple to see why the graphic is so misleading. If the 10 guys on the upper right are the only ones convicted, then they are the only rapes that have been proven, in a court of law. All of the rest, over 90% of the chart, are just “alleged” rapes. You can’t discount an alleged rape as a being a false accusation if there is no investigation, so there is no way to limit the number to just the couple guys in the lower right.

[Sherman Logan]

More critically, in cases where FBI labs are able to analyze DNA, 20% of the accusations are proven to be false, in that the evidence shows somebody else committed the crime. 20% more are inconclusive.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,194032,00.html

The famous “Innocence Projects” are often used by leftists to show how often men jailed by our unjust legal system are later shown to be innocent by hard DNA evidence that was unavailable at the time of their conviction. What they seldom talk about is that the considerable majority of these convictions were for rape.

Now this is obviously because DNA is more often available in rape cases than in most other types of crimes. But their claims that “many” men convicted of rape are innocent does not line up with their claim that “few” men are ever falsely accused.

It should also be noted that rape is the only crime in which conviction is routinely obtained based solely on person A’s unsupported testimony accusing person B. This in those cases where the parties agree intercourse took place but disagree over whether it was consensual.

Conviction or acquittal in such cases is based on nothing more than who tells a better story. The problem here is that we have all known people who are, like Bill Clinton, unusually good liars. And most of us have known people who under the stress of testimony in court would be unable to believably tell the truth.

[pepsi_junkie]

So nobody falsely accused of rape ever goes to jail? That’s what the graphic claims.