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Comment by spatulan | Hacker News Reader

Why is that the headline when the article contains the much more worrying

"And 20% of those surveyed said women often said “no” to sexual activity when they meant “yes”, and 18% agreed if a woman was raped while affected by alcohol or drugs she was partly responsible."

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"partly responsible" is a highly context-dependent weasel word. You can be "partly responsible" for a brick hitting you on the head, since you didn't look up. You can be "partly responsible" for being raped while drunk, because you chose to get wasted in unsafe company. Your parents are also "partly responsible", because they raised you in a neighbourhood with a high number of violent young men. The bar is, indeed, also "partly responsible", for not hiring competent bouncers to prevent this situation. And so on and so forth until we get to the Big Bang, which is also partly responsible, because it set up the initial conditions which evolved to the current predicament. In short, "partly responsible" can mean whatever the hell you want it to mean, and you can get most people to answer whatever you want to that question by first priming them with other questions.

You can be "partly responsible" for a brick hitting you on the head, since you didn't look up.

Or because you were in a marked hardhat zone without a hardhat.

Designing properly ambiguous wording for surveys must be a lot of fun.

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