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Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

The top Breitbart headline, "Criminal Aliens Sexually Assault 70,000 American Women — But Paul Ryan Targets Trump", is willfully inciting anti-immigrant sentiment by taking numbers out of context. According to the report they cite, 69,929 criminal aliens (or 3% of the total criminal alien population they measured) had been arrested for sex-related crimes between August 1955 and April 2010. The number is true but the inference is false.

While the Huffington Post obviously sensationalizes things too, their top headline, "SEX ASSAULT SPREE / ACCUSATIONS PILE UP", is completely true: the accusations are piling up. I don't think you can draw an equivalence here.

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> The top Breitbart headline ... is willfully [sic] inciting anti-immigrant sentiment by taking numbers out of context.

> The number is true but the inference is false.

How are the numbers taken out of context? In your opinion, how would that headline read if the numbers weren't taken out of context? Or does the mere act of publishing the headlines (at all) make Breitbart guilty of taking the numbers out of context in your opinion? Honest question.

Also, it's not clear to me what you mean by "inference". Are you referring to the "-- But Paul Ryan Targets Trump" phrase? If so, then I would contend that "inference" is not the correct word. Instead, I would perhaps use the word "juxtaposition". Whether or not you agree to Breitbart's thinking, it seems to me that what they're trying to do is call attention to what they see as false priorities -- essentially, IIUC, they're saying "Paul Ryan is attacking the wrong person, because 70K women are targeted by criminal aliens and this is worse than anything Trump has done". You can agree to that or not, but it seems to me unfair to accuse them of bad logic.

In your opinion, how would that headline read if the numbers weren't taken out of context?

"Criminal Aliens Arrested for Sex-Related Crimes 70,000 Times Between 1955 and 2010 — But Paul Ryan Targets Trump"

The original headline creates an emotional impact by implying certain things: that these 70,000 events are sexual assaults (not generic sex crimes like indecent exposure etc.) against women (implying a relationship with Trump's actions where none specifically exists) that happened recently (not during a 55-year period that ended six years ago). The headline with context doesn't have the same emotional impact because you can't make the same misleading inferences. Maybe these crimes are a problem, maybe they aren't, but either way this headline is a clear misrepresentation of the facts.

OK, so it seems you have two objections. First that the headline omits the fact that that the period involved is not annual, thus optically inflating the figure. Second, you object that the phrase "sexually assaulted" is used instead of the more accurate and neutral phrase "arrested for sex-related crimes".

I have to say I agree with you on both counts. It would have been more accurate and neutral to write the headline as you suggest. (It would also have been longer and more boring.) Regarding your second point, a quick google search reveals that sex-related crimes encompass:

- Sexual Assault: Describes the catch-all crime that encompasses unwanted sexual touching of many kinds, with links to state penal code and federal law on related crimes. - Solicitation: It's illegal to entice someone else to commit a crime (such as prostitution). ... - Statutory Rape

I have no idea how the figures break down in these categories, so it's hard to the degree of unfairness being applied. If all of the 70K cases were rape, then Breitbart may actually be overly nice :) (Not saying it's likely!)

So thanks for that clarification. I would say, however, that this kind of headline is pretty typical for all news agencies. For example, during the Brexit "debate" in Britain, news outlets like BBC also quoted figures that were aggregated over a number of years to highlight the potential losses to the UK economy. Ditto the Daily Mail on the other side of the aisle. If this is the evidence that Breitbart is a shoddy news outlet, then I contend that the evidence is fairly weak.

The lack of context renders it meaningless.

They cite 70,000 sexual assaults from 1955-2010 and characterize it as a crisis. Yet, there are over 200,000 sexual assaults and rapes annually, and 80,000 sexual assaults in prisons alone annually. (https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem) If the 70,000 number was equally distributed, than 1,272 sexual assaults by criminal aliens would happen each year, which represents 0.006% of the total.

Is this a good thing? No. Is this some existential crisis where illegals are flooding over the border to rape american women? No.

"Criminal Aliens Sexually Assault 70,000 American Women". You're saying you don't see ANY problem with this headline? The inference is that this is a giant problem that we should be addressing right now, that it's eclipsing all other issues, when in fact it isn't in the slightest. You're being wilfully obtuse if you don't see the subtext: "Be very afraid of criminal aliens, they're coming to hurt you and rape you."

Let's not dismiss what inaccuracy here can lead to: bigotry on false pretenses, violence against innocent immigrants, and blindly supporting wars against "the wrong kind of people."

Also worth noting that these are arrests, not convictions. The police can relatively easily arrest, but need more evidence to charge and eventually convict.

And hey, let's not forget: Trump hasn't been arrested, tried, or convicted, nor have the supposed victims filed police reports.

But plenty of lawsuits have been filed. Just saying.

Well, just saying, anyone can sue anyone for any reason in the US.

> How are the numbers taken out of context?

The numbers lack context in that they don't specify a rate, merely a value. It makes it sound like 70K women are attacked each year by undocumented immigrants, when the reality is that the number is closer to 1.27K per year since 1955. Let's do some back of the napkin math:

There are about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, meaning that the rate of sexual assault victims per undocumented immigrant would be ~0.012%. Meanwhile, in 2006, 300,000 college women were raped.[1] With 300 million people (in 2006), that puts the rate for the general population at 0.1% of victims per person. That's nearly 10x the rate of the undocumented immigrant population, and that's only including college-aged rape victims, rather than sexual assault victims of all ages as the 70K number claims to be.

Meanwhile, we have Trump who has no fewer than 4 woman claiming he sexually assaulted him. Divide that over the 70 years of Trump's life, and at 0.057 women-per-year you have a 1-man rate of 5.7% -- 57x the rate of the general population. Seems like Paul Ryan is targeting the right person, and that Breitbart is using bad logic.

[1]: https://www.nsopw.gov/en-US/Education/FactsStatistics#victim...

The numbers don't claim to specify a rate - that was your inference.

Also, your numbers seem to demonstrate the exact dishonesty that you accuse Breitbart of doing.

The number cited for illegal aliens is the number of arrests.

The number you cite for the general population is a victimization survey which includes a lot of alleged rapes that were never reported to the police. (In fact, I can't even figure out if all of them meet the legal definition for rape.)

According to your report [1], 12% of rapes were reported to the police. If every single rape report results in an arrest (hint: they don't), that eliminates your 10x factor right there.

When reading Breitbart, you seem to draw incorrect inferences from cited statistics. And when digging up your own data, you also seem to draw incorrect inferences. Consider the possibility that the problem here isn't Breitbart.

(Note: I hate Trump. I favor open borders and think we should let Mexicans in even if they are more rapey than Americans. In fact I have nothing but positive feelings towards Mexicans - their food is tasty and their women are beautiful. I'm just pointing out bad reasoning.)

That's the problem. The people reading the site think there are 70k rapes a year by reading the headline, and that is the incorrect, and a problem. The site exists to put up data as such to incite hatred against immigrants.

We are now in a post-fact era. Watching the current idiocy of the Trump speech happening right now shows it in full force. Any factual data people don't like now is a "conspiracy".

You are correct about the arrested vs reported thing. I don't know how I missed that. Still, that brings them in line with the general population. You're also right about Mexican food and women. (Full disclosure, I'm married to a Mexican woman.)

Would you leverage similar criticism towards any other reports concerning sexual assault? Such as how numbers concerning sexual assault on college campuses are told lacking the context of how they were derived and also report magnitudes more crime than official FBI statistics.

It seems both sides abuse these numbers to lead readers to draw certain conclusions. Yet criticism of the practice often is not evenly applied.

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