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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

I feel confident enough that I don't have to look this up, but I might be wrong. Most women in the US surely aren't raped right? Not even 0.1% of women in the US get raped no? So I don't think you need to forcibly vaccinate people because of any rape risks.

Most people who are sexually active are voluntary so, so let's just assume people are not talking about sexual assault when talking about an active sex life.

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> Most women in the US surely aren't raped right? Not even 0.1% of women in the US get raped no?

You’re presumption is so bad it’s not even wrong.

> “Nearly 1 in 5 women (18.3%) and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) in the United States have been raped at some time in their lives, including completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration. [0]

[0] https://www.nsvrc.org/statistics

> Most women in the US surely aren't raped right? Not even 0.1% of women in the US get raped no?

It's closer to 15%.

https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem

EDIT: Wow people really hate rape statistics.

If you look up the history of the HPV vaccine and how a subset of the United States decided that it wasn't acceptable to protect women from cervical cancer because 'reasons', you can start to get a sense of the kind of uphill battle an HIV vaccine will face. It's hard enough to explain to parents that it doesn't matter if their kid is sexually active for HPV, imagine how much worse it's going to be when they add "10% of girls will be raped before they turn 18" to the mix.

So rape ends up being epidemiologically-relevant to STD vaccines, but there's a lot of folks who would rather not confront that — even here on HN.

For the purposes of HIV, I would think that “attempted” is not very informative?

Irrelevant. If I successfully defend myself from a rape attempt by biting the attacker, that will be recorded as "attempted", and yet I will still be exposed to the risk of HIV infection.

I guess that’s the question: does “attempted rape” really expose one to risk of HIV infection? What fraction of attempted rape victims go on to contract HIV compared to those who were actually raped? What gets counted as “attempted rape”? If the victim escapes before anyone’s clothes are off, does that get recorded as attempted rape? Presumably in that scenario omens risk of contracting HIV isn’t meaningfully increased?

If the rapist spits on them, maybe. If the person being raped bites them in self-defense, maybe. If the rapist is wounded and bleeds on them (and others!), maybe. The statistic you seek is "unsuccessful rape attempts that did not result in fluid transfer risk to the person being raped, bystanders, or emergency responders". If you are able to find it, feel free to link it here. I suspect you will find that no such data is collected.

Fortunately, this is irrelevant. Given the severity of HIV, the full 18% figure can be safely taken at face value, for society-level disease prevention purposes. HIV is both expensive and deadly and vaccination is cheap.

So basically, if someone gets raped and gets HIV we can just blame them for not fighting back enough?

If that is the question, it's based on some abhorrent moral assumptions.

The “almost 15%” referred to the 14.8% experiencing “completed” rape, not the additional 2.8% experiencing only “attempted” rape.

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