Hacker News Reader

Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

> Total straw man, he didn't define any culture as this, he noted that it's one characteristic of our culture.

From Randall's post: Our culture's relentless treatment of women as objects teaches them that they are defined by the one thing that men around them want from them [...]

> "Do you want to walk around Baghdad at night alone?"

An American man's likelihood of getting killed in Baghdad is a couple of magnitude higher than a woman's likelihood of getting killed by a sexual predator in NYC. In fact, my educated guess is that far more women die from car accidents than from crazy murderers.

View on HN

  In fact, my educated guess is that far more women die from
  car accidents than from crazy murderers.

That's true. However, if I'm doing my math right, the statistics for rape and sexual assault are an entirely different story. The US isn't on both of these lists[0][1], so we'll take a proxy and compare: Germany has 6.5/100k deaths/year in accidents and 8.9/100k rapes/year. Note that that's per 100k people, not per 100k women. Then note that, in the US, we have 28 rapes per hundred thousand people, more than three times the rate in Germany. Then note that something like half of rapes are never reported to the police [2].

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#UN_Statistics

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_accident#Statistics_...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#Under-_and_over...

Right, but I was really objecting the "American killed in Baghdad" vs "woman murdered/raped in the US" comparison. What I meant is that the risk of a woman getting raped/murdered in the US is much closer to the risk of getting killed in an accident than of walking at night in Baghdad. I'm still sure there are far more than 8.9/100k deaths in Baghdad.

Great statistics. What is the point?

Are you suggesting that knowing the gender of people is a risk factor for rape?

It seems like a few people are making this odd connection between assault, stalking and rape with knowing somebody's gender. You do realize that most humans can sit on any street corner and identify the gender of passers-by with a high degree of certainty, right?

I was simply being annoyed at an unbacked statement like that, especially given the topic. We always seem to forget that being a woman is, in fact, bloody dangerous. Something like one in five American women experiences a rape. We aren't discussing some abstract edge case; half of the population lives in completely justifiable terror of something that actually happens.

I mention gender because that modifies the statistics. Women get raped much more often than men do, so the rapes/person stat is misleading; rapes/woman, the stat we care about here, is almost twice the number I quoted.

I don't see how you arrive at the statistic of "one in five american women experiencing a rape" from 28 rapes per hundred thousand people. Even if we considered that only women were victim of rapes and that half of the incidents weren't reported, it would still amount to something like 112 rapes/100k so around 0.1%.

Anecdotically, none of my female friends were ever raped which doesn't match with your assertion that "one in five American women experiences a rape".

I do think that our culture tends to objectifying women in the medias but I don't think that rape and sexual assault is as prevalent as many people think it is... There's also a lot of paranoia due to the media looking for good sensational stories and latching on any sexual assault story they can find.

Anecdotically, none of my female friends were ever raped

So far as you know.

Incidence varies by community and definition. Sexual assaults are very common on college campuses.

The stereotypical scary guy with pantyhose pulled over his head is only one manifestation of rape. "Date-rape" and taking advantage of people not capable of giving consent (drunk, drugged, etc) happens all of the time.

"taking advantage of people not capable of giving consent (drunk, drugged, etc) happens all of the time."

Men are also victims of that.

The x/100000 is per year. The 1/5 number is over a woman's lifetime. Still seems fishy to me, though.

I didn't go from one to the other; I should have made that more clear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States#Rape_...

It's a question of comfort in an online space, which is all about perception, not actual risk.

This seems a little off-mark. Nobody[1] is suggesting that public G+ genders are going to result in more cases like Amy Boyer. That would just be silly.

If someone decides they want as much privacy as possible, and maximally locks down their profile, they are exposing exactly two things: name and gender. The argument is that this is calling undue attention to that one particular field. No doubt Google has a reason for this -- it is an exception, after all; why implement an exception without a reason? The question is whether this reason (that we don't know) is good enough.

[1]OK, maybe somebody is, but it's not Randall, and it's certainly not me.

> In fact, my educated guess is that far more women die from car accidents than from crazy murderers.

This has got to be one of the most overused and misappropriated statistics I've heard during a multitude of arguments. I can't even deduce what point is being made beyond X is greater than Y. You can't simply invalidate a problem, because you found a larger (scarier) number on Wikipedia. Have you considered the amount of time spent and km traveled in a car versus time spent in bars and social gathers? I hope not because it's a rabbit trail and a moot point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com