Noteworthy News

[Rev. Rye]

Wait, are we talking sheer numbers or per capita? Because if it’s the former, the fact that it’s the second-most populous state of the Union makes it unsurprising, and if you mean the latter, well, it’s not even in the Top 10. And if this were true, having the highest number could mean a lot of things (that said, I have to admit that I’m not certain any of the three are true for Texas):

• The rape victims of Texas are more likely to report their sexual assault to the cops, which implies that they have more faith than usual that the cops will give them justice. This may be due to naïveté or the cops actually effectively doing their jobs.
  
• They have a broader definition of what constitutes rape than many other jurisdictions
  
• The stats count incidents where the rapist has raped their victim multiple times as multiple offenses, which can skew the numbers somewhat.
  

And, of course, tangentially related to the first point, what percentage of reported rapes leads to a conviction? 

Depressingly, the old Mark Twain quote about lies, damn lies, and statistics really applies to statistics about rape. The greatly underreported nature of rape makes it hard to get a handle on how big the problem is, and it can be depressingly easy to skew the picture of how much rape there is in a certain place. And Shaun covers the topic as part of his debunking of one of the stories in this video:




In a rather extreme example not covered in the video, I recently found out that New Jersey has the lowest per capita rate of sexual assault of any of America’s 50 states, with 16 per 100k. The country of Algeria has a rate 10% of that. Does this mean women are safer in Algiers than in Philip Roth country? Nope, it turns out the rates are so low because, in their legal code, rape is so poorly defined that it’s hard for victims to report it and seek legal recourse.

On another frustrating note, I found out that thing about Algeria’s praeternaturally fucked rape laws while I was trying to find statistics about what percentages of rape cases end in a conviction for sexual assault in any given jurisdiction. I tried for about 20 minutes and the closest thing I found are those pages about how many rapes are estimated to go through any of the given stages of a criminal case from reporting to spending even a day in jail. Nothing for any given jurisdiction, let alone Texas. One would think stats like those would be useful, but evidently, people aren’t keeping track for whatever reason.