It is no trivial topic indeed. My comment was regarding the use of the term “rape” itself. There has been much dispute over its definition, and I grant that there is much data suggesting some disturbing numbers. But the information I have seen is consistently based on studies of small and selective groups, and on questionnaires naming all sorts of acts ranging from verbal advances of an unsolicited nature to actual physical violation, whereupon the final tallies are all lumped together as all the respondents who had answered “yes” to any of them.
Many such studies have been roundly criticized for their accuracy in both methodology and conclusions drawn. Given that so many police departments and courts are already overwhelmed with tens of thousands of unexamined rape kits dating back years, and that college campuses in some places are experiencing near-daily allegations of abuses which often turn out to have no merit at all, it seems reckless and misleading to operate under such exaggerated premises that conflate any and all instances of perceived sexual misconduct into calling every bit of it “rape.”
It seems there is an excess of supposedly good intentions, added to a plethora of program funding schemes whose survival is based on caseload numbers, combining into a perfect storm of actually encouraging women to cry rape at the least provocation, resulting in a complete deadlock of any systemic ability to respond meaningfully to actual rapes that actually occur. My own dialogue with victims suggests that a climate of indifference and skepticism has indeed arisen in law enforcement regarding rape charges, in which officials are incentivized to secure lesser convictions in order to process cases out due to sheer volume of all criminal cases they are facing. This seems to result not only in innocent people being charged and pressured into pleading out to avoid prison, but also in actual serial rapists being easily able to game the system and walk away from prosecution then go on and commit more crimes.
Numbers alone, and creating a climate of fear and panic, are not solving the issue. Shouting “1 in 5” in the streets when the numbers include any woman who ever had to turn down a date from a creepy co-worker, hardly assists those dealing with real rape cases in addressing them fairly or with true justice. Nor does it do much more than cast doubt on women whose claims are genuine and whose suffering is real, when the crime itself is made a throwaway political claim based on lazy guesswork and the need to pad numbers for the sake of grant applications.
