La Virgen de las Mercedes

I don't think you can exaggerate rape

freebroccoli:

lasmercedes:

What I’M saying is that with rape trauma it takes YEARS for women or men to come to terms with the fact that they’ve even been raped—if they EVER come to terms with that fact.

No argument there. It’s an arduous process and not everyone can do it.

To call this an exaggerated statistic is ridiculous. Maybe trying to have a statistic is ridiculous. But I don’t think you could exaggerate rape if you tried. Centuries upon centuries of culture tell women that unwanted sex isn’t rape, it’s just, oh, you know. It happens cause men are like that. That is what makes rape impossible to track. No one wants to believe they’ve been raped.

Rape isn’t comparable to murder. It’s not quantifiable. And as a rape victim who has attempted suicide, I resent the fact that you’d even mention it all in such a flippant manner without any idea of the far-reaching effects that rape has in a person’s life. It takes so much more than hope to get past rape. My entire life, every relationship is scarred by one man’s actions. And I resent the man who tries to do the math on the exaggeration of how often college students are raped in a culture where rape already goes without enough proper treatment as it is.

There’s been a failure in communication here. Rape is absolutely awful. Speaking as someone who has not been raped, I cannot fathom the emotional turmoil which it puts someone though.

Then stop comparing it to murder.

But that’s not what I’m talking about here. A statistic is a number. Numbers are supposed to reflect reality, not value judgements. If I were trying to take action against bear attacks, I could say “1 in 5 people have been attacked by bears” and be totally wrong. Just because someone else points out that my statistic is BS doesn’t mean they are suggesting that bear attacks should be tolerated, or that the victims deserved it, or that it wasn’t an emotionally damaging experience. The only thing which is expressed by debunking by nonsense statistic is that my claims about reality are false; value judgements have not entered into the conversation at all.

This isn’t a value judgement. This is an directly pertinent fact about what defines rape. Is rape rape if it is unreported? Is it rape if the victim never even understands that they have been raped? Does rape need to be violent to be rape? Does a victim need to verbalize “no”? Does a victim need to fight back?

This directly effects the numbers that this man is working with because this hasn’t been defined for the majority of people and therefore many people are unsure about whether or not they have been raped.

Is that a value judgement? I’m talking about facts, too.

On the other hand, let’s suppose that you are right when you say that rape can’t be quantified because of unreported cases. If that’s true, then any statistic should be considered false. You can’t express a fact of reality of you don’t know it. Just making up an number is irresponsible and anti-intellectual, and thus counter-effective.

Statistic are hard to make on undefined subjects. How do you measure something you haven’t quite defined yet? And even if it is defined in some private manner, the public is still very unsure about what rape is, so any gathered numbers are ‘unreliable’. It’s irresponsible to minimalize the frequency of rape based on unreliable numbers. It’s anti-intellectual to believe that rape statistic can be summed up without a proper understanding of what rape IS. It’s counter-effective to dodge the responsibility of making ignorant comments on this subject with analogies to less murky subjects, such as bear attacks.

Although, I sympathize with anyone who has indeed been attack by a bear as I am sure that that is also terrible. I hope you get all the help you need.