(including unreported rapes and attempted rapes, which may be as many as or more than the number reported to police).
New DOJ Crime Data Released: Rate of Sexual Violence Well Below Record Rates of Early-1990s http://www.rainn.org/... RAINN's website states that 1 in 6 women and 1 in 33 men will be raped during their lifetimes.
RAPE-RATE STILL CATASTROPHIC
An estimated 248,300 rapes in 2007: five and one half times the 41,057 auto-related deaths. For 305,986,357 US population 2007, those DOJ stats pencil out to about 81.15 rapes of persons 12 years and older per 100,000 population that year. For 65 years of a 77-year life expectancy, assuming that rate doesn't drop further because nothing more is done to inhibit rape and an average national population of 350,000,000, that would be about 18.5 million victims, or perhaps 1 in 12 women and 1 in 65 men (just back-of-envelope figuring). Is a reduced level of evil acceptable? No.
We might be surprised to learn where America's rape pandemic is most entrenched. Check below the fold.
RAPE IS A MAJOR PROBLEM IN TROUBLED INNER CITIES
For Detroit, with 916,952 population in 2007 (est.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/... my DOJ-derived estimate of 81.15 rapes and attempted rapes per 100,000 population would mean at least 744 rapes (including both reported and unreported). Per the FBI, Detroit reported 593 forcible rapes in 2006 http://www.fbi.gov/... .
(Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/... for appropriate condemnation of misleading comparisons of crime in big and small cities.)
RAPE IS A MAJOR PROBLEM IN AFFLUENT SMALL CITIES
For my affluent hometown of Lafayette, Indiana (population 60,859 in 2006), the just-released DOJ estimates would have predicted 49 reported and unreported rapes in 2007. In 2006, FBI got a report of 45 forcible rapes from Lafayette http://www.fbi.gov/... with another 30 reported for the rest of the Lafayette SMSA, which includes ethanol-enriched farmers and blue-collar automotive plant workers in Tippecanoe and Clinton counties, the smaller cities of West Lafayette and Frankfort, and 40,000 Purdue students.
Rape is evil. The 593 rapes reported from the troubled city of Detroit and the 45 reported from the fortunate city of Lafayette Indiana are both hellish numbers.
WHAT TO DO TO GREATLY REDUCE RAPE?
In fact Lafayette had a higher rate per capita of reported rapes than Detroit, which is 15 times Lafayette's size but had only 12 times as many reported rapes. I don't want even to begin to check out possible ethnic, religious, class, or "racial" explanations for that surprising anomaly. And such answers don't strike me as relevant to meeting the challenge of America's rape pandemic.
How much social spending -- governmental, charitiable, religious, corporate -- should be undertaken to compensate and heal the victims? I consider that a pertinent public policy question. My own surmise is that communities like Lafayette are better able to finance such programs than financially desperate cities like Detroit, so federal aid should be targetted preponderately on such inner cities.
What should the spending be on? There must be lots of ideas out there among humanist and feminist Kossackians as to what are important categories. I would start with foundation and state film office aid for independent filmmakers to make films showing respectful, loving relationships between couples (and not just heterosexual gentrifying or suburban yuppies).
Suggestions, please.
STUDENT RAPE MAY BE ONLY ONE-TENTH AS FREQUENT AS IN THE GENERAL POPULATION. IS IT BEING REPORTED MORE, OR COULD IT BE GROWING?
I surmise there is only about one-tenth as much sexual violence occurring among students as among the general population. This is a surmise -- based on actual data from Purdue University and Lafayette Indiana police -- and does not even begin to be enough for a generalization. (Of course, these two intermingled Indiana populations may be outliers, but I suspect not.)
The police of Purdue University's West Lafayette Indiana campus reported 9 rapes (6 of the 9 were in one year) and 1 attempted rape between 2005 and June 2008. That pencils out to 2.86 rapes or attempted rapes per year on this 40,000 student campus, or 7.14 rapes or attempted rapes per 100,000 students, less than 8.8% of the 81.15 assaults per 100,000 rate for the general population). For Purdue stats click on http://www.purdue.edu/... then click on "Crime Statistics At A Glance" for a spread sheet.
In 1994, Purdue Professor Eugene Kanin published a controversial study of falsely-reported rapes in an unnamed 70,000 population midwestern city for the years 1978 - 1987, and found that 45 of 109 cases were false chargings, according to Salon.com contributor Cathy Young http://dir.salon.com/... (writing in 1999, when horndoggery mattered more). Kanin (now retired) didn't report the ultimate dispostion of the 64 cases which the police kept on their books and fully investigated, leaving himself open to criticism for not estimating unreported rapes, amply but inconclusively discussed in Young's article and recapitulated in teacherken's Rape diary. Kanin also found that charges were withdrawn in 32 of 64 reported college-campus rapes for two universities of comparable size to Purdue. That left 32 rapes on the books of the police forces (who used female investigators, and avoided lie detector) for the two campuses, or 1.6 rapes on the books per campus per year. If Purdue experience from 1978 - 1987 was also on the order of 1.6 rapes per year, its current rate of 2.8 of rapes and attempted rapes per year would be a near-doubling, although it may be that more such assaults are being reported.