Scapegoating refugees for political advantage continues

[trigger warning]

So the news today is reporting that the Home Affairs Committee has described the news that 40% of asylum cases since 2006 have been given leave to stay in the UK as an "amnesty".

Well, of course they do. The idea that it's even remotely possible that anywhere near 40% of asylum claims might actually be justified is hardly going to be considered by politicians who view "immigrants" as a convenient scapegoat for all the country's ills.

Cue the usual comments from the usual suspects about "illegal immigration" and "overstaying visas" - none of which apply to asylum claims that are pending a decision, but it's useful to that argument to pretend all immigrants are coming over here to take our jobs and claim our benefits - and how the government hasn't yet succeeded in building a ten-mile high wall around the country to keep those nasty foreigners out. Except the white English-speaking ones, of course.

The idea that people might actually be claiming asylum because they face persecution and possibly death in their original country seems irrelevant - and with large parts of the world being unstable - indeed, with the UK playing its part in keeping large parts of the world unstable - the idea that 40% or more of claims might be justified doesn't seem unreasonable.

Given that the [trigger warning] deportation of LGB asylum seekers back to Uganda and other unsafe countries continues, despite assurances from the government that it wouldn't, it seems there's a very strong case that the UK isn't being generous enough when it comes to saving people's lives.

Journalists downplay rape prevalence in DR Congo

[trigger warning]

Several news sources are reporting on this study on rape prevalence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The headlines are all along the lines of "48 rapes per hour" or "1100 rapes a day". Here's the BBC article.

My first thought on reading the headline? "That's really low." Somewhere between study, press release and news article, they've lost some really important details.

The "shocking" figure they quote is - while absolutely terrible - only a fraction of the real problem.

The UK is a similar size to the DRC, in terms of population (62 million and 67 million respectively). Going from British Crime Survey data, my low bound for the number of rapes annually in the UK is around 200,000. It's a low estimate because the BCS data doesn't cover children or people aged 60 or over, but it gives a rough estimate.

The reporting claims the figure for the DRC to be around 400,000. Worse, even accounting for the slightly higher population, but not much worse.

"UK: 20 rapes every hour, study finds" would be an equally accurate headline (and perhaps expressing it like that might shock a few people into action).

The figure for the DRC is considerably higher - not just twice as bad as the UK

1. The study, according to the article, only covers women and girls aged 15-49. Like the BCS, that misses out a lot of people (and, indeed, the authors of the study acknowledge this)
2. The figure of just over 400,000 is not how many rapes occurred, but how many women were raped in the last 12 months. Like the BCS, it doesn't measure multiple victimisation. Given that the lifetime estimate is only four times higher, there must be a lot of multiple victimisation going on.
3. They also note a figure of over 3 million women experiencing "intimate partner sexual violence", though the abstract doesn't say whether this is lifetime or annual. It's not quite clear how this figure relates to the initial count, but from the Guardian reporting it seems to be a separate figure, and includes yet more rapes. Not at all surprising - but imagine how much better the UK's figures would look if they only counted stranger rapes; now think about what that implies for the DRC figures.
4. Unlike the BCS, the figures this study were based on don't appear to have had the same effort put into avoiding reporting stigma (Dr Peterman explicitly mentions this as a cause of underestimation).

Add all that together and this study is still a massive underestimate.

It's also a big increase on previous estimates - which says a lot about those estimates.

That rate is significantly higher than the previous estimate of 16,000 rapes reported in one year by the UN.

If anyone at the UN actually believed that figure - again, only about twice the number reported in the UK - to be remotely accurate, they would have been congratulating the DRC on its successful strategies against sexual violence. Clearly, no-one actually did - the UN staff are not naive! But again, it's measuring something completely different - and the DRC government points out that the difference between the two figures is due to reporting and collection, not a change in the number of actual rapes.

But I don't think the journalists get just how high rape prevalence is in countries like the UK, or they wouldn't print things like (BBC):

The highest numbers of rapes were found in war-ravaged North Kivu, where an average of 67 women out of 1,000 have been raped at least once.

...which, back of envelope, makes North Kivu noticeably safer than the UK. Or it could be - as the authors of the study state - a severe underestimate.

If UK journalists - and the public as a whole - were actually aware how many rapes took place in their own country, then they might not have to have the obvious underestimates here pointed out to them - underestimates that make the DRC's problems with rape look nowhere near as bad as they actually are.

In an effort to get the reporting to be more accurate, here's the message I sent to BBC Complaints - I also sent a similar one to the Guardian regarding their article (to reader@guardian.co.uk). I didn't even get into the extra 3 million, since I wanted to keep the initial complaint short. I'll mention it if they get back to me.

Dear Editors,

Your article reported that "A study by US scientists has concluded that an average of 48 women and girls are raped every hour in the Democratic Republic of Congo.". The study actually concludes something far worse than this - the figure of 400,000 a year from which the hourly rate is derived is the number of women and girls raped at least once in the last twelve months. Dividing this into hours forgets that many will be raped far more than just once. Furthermore it ignores the statements made - and reported on - by Dr Amber Peterman that the estimate from their study is likely to be a significant underestimate.

This becomes obvious when you consider the comparable rate for the UK. The British Crime Survey finds that around 70,000 people between the ages of 16 and 59 have been raped at least once in the last twelve months. Studies on multiple victimisation suggest that many rape victims are raped more than once, for an estimate of around 200,000 rapes each year in the UK - or around 20 every hour.

Similarly, your article gives a lifetime victimisation rate for the worst area - North Kivu - of 67 in 1,000 - a rate that is actually somewhat less bad than the equivalent rate for women in the UK.

I'm not suggesting that rape in the UK is as prevalent as it is in the DRC - though "UK: 20 rapes every hour, studies show" is a horrifying statistic in its own right - but by doing a simple division your headline and article actually hides the true scale of the problem in the DRC.

Please correct the article - especially the headline and lede paragraph - to better reflect the original study.

Yours faithfully

[me]

Collecting and interpreting rape statistics

[trigger warning]

Since some of this isn't completely obvious, and so I want to write this down for my own use later if nothing else, here's a post on the difficulties of collecting statistics on the prevalence of rape. A lot of this applies, in other forms, to collecting statistics on just about anything that happens to humans, but because it's working against privileged structures, statistics about rape get criticised more for the same inevitable problems.

A lot of the problems aren't as important as they're made out to be, though, from the point of view of having useful statistics. (Furthermore, despite the problems, the statistics are all relatively consistent to within an order of magnitude)

I'm discussing the problems here from the perspective of statistics on victims; statistics on perpetrators have basically the same sort of problems.

Definitions

The first difficulty is that the colloquial and legal definitions of rape vary considerably. Colloquially rape is sex without consent. Legally, this could be any of "rape", "assault by penetration", "sexual assault" or "legal". Furthermore, the same sexual activity could be rape if A does not consent, but "only" sexual assault if A consents and B does not, because of the asymmetry in the law discussing penetration.

This is to an extent an inevitable problem with the law. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 defines "rape" and "assault by penetration" very precisely. Everything else, whether it would generally be considered rape or not, is "sexual assault". This matters, because the maximum sentence for sexual assault is ten years, whereas rape and assault by penetration have life sentences. Providing a loophole-free legal definition of rape is the same problem as providing a loophole-free definition of sex and adding "without consent" to the end of it.

Add to this the "reasonable belief" exemption in law that means many things that the victim will call rape the law will call "legal" or "no crime".

The problem comes, then, when you try to do any sort of measures of prevalence. People will correctly say that they were raped when it wasn't rape in legal terms. There seems to be some attempt to deal with this in the British Crime Survey's figures on sexual assault, which split "serious sexual assaults" (which include rape and assault by penetration) away from "less serious" (indecent exposure, sexual touching, sexual threats, etc: note that "sexual touching" is in law the same crime as raping someone by forcing them to penetrate you)

If you classify according to the strict legal definition, then you inevitably lose quite a few rapes in there buried in the sexual assault and no crime categories. If you classify according to the colloquial definition, then it becomes much harder to do comparisions with the statistics produced by the criminal justice system (and apologists will claim that your statistics are worthless because they don't only include government-approved rapes)

There's also a question of whether to include the "attempted" types of crimes within the statistics. I think that one should, because the difference between the two is largely down to random circumstances, and either way there's a rapist to apprehend: that they didn't get quite as far as raping this victim (but far enough to make it clear that they were going to try) shouldn't be considered.

Reporting

The second problem is that being a victim of rape has an extremely strong stigma associated with it, and even if it didn't, as a traumatic act it's something that some victims block out of their minds. (Associated with this, misconceptions about consent aren't just confined to rapists, so it's common for people not to define what was done to them as rape until much later, even though they're dealing with the psychological consequences immediately)

So it becomes very difficult to find out if people have been raped by surveying them. The British Crime Survey tries to do this by asking questions about actions rather than about legal definitions, and this does help - around twice as many people will say that someone did [action(s) constituting rape] to them than will say that someone raped them. However, you then inevitably have the situation that the survey is only as good as the questions are exhaustive (and even then despite good methodology people may decline to answer).

We can use the surveys to establish some upper and lower bounds, at least. The 2009/10 BCS data gives 0.4% of women and 0.1% of men, in the preceding year, have been subject to rape, assault by penetration, "serious sexual assault" and/or an attempt at either. We can't necessarily scale up from this to a lifetime prevalence (if we for simplicity assume the likelihood of being raped doesn't change with age¹ it gives a likelihood of 17.6% of women and 4.4% of men, not all of whom will be raped in the legal sense).

The NSPCC survey (page 66 onwards) gives figures for sexual violence of around 27% for girls, 16% reporting that they were pressured into intercourse (6% with physical force). There's no particular attempt to match these up to legal categories, but it's obvious here that the risk to 13-16 year old girls (not varying much by age within that) is considerably higher than the average risk for the 16-59 year old adults covered by the BCS. The NSPCC survey notes that figures between 4% and 78% have been found by other surveys of children, with - as with adults - there being a significant gender split in perpetrators and victims.

Meanwhile the Havens survey says that 41% of 18-25 year old Londoners have felt pressured into unwanted sex. 9% of women in the sample had said no and been ignored, and 25% of women (almost certainly a strongly overlapping set) had said nothing and been ignored².

Measuring the legal system

It's relatively easy, within the provisos of the definition problems, to get statistics on the legal process - convictions, prosecutions, arrests, reports. Relying solely on those statistics is a mistake: the attrition rate from report to conviction has worsened considerably since the 1970s, while the number of convictions has increased. What's happening is that rapes that wouldn't previously have been reported - and marital rapes that were legal until 1991, for that matter - are now being reported ... and the justice system hasn't caught up.

There isn't any comparable prevalence survey going back that far - the BCS only started asking about sexual violence in 2004 - but despite everything, and despite appearances, the justice system is probably better now (with its 90%+ attrition rate, and widely reported failings) than it was in the 1970s with a much lower attrition rate - because most of the attrition was occuring before reporting.

Measures from the justice system aren't useful for measuring incidence of rape, but they are useful for measuring the (in)effectiveness of the justice system (and hopefully improving it). It's important, however, to note that the definitions problem makes it very difficult to compare prevalence statistics with justice system statistics (which makes getting meaningful figures about reporting rates - beyond "very low" - very difficult indeed).

Another problem is that the categorisations used for reporting and police activity - the report to charge stage - use one set of categories (managed by the Home Office), but the categories at the charge to conviction stages use a different set (managed by the Ministry of Justice). This makes sense, because the police often won't know exactly what crime has occurred until after they've investigated, whereas the CPS and courts do know the details of the charges, but it makes comparisions tricky. Kelly, Lovett and Regan's attrition study dealt with this by following cases right through the report to conviction process (or as far through the process as they got, anyway).

The need for statistics

On the one hand, it doesn't really matter at this stage. It's very clear from the statistics that the (lifetime) chances of being raped (in the colloquial sense) are somewhere between 1 in 20 and 1 in 2 for women (and most probably around the 1 in 4 figure generally quoted), and lower (but still probably higher than most people would guess) for men. Wherever it falls within that range, it's still a massive problem (we view murder as a serious problem at the far lower 1 in 1000³ lifetime prevalence, and rape is sentenced similarly)

On the other hand, if it's not to remain a problem, there's a need for accurate statistics to monitor things over time, so that it's possible to tell if actions to deal with the problem (by bringing rapists to justice and more importantly because we don't have space for all of them by educating people so they don't become rapists).

Fortunately, for the purposes of accuracy, it doesn't matter than much exactly what definitions you use, as long as you're consistent over time. You'll always only be asking about - and being told about - a particular subset of sexual violence, but you should be able to measure trends in it. The way that rape culture works, it's vanishingly unlikely that one particular form of sexual violence that you're surveying will disappear or expand while the rest remain unchanged.

As long as you remember that changes in methodology are likely to give changes in result significantly larger than any change in the underlying facts, then changes can be seen (and yes, this means sticking with methodology you know is flawed, at least until you've run it in parallel with the improvements for a few survey cycles to see what difference it makes).

A final thing to note - and bear with me here - is that accuracy can be overrated. For year-to-year comparisions about the scale of the problem, a repeatable survey that's not too vulnerable to random noise is needed. For surveys to establish the existence of a problem within a particular context, it's not. There was a recent NUS Women's Campaign survey looking at female university students' experience of sexual violence, which gave the predictable results. It wasn't at all statistically sound: self-selected sample, no attempt to normalise it demographically, massive difference in response rates between universities, etc. but that doesn't actually matter for establishing the existence of the problem.

Now, if universities were to take the NUS survey seriously and start doing (actually useful⁴) things to reduce sexual violence on campus, then a survey less sensitive to random noise would be needed. But if they were going to take it seriously they'd fund their own surveys for that purpose, and if they're not going to take it seriously a "yes, this is still a problem, what did you expect?" survey is all that's needed.

Footnotes

¹ I believe it decreases with age, but I don't have the figures for that.

² This brings us back to definitions. Silence is not consent, but the law usually takes it as such. But you'd never find out about this set of colloquial rapes/sexual assaults if you didn't ask that specific question.

³ Massive variation with gender, cis/trans status, age, race, class, sexuality, disability, location, etc. As a society we don't view the elevated number of murders of certain non-default individuals as a problem, even if the murder rate as a whole is considered a problem.

⁴ Putting up "have you considered not getting raped?" posters, for instance, is fairly common and massively counter-productive.