Hey do you want to watch something that will make you want to put a nail through your skull? Okay, then go ahead and watch this newest video from the Huffington Post:
If you didn't watch it, a summary is that girls are excited to get letters of "unacceptance" from colleges that detail that they are going to get raped in college. The girls in the video act so happy and surprised like you would to a normal acceptance letter, which is what really makes this video absolute horse turds. While it was probably intentional, the whole tone of the video is, "YAY! Rape!", and, "YOU'RE GONNA GET RAPED!"
Holy. Sh*t. Let's take a step back and actually evaluate some of those statistics.
So 1 in 5 women are raped in college (supposedly) and 1 in 16 men as well. That's a lot if that's true. To put this in perspective, there are currently 10 million enrolled in higher level education in the United States. So if that statistic is true, that means 2 million of those women are raped. If that were true we would have a legit serious rape epidemic. Rapes wouldn't even be given coverage in the news warn citizens of what was going on, there would just be a little tally box that said, "Number of rapes yesterday: X,XXX".
The problem is, this statistic comes from a survey that counted many non-rape things (like having pity sex or sex while buzzed) as rape. There's a glaring difference between hooking up with someone you wish you hadn't and being violently forced against your will to do sexual acts. It also had a very small sample size that included only two universities and a high non-response population. I could go into more specifics but authors at the USA Today and Time have already done so.
Point is, rape is a heinous crime. And who keeps track of heinous crimes? The US Department of Justice.
According to the US Department of Justice, the rate of rape and sexual assault for college students that are women ages 18-24 is 4.3/1000 in 2013. That's 0.43% of college attending women.
"But hold up", you might say, "most rapes aren't reported to the police". That's true. According to the same survey, about 80% of college women do not report their assaults to the police. So that 0.43% should be adjusted to 1.72%.
Now the point is that is STILL too high, but 1.72% is nearly 12 times less than the commonly stated statistic.
However, there is a silver lining to all of this: Students are less likely to be raped and the number of rapes is declining.
While there are still too many victims out there, and we need to bring these statistics down to zero, it shows that things are getting better. Even if the Huffington Post wants to use scare tactics to say they aren't.
So how about instead of treating humans like some statistic and purposely inflating them to make headlines, we start helping victims more and progress more as a society to not accept violence, whether sexual or not, against human beings.
Oh yeah, and one more thing, F**K YOU HP for doing this kind of sh*t:
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