Trivializing rape (at taxpayers’ expense, natch)

Amy Alkon links a report from Christine Hoff Sommers about how the CDC has dramatically inflated the number of rape cases, by asking questions about activities having nothing to do with rape, then tallying the answers to facilitate the following absurd conclusion:

“More than 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.”

Really? One out of every 3.5 of this blog’s readers? Do tell.

Here’s the “methodology”:

It found them by defining sexual violence in impossibly elastic ways and then letting the surveyors, rather than subjects, determine what counted as an assault. Consider: In a telephone survey with a 30 percent response rate, interviewers did not ask participants whether they had been raped. Instead of such straightforward questions, the CDC researchers described a series of sexual encounters and then they determined whether the responses indicated sexual violation. A sample of 9,086 women was asked, for example, “When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you?” A majority of the 1.3 million women (61.5 percent) the CDC projected as rape victims in 2010 experienced this sort of “alcohol or drug facilitated penetration.”

What does that mean? If a woman was unconscious or severely incapacitated, everyone would call it rape. But what about sex while inebriated? Few people would say that intoxicated sex alone constitutes rape — indeed, a nontrivial percentage of all customary sexual intercourse, including marital intercourse, probably falls under that definition (and is therefore criminal according to the CDC).

Other survey questions were equally ambiguous. Participants were asked if they had ever had sex because someone pressured them by “telling you lies, making promises about the future they knew were untrue?” All affirmative answers were counted as “sexual violence.” Anyone who consented to sex because a suitor wore her or him down by “repeatedly asking” or “showing they were unhappy” was similarly classified as a victim of violence. The CDC effectively set a stage where each step of physical intimacy required a notarized testament of sober consent.

This now explains something that amazed and puzzled me a couple of years ago. When a friend was in the hospital after a stroke, an officious woman with a clipboard came into his room and started peppering him with what he thought were bizarre and intrusive personal questions.

One was, “Has anyone ever pressured you into having sex?”

This made him angry, and he asked her to leave. He later learned it was a survey. I guess if he had answered “yes,” he’d have been counted as among the rape victims.

What is going on is, simply, insane.

But insanity has become officialized routine. It’s all too easy to dismiss it out of hand as crazy, or to ask rhetorical questions such as “Why do people put up with this shit?” As if ordinary people have any say.

Too bad, because ordinary people have the right to vote, but the people who are enforcing all of this insanity are not elected, and the biggest problem is this:

They are not going away, no matter who is elected.