A recent survey claims one Asian man in four admits to committing rape. Now someone has taken a critical look at these figures.
This study by the United Nations, no less, has been widely reported, widely quoted, and doubtless widely misquoted. As usual, the real story does not live up to the sensational headline. Today, the BBC published a slightly more critical evaluation than that of the usual suspects. Before we come to that though, let us ask a pertinent question, if a claim of this nature had been made about blacks, Moslems or even homosexuals, what would have been the media’s response? Yet because the finger was pointed at men in general and at a third or more of the planet’s male population in particular, the claim went unchallenged. All right, there is a problem with rape in India, and in Kenya, we get that.
Now let us look at the original report.
This document has 6 co-authors, 4 of them women. Emma Fulu graduated from Melbourne University, and her employment history includes “Gender Specialist In the Tsunami Recovery Program United Nations Population Fund”.
Xian Warner is likewise an alumnus of Melbourne University; on her Engagingmen.net webpage she endorses an article called Ten Things to End Rape Culture wherein we are told: “Rape is a standard result of a culture mired in misogyny, but for whatever reason—denial, self-preservation, sexism—Americans bend over backwards to make excuses for male violence.”
Stephanie Miedema has a page on the same website.
This so-called study is already beginning to look a bit suspect, isn’t it? A bit like asking Dr Goebbels to produce a report on the Talmud.
The fourth and last female author is Rachel Jewkes, who as a doctor with a degree in a real subject – medicine – might be expected to be less of an obvious airhead than the other three. Now to the report itself.
The Foreword begins “Violence against women constrains the enjoyment of women’s human rights everywhere. We know that it is a manifestation of power and control and a tool to maintain gender inequalities, disrupting the health, survival, safety and freedom of women and their families around the world.”
That is one massive sweeping statement; is violence against women really used to keep them in their place, as it were? Or is it used to facilitate robbery, rape and other unpleasant acts?
The survey itself is said to have involved more than 10,000 men and 3,000 women from various countries, including Bangladesh.
On page 3, we are told that in China, urban Bangladesh and all three Indonesian sites, around 2% of those surveyed reported having raped another man, most in addition to raping at least one woman. We are now in territory so far removed from the world in which most of us live that we must surely ask about the methodology used. If we recall that in spite of the lies and nonsense of Alfred Kinsey and his acolytes, the homosexual population is around 1-2% at most (except apparently for Manchester’s Gay Village and the San Francisco Bay Area), this amounts to a de facto claim that all or nearly all homosexuals and bisexuals are rapists. What are the alternatives?
As with the rest of the study, they are that the whole thing is a total crock, or that the people answering the questions did not understand what they were being asked.
Back to politics, and on page 11 we are told: “The Commission affirms that violence against women and girls is rooted in historical and structural inequality in power relations between women and men, and persists in every country in the world...”
Table 2 lists “Items used to measure intimate partner violence” – which include:
“Insulted his partner”
“Belittled or humiliated his partner in front of other people”
“Prohibited his partner from getting a job...” – this is called economic abuse, but is it rape?
In view of the more serious admissions, one is tempted to ask how many arrests were made as a result of this survey?
The BBC’s report has already raised other questions about its methodology, doubtless men’s rights activists and others will do the same in more detail in due course.
For those of you who may be confused, here is a short audio – from YouTube – that looks at rape statistics from a Western perspective. The author takes apart one of the key studies that gave rise to the feminist myth of American rape culture, the 1985 Ms magazine survey.
It is of course possible that the men of Bangladesh and elsewhere have a greater proclivity to sexual violence than Americans of all races. Clearly there are serious problems, not with rape culture, but with attitudes towards women in some countries. It does though seem extremely unlikely that a substantial percentage of Asian men are rapists or even serial rapists, the mere fact that this obviously politically motivated study yields results that are so at odds with accepted norms is surely proof positive of that.
[The above article was published originally November 2, 2013.]
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