Statistics are like Rorschach tests; they can be made to reveal anything at all.
When I posted my blog on Rolling Stone’s mis-reporting of the University of Virginia campus rape story, the public was still absorbing the shock of the magazine having, possibly for the second time, let Sabrina Erdely engage in the worst kind of fake journalism. Since then, matters have only become more complicated, with the possibility that Erdely may have even published the story without the permission of the woman referred to as “Jackie,” and a conservative commentator has apparently now published her real name. More recently, the friends who, according to Erdely, actively discouraged Jackie” from reporting the group rape have now come forward and revealed that, in fact, not only did they try to support her but also found several holes in her story.
Even as a long-time critic of sex panics and sex offender registries, it gives me no pleasure to know that the Rolling Stone story might be entirely or partially fabricated. It gives me no pleasure to know that a leading and presumably profitable magazine chose to not adhere to the most basic principles of reporting. My entire freelance career has been based in small, sometimes tiny, independent and alternative publications, with beleaguered editors paid far, far less than what I’ll assume Rolling Stone pays its staff; not one of them would have let this shitty piece fly.
There is no mystery here. Contrary to what the magazine’s apology states, Rolling Stone did not decide to honour Jackie’s request to not contact her assailants because it was “trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault.” Bullshit. First, nothing, nothing allows a publication to skirt the most basic rule of reporting: contact all sides. Second, let us, please, consider what I think is the real reason Rolling Stone went ahead with this story: it saw a huge moneymaker in this tawdry, sensationalistic piece, and was interested in nothing but eyeballs, subscriptions, and advertising. For proof, look no further than its ridiculous (and heavily criticised) description of the actual rape scene. Consider the lurid, overblown images by John Ritter, complete with the most simplistic iconography, like a bra lying on the floor of what we presume to be a frat house, surrounded by several male legs and several empty plastic cups, all of which screams, “This is what campus rape looks like!” The whole piece reads and looks like a comic book version of a Liam Neeson movie about sex trafficking, complete with bad dialogue and impossible scenarios.
If there is one glimmer of hope in this ridiculous mess, it is that, perhaps, perhaps, this will at least make people question the veracity of hundreds and thousands of similar stories, not just about campus rape but about sex trafficking, child prostitution — really, anything at all concerned with sex, women, and children.
Ironically for those of us who have tried for years to beat back the tide of erroneous and overblown hysterical narratives around sex crimes, this might finally be a window of opportunity to move in and get people to pay attention to not only the deeply faulty narrative frameworks of such stories, but the misleading and often made-up statistics on which they’re based.
In, “Feminism Can Handle the Truth,” Judith Levine analyses the UVA story by deftly rounding up a brief history of how certain feminist writers simply got numbers and analyses wrong. She points to Jessica Valenti’s assertion in an earlier piece on the Woody Allen-Dylan Farrow case:
“We know one in five girl children are sexually assaulted,” Valenti said, arguing that all sexual abuse accusers be believed “en masse.” No, we do not know this. Estimates of child sexual abuse vary wildly—along with its definition—from 1.2 per 1,000 children, based on studies of one-year periods, to as high as 280 per 1,000, as reported by adults recalling childhood experiences.
In her expansive piece, “The College Rape Overcorrection,” Emily Youffe swiftly takes apart the infamous “one in five” (as in, one in five college women will be raped) statistic that has been used to prop up what Levine and many others are pointing to as a disastrous overstretching of campus rules around “affirmative consent.” That number, Youffe writes, was generated “from a 2007 study funded by the National Institute of Justice, called the Campus Sexual Assault Study, or CSA.
But, as Youffe writes,
There are approximately 12 million female college students in the U.S. (There are about 9 million males.) I asked the lead author of the study, Christopher Krebs, whether the CSA represents the experience of those millions of female students. His answer was unequivocal: “We don’t think one in five is a nationally representative statistic.” It couldn’t be, he said, because his team sampled only two schools. “In no way does that make our results nationally representative,” Krebs said. And yet President Obama used this number to make the case for his sweeping changes in national policy.
Youffe dismantles other number-bending studies as well, and I encourage everyone to read both her and Levine if they’d like to some sober, somber, and extremely revealing research and analyses that go beyond the usual knee-jerk liberal cries of eternal rape everywhere.
But, as expected, Valenti and her ilk are choosing to ignore the troubling matter of such hyperbolically misguided campaigns based on insufficient data.
As Roger Lancaster, whose book Sex Panic and the Punitive State should be required reading in all gender studies and sexuality classes, wrote in a recent Facebook post:
With the unraveling of the Rolling Stone article, liberal feminists are campaigning to shore up their gains; they’re worried that the inflated rape statistics they floated to create the impression of a national emergency— prodding sweeping laws and rules like affirmative consent — will now come under question. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what ought to happen. (It won’t. the White House has already enrolled in the campaign, and its autocratically imposed rules are probably irreversible.)
Statistics, man.
A modern-day version of The Graduate would include these lines, “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Statistics. There’s a great future in statistics.”
No, really, think about it, as Mr. McGuire would put it. Since the 1970s, shortly after the release of The Graduate, the Prison Industrial Complex has ballooned, exploded, and expanded. New measures like the long-sought-after hate crime legislation named after Matthew Shepard and James Byrd (though few know who the latter was), various punitive and damaging anti-trafficking bills, ramped up laws to entrap and imprison and sex offender registries have all depended on the shoddy use of statistics.
For instance: It was once predicted that no fewer than 40,000 women would be trafficked into South Africa, forced into sex work. In reality? None. Despite the statistics having been solidly debunked, different versions still crop up regularly before nearly every major sporting event.
Mira Sorvino, who was once famous for playing, well, actually, a sex worker, went on to a second career campaigning against child sex trafficking which, she claimed, was so rampant that she even feared for her own daughter. In reality, the math around child sex trafficking is fuzzy at best, and the claims of exploitation are muddied. I’ve attended numerous conferences where politicians and sheriffs have showed up with those they claim are such victims, young people clearly compelled to vomit out tales that hint at sex slavery and worse. But anyone listening with any attention to detail could tell that their stories were more about the intersections of of dire poverty, forced migration, and people, including children, being forced to find work, any work, to survive.
Not surprisingly, authorities never let the purported victims talk to members of the press, ostensibly to protect them but really in order that there not be too much probing into the details. Except for the rare and brave exceptions like Debbie Nathan, journalists generally are content to uncritically repeat the stories they’re fed by authorities. One of the lesser-known aspects of the hysteria and policing around sex trafficking is that women and children and, on occasion, men, are compelled to iterate narratives of victimhood and forced trafficking if they are to gain any clemency from the state, and they are often compelled to turn in the very people who might have helped them find a footing in the country and declare them abusers. This is, of course, not to say that true victims and traffickers do not exist, but as many of us have written, often, the issues underlying the exploitation of people — the economic degradation of entire countries in the global south, for instance — are often conveniently ignored and even bolstered with sex trafficking hysteria.
Narratives about beautiful, dark-haired women being raped and children being passed around as sexual toys are not only pornographic in origin, as I’ve written here, but perpetuate the idea that entire nations need to be punished and abandoned, only to be filled in by the healing powers of US-led neoliberal policies. What is ultimately called for in narratives of rescue, whether about sex trafficking or the need for white people to adopt more black and brown babies, is a neoliberal domination that is also often racialised.
And yet, out of such shoddy reporting and shady government presentations emerge these WILD! Shocking! True! stories with yet more fictitious statistics. The infamous End Demand campaign, for instance, insisted that eighty-five percent of sex workers have suffered from childhood sexual abuse. That number came out of a 1991 report produced by the Council for Prostitution Alternatives in Portland, Oregon. That organisation no longer exists, and I’m currently trying to track down both the original report and the story behind how CPA came to that number. The same report apparently claims that seventy percent of prostitutions have experienced incest. What is remarkable about these numbers is that they have no link to what we might consider a general population of people, including those who are not sex workers. Is there a direct correlation between childhood sexual abuse and incest and sex work? Does this mean that everyone who has suffered from such is automatically a sex worker? If not, how does the report account for the fact that many people who have suffered childhood sexual abuse do not end up doing sex work? In the end, we have to ask, what is the exact relevance of people in sex work having suffered prior sexual abuse and incest?
Statistics are like Rorschach tests; they can be made to reveal anything at all. Most people don’t bother digging around to find out the facts behind them, and with official-sounding organisations like the “Council for Prostitution Alternatives,” they often have little reason (or the time) to do so. In an increasingly transnational culture of obsession with rape and sexual violence, statistics about sex are like human flesh to zombies, regurgitated in a shorthand of the mindless.
The Rolling Stone story was birthed in an environment where false statistics about the pervasiveness of “rape culture,” about which I’ve been critical in this interview, are circulated and recirculated uncritically by media outlets eager to increase page views and reluctant to question authorities and supposed experts for fear of losing access. In such a scenario, even the most unlikely scenarios get full play.
Bur for now, liberal feminists who keep insisting on the veracity of trumped-up statistics are doing so partly because they stand to gain monetary and cultural cachet (the latter usually translates into the former). Writers like Valenti are frequent paid speaking guests at various events, and their willingness to hurl uncomplicated missives and judgements about sexual abuse, all of which are encapsulated in media-ready quotable one-liners, increases the frequency with which warped messages are disseminated. The same is true of academic researchers like Danielle Dirks, who exist in a professional world where simply teaching publishing in obscure journals is no longer enough: they must prove their worth as “public intellectuals” and “thought leaders” and appear as frequently as possibly in the pages of publications like the New York Times.
There is, thus, an economic incentive for liberal feminists to keep perpetuating harmful myths about sexual abuse. But there is also a larger and perhaps more insidious confabulation going on here. The likes of Valenti and Dirks have based entire careers on supposedly irrefutable evidence that is now fraying at the edges, but they have no choice at this point but to keep moving forward with the fictions they have had such a stake in enshrining in public discourse. These liberal feminists are like horses tethered to a runaway train set to crash and explode at any moment. But, at this point, no liberal feminist can actually afford to even hint that she might have doubts about any story because to do so would bring an entire house of cards and their careers crashing down around them.
The Rolling Stone article is not an exception, but merely a symptom of a decades-long series spread over a media landscape where reporters have increasingly moved from initially simply reporting on bad numbers to now inserting them in fictitious stories. Campus rape happens to be the popular topic of the day, but in the past such excessively bad reporting has occurred in and around cases of Satanic abuse, sex trafficking, and sexual abuse by priests. It would be easy to simply point the finger at the press and make this all about “better standards.” It would be far more ethical for us all to question our own often salacious tendency to want to believe such far-fetched tales. Even if our impulse to believe is not a lascivious one, we might want to question our wretched inability to not question something as hideous and awful as rape. We might want to ask why and at what point did we decide that the mere accusation of such inevitably means that the accused is guilty and the accuser incapable of lying.
There are other problems here, and they have to do with a worrisome and deepening sense that sex, in order to be considered consensual at all, must only be played out in the most depoliticised, antiseptic, and mundane ways possible, its liberatory and darkest possibilities now shrouded in layers of narratives straight out of Romance fiction: roses, serenades, and the gentle lapping of ocean waves as bodies rise and fall in muted crescendos of gently rocking and mutually satisfying orgasms.
If we are interested in ending sexual violence, we might begin to consider the complicated circumstances around it, especially on sexual violence. Liberal feminists often ask the question, “Why would women lie?” Well, for plenty of reasons, and for often the same reasons that so many adults children have lied, so drastically and with such devastating results, in instances like the satanic abuse cases. At worst, Jackie went about deliberately and wilfully ruining several lives in a variety of ways by making up a lurid story. At best, this is a woman who went through something that night, but that something may also have been a result of someone desperately trying to find her place in the world and on a new campus (my piece on the particular culture of college sex is forthcoming). She may well have been taken advantage of but — and this is hard for too many feminists to read — being taken advantage of is not always the same as being assaulted (again, for more, see my forthcoming piece).
It may well turn out that Jackie needs help, that she needs to leave UVA for a period, and that she needs the most intensive and supportive kinds of counselling that the university and her supporters can provide. But I suspect that few of the liberal feminists will throw themselves behind the effort to actually find her help that goes far beyond simply agreeing with her en masse. Or, what is more likely, they will support this but also insist that this in no way implies that all such cases are fiction.
Of course it doesn’t. Anyone who has spent any time on campuses with fraternities can tell you that frat culture is probably one of the worst aspects of college and university life, breeding grounds for all kinds of exclusionary social hierarchies and filled with a drinking culture which practically makes bad to dangerous behaviour mandatory.
But the sad truth is that men, women, and children do in fact lie about sexual violence, and they lie for various and complicated reasons. Sometimes, let us be honest about this, they lie for profit or to malign someone, and sometimes, as in the cases of children in the satanic abuse cases, they are gently or forcefully coerced into lying.
Rather than insist that there is no such thing as a lie when it comes to something as serious as sexual violence, we ought to begin to take these accusations on a case by case basis. Rather than see them all as symptoms of “rape culture” that prove trumped up statistics, we ought to think more clearly about the accusations made. As Hannah Rosin put it recently,
Erdely said she called several universities but kept hearing typical stories about sexual violence. Then she called some activists and heard this sensational story about Jackie and gang rape. Maybe the lesson there is, if one story sounds so outlandishly different than the dozens of others you’ve heard, you shouldn’t decide to make it the centerpiece of your reporting. You should wonder why.
I would add here that the “you” should include readers as well, who have thus far, frankly, largely failed to push back against the most lurid accounts fed to them by the press for years. This, I suspect, is where the supposedly unimpeachable statistics come into play. When an assistant professor of sociology at Occidental College repeats the “one in five” statistic in the New York Times, as Dirks did, there is, in a sense, no real reason for readers to question that fact. And the preponderance of such numbers being circulated by “experts” makes it easier to believe that, if so many rapes happen on an ongoing basis, surely it makes sense that someone would, eventually, face as horrific even if improbable attacks as the one supposedly suffered by Jackie.
Perhaps the time has come for all statistics in reports and opinions to be accompanied by the sort of disclaimers that accompany advertisements for anti-depressants. You know the ads I mean: sad images of people walking under dark clouds, and then, after taking the medication, voila, suddenly transforming into happy figures dancing in the sunlight. Only at the end do we hear that quickly and breathlessly intoned warning: “This product may cause tingling, heart attacks, diarrhoea, or death.”
Perhaps it’s time that articles relying on statistics on sexual violence are accompanied by the words, “This piece is based on slender facts, heavy mythologising, hearsay, conjecture, and, oh, heck, just plain lies.”
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