We are going to start in the middle of the pack and start off with the abuse of statistics when making an argument. The title of where we got this information is forgotten but it is a post created by MM. Let’s just get to it.
An estimated 91% of victims of rape & sexual assault are female and 9% male. Nearly 99% of perpetrators are male.
1 in 4 women in the UK have been subject to sexual assault since turning 16 (double the rate of male victims). 98% of people arrested for sexual assault are men.
It has been said that you can prove just about any point by using statistics. Everyone uses them to bring credibility and support to their arguments. Christians do it, unbelievers do it and we have also done it in the past.
Statistics do help but there is a weakness with this data. They only tell part of the story. They do not reveal the mitigating factors that lead to these issues. For example, the figure 99% of the rapists are male. Is this true? We do not know as 99.5% of the men do not reveal they have been raped by a woman.
According to new research, sexual victimization by women is more common than gender stereotypes would suggest.
Two years ago, Lara Stemple, the director of UCLA’s Health and Human Rights Law Project, came upon a statistic that surprised her: In incidents of sexual violence reported to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 38 percent of victims were men––a figure much higher than in prior surveys. Intrigued, she began to investigate: Was sexual violence against men more common than previously thought? (source)
and
The results were surprising. For example, the CDC’s nationally representative data revealed that over one year, men and women were equally likely to experience nonconsensual sex, and most male victims reported female perpetrators. (source)
and
Also surprisingly, women inmates are more likely to be abused by other inmates than are male inmates, disrupting the long held view that sexual violence in prison is mainly about men assaulting men. In juvenile corrections facilities, female staff are also a much more significant threat than male staff; more than nine in ten juveniles who reported staff sexual victimization were abused by a woman. (Ibid)
Statistics can say what you want them to say. People get away with the abuse of statistics because others either have accepted the myth about sexual violence or are too lazy to do their research.
On top of that, statistics for the same issue gathered by different organizations can disagree with each other. The statistics battle boils down to my statistics can beat up your statistics mentality. There is another problem with using statistics.
People lie. Statistics do not record who is telling the truth and who isn’t. They are just, in some cases, taking the self-reporting or gathered information as gospel truth. Along with the lying, the statistics gatherers can easily influence the answers to get the numbers they are looking for.
It is very difficult to take statistics at face value as everyone can find the ones they need to support their point. Sort of like in a court of law where the defense has their experts who say one thing and the prosecutors have their experts who say something different.
The same story can and does apply to abuse. men do not report being abused by women. The statistics will not tell you who started it, if the woman added to the problem, and other mitigating factors. All they report are numbers. They say that the numbers do not lie but they also do not tell the whole truth.
This is one reason why we can call certain people distorters. They manipulate the data to fit their point of view instead of being honest.This is a problem because statistics are often used to pervert justice.
For some reason, society holds victims of one form of crime to completely different standards. Is this because of the form this crime takes? It would seem so.
This is an interesting question because we have been told the same thing by an old Christian college friend. He said that God looks at sexual sins differently than other sins but we have not seen any biblical verses to indicate that.
The verse that we have seen that makes this indication is James 3:1 where teachers aree warned about their activities.
3 Not many of you should become teachers,e my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judgedf more strictly
So God may have different levels for different sins. We would have to do a Bible study on this issue to see if it is true or not. What the Bible does say is that if one breaks one law he is guilty of breaking them all, but as to the difference levels of sin, it does not say (that we know of at this time).
We do know that humans place different crimes at different levels of severity as they think crimes against children are worse than crimes against women, which are worse than crimes against men. Then the type of crime is also given different levels of importance.
We see it all the time when we read news stories and read the comment sections underneath. They say that in prison there is a hierarchy with murderers at the top and child molesters at the bottom.
There may be something to that question that would take an honest person to investigate.
Consider that no one would consider blaming a murder victim for getting murdered. No one passes on ‘mitigating circumstances’. No one asks what the victim did to deserve it. No one tries to absolve the guilty party of their simple responsibility to not murder. It is similar with cases of burglary and robbery. No one (well, no one reasonable) would suggest the victim deserved it, or invited it. Why then, with cases of rape and sexual abuse, is the victim treated like they are the guilty party?
This is not totally true. Women and men who walk alone at night in questionable locations are often said to be a murder waiting to happen. Those people who do not put security cameras or alarms on their homes or businesses are also said to be asking to be robbed.
And yes, these same people are accused of inviting a crime to happen because they did not take the proper security measures to ensure their safety. In the hurry to defend the victims of sexual assault or abuse, those people who say the above do not do their homework and misrepresent the the facts.
‘They didn’t report it right away, so they’re probably lying’. This is a very common argument, but it overlooks numerous details. Victims of sexual abuse are often led to believe they deserved it, or that they were ‘leading their assailant on’. Even today, they are grilled as to what they drank, what they wore, and whether or not they did or said anything that might have given their attacker the wrong impression.
The problem with people who say these quoted words is that they are ignoring key points of the legal system. Credible and verifiable evidence is needed to bring an offender to justice. If the woman waits 20 to 40 years (Or the man) what evidence do they have to support their claim?
If they do not have the evidence, then prosecutors cannot do very much. It is not that they are lying but the fact that they do not support their claims correctly. We do not pervert justice on the word of a woman even if she is telling the truth. The Bible has made that very clear.
As for the rest of that quote, yes those situations do take place but the writer and people like him/her need to remember that there are more false accusations made than legitimate ones. It is not the process that harms the legitimate victims but the false victims who ruin it for their own gender.
If you leave that fact out, you are distorting and misrepresenting the situation. Stop the false reporting and more legitimate victims can get justice.
Half the time, victims of sexual assault are not believed, for various reasons, which is why they don’t come forward. It would be a different matter if this were grievous bodily harm, or some other form of assault. No one would suggest the victim of that sort of crime was trying it on to make money, or to damage the reputation of someone else, so why do we see this narrative repeatedly come up where sexual violence is concerned?
The reason for this problem is because many of the women who claim to be victims of sexual assault demand money or want to ruin the reputation of a man. The latter is for as little as trying to hurt him. Protestia has an article that talks about the money and the threat made by the accuser of Mr. Morris.
Cindy Clemishire reportedly asked disgraced Gateway Church pastor Robert Morris for $2 million to prevent her from going public with accusations of his molestation of her as a child.
A similar story is published at The Christian Post. So there is more to the story than the defenders of the accused let on.
When Morris pressed her again to “put a price on it” Clemishire told him “Two Million Dollars.”
Those defending the accused are not getting to the heart of the matter but let statistics and their own perspectives on certain crimes interfere with their judgment. For other crimes, we have yet to hear any victims demand money or they will go to the police. They usually go to the police first and let the juries decide about the money factor.
But distorters won’t tell you about the whole story. Just enough to try and sway you to their side so they get the injustice they are looking for.
The pattern is clear. Women are more likely to be victims of sexual violence, and men are more likely to be the perpetrators. This what the evidence shows, yet there are those who will flippantly quip ‘but women lie’, as though this erases any possibility that the evidence is correct
This is just perpetrating the myth we mentioned and referenced earlier in this article. Also, it glosses over the proven fact that women lie. Those lying women make it harder for those tellin g the truth. The system doesn’t make it harder, the people who abuse the system are taking care of that on their own.
Getting to the truth is very difficult in many cases. No one said lying erases any evidence. What has been said is that the liars fake the evidence, or legitimate victims destroy the evidence for certain reasons. Those are just two reasons why the evidence is suspect.
Besides, if women lie, then it is worth noting that men lie too. Men will lie about committing sexual assaults, and other men will lie for them, to help conceal their crimes.
So what? Not germane to the issue as the real evidence gathered legally will prove that the offender lied.
This brings me back to a prior post of mine, Judgement and Justice. The case of Pastor Morris is pertinent to all of the above. There are some who simultaneously bleat that Mr Morris has done enough by admitting guilt and saying sorry, and that his resignation should satisfy all parties, whilst in the same breath, suggesting Mr Morris’ guilt is not proven by any reasonable means. Leaving aside this absurd contradictory stance, is a tearful apology from Mr Morris enough to cover off years of trauma? Is it down to the attacker to determine whether or not the victim has overcome what happened?
We skipped a few paragraphs as it was filled with inane and non-germane statements that have no business being in this discussion. These quoted words are merely rejecting the solution that was administered because it did not fit the writer’s idea of justice.
They also ignore the fact that the people in authority along with the victim’s father decided on the penalty not the offender or his tears. If you read one of the comments under the Protestia article, you will get a different perspective of the alleged victim from the parent’s point of view.
Yet, you will not hear this information from those whose minds are closed the minute they hear a young girl was molested. As we wrote in our @MeChurch series, this situation continued for 4 1/2 years, well past the legal age of consent in some states.
Those of us who take God’s side are looking for true justice, not vigilante justice or kangaroo courts. But the distorters will mock that action because it takes control of the situation out of their hands and does not always implement the penalties they want to see take place.
The rest of the article is just the rantings of someone who does not know what they are talking about so we will omit those words.
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P.S. We saw the ‘post at MM’s site and it is filled with erroneous information as usual as well as accusations hurled at us yet despise if they are used against him
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