On social media it’s easy to see numbers and statistics on sexual violence doing the rounds.
It takes mere seconds to share them with our followers, but a lot longer to apply the due diligence to ensure they’re accurate.
We saw this last year with the widely circulated statistic ’97% of women have been sexually harassed’, which quickly became a social media phenomenon.
But if anyone actually looked at the study, there was literally no mention of that number anywhere in the paper – and whilst (some) newspapers quietly retracted the claim, the world did not.
This is something that easily happens within many areas of highly emotive discussion, and certainly is not new.
It’s happening with the latest research, and it happened with the very earliest too.
Vague words, ambiguous questions, awkward surveys, all of which present a lopsided and often inaccurate view of the real world.
And any questioning of said statistics only ever results in the worst accusations imaginable, those of ‘misogyny’, ‘rape apologist’,’ and others.
So let’s take a look at some of this data, those conducting the research and how it happens.
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Source–
[1] https://tinyurl.com/247ayv7a
Time Article https://tinyurl.com/mr3n748j
N. Gilbert Paper: https://tinyurl.com/ywbvh8cz
Images by devn, agreen, gradienta and jesus-rocha from Unsplash