No good deed goes unpunished: When being honest about the rate of sexual assault in your community makes you look bad.

Mark Twain liked to say that there were three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.

A good example of the misuse of statistics is the recent list in Maclean’s magazine that compares the rate of sexual assault in cities across Canada. (Maclean’s is a Canadian publication much like Newsweek or U.S. News and World Report. The list can be found at: http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/10/14/sexual-assault/ . Entitled “Canada’s most dangerous cities: Sexual assault,” the list is part of Maclean’s “Canada’s most dangerous cities” webpage. http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/10/14/national-crime-rankings-2010/)

Just because “numbers don’t lie” does not mean that they always tell the truth, either! Maclean’s ranked the city where I live as the third most dangerous Canadian city for sexual assault. I find this a little odd. Not because rape does not occur here – I know that it does; I have several friends who have survived assault here. But I am not quite convinced that this place has a rate of sexual assault that is nearly twice the national average. (I don’t think this city is necessarily much better than others when it comes to sexual assault, but I also do not think it is that much worse.) Maybe it is time to take a closer look at the numbers Maclean’s actually used.

Rape is known to be an extremely under-reported crime. Yet Maclean’s relied only upon official police reports to compile its list. This means that its estimates of the real prevalence of sexual assault in any community will be way off. Rather than measuring the rate of sexual assault – they merely measured the number of people who report sexual assault. Their list is probably meaningless. And it is bad journalism.

Fredericton: low in other crimes, high in rape? A quick look at the other four Maclean’s lists that track crime (homicide, car theft, robbery, breaking and entering) shows my city to be way down the list on all four – typically well below the national average. So why is Fredericton listed so high when it comes to sexual assault? Are we actually a city that is low in crime except for when it comes to rape? I suppose that is possible.

But isn’t it also possible that we are a city where survivors of sexual assault feel more supported to report the bad things that have happened to them? After all, we have an active police victim services unit. Our police force itself has been willing to be comprehensibly trained on issues of violence against women. We also have an extremely active sexual assault crisis centre that works for feminist social change. Might not all of these efforts have created a context that facilitates the reporting of rape to law enforcement? It’s hard to know for sure the exact impact of all of these good works, but it makes sense to assume that they have made a difference.

When falsehoods become realities. So what? Why should we care where we rank on a list that is totally taken out of context and is probably not at all valid? Because perception can impact reality. And no place wants to be perceived as being more dangerous than others – especially when this characterization is probably unfair. Sometimes the fear of looking bad leads entities to want to suppress their official figures through miscoding of reports or through simply not compiling the information in the first place. My concern is that it would be all too easy for someone somewhere along the line to look at the numbers that make us look bad and simply make them go away. And that would be a shame.

It is a very good thing when people feel that they have the option to report a rape that has happened to them. Suppressing these reports would just take us right back to the bad old days when women who demanded justice got nowhere.

How common is this tendency to suppress the numbers for fear of looking bad? It’s hard to know for sure, but for years there have been great concerns that colleges and universities actively suppress their reported numbers of sexual assaults. No one wants to be perceived as having an especially dangerous campus – especially by comparison to other “safer” places. And if everyone else is underreporting, being honest can really hurt you.
 
 
Something that occurred at Reed College in Portland, Oregon a few years ago is an excellent case study for looking at this issue. A young woman there was sexually assaulted by a male student. She reported the rape to the College administration, who urged her to not go to the authorities. They said that they would handle it themselves. She complied with their request. At the end of the year, however, in its official reports, Reed College then claimed that there had been no sexual assaults on campus that year!

The young woman got mad and went public. And Reed College was shamed. As it should have been. It had behaved atrociously.

But Reed College was also trapped in a vicious cycle. Had it chosen to do the right thing and stand alone in honestly reporting the number of sexual assaults on its campus, many prospective students might have unfairly assumed that Reed was a far more dangerous place than other schools – and would have chosen to go elsewhere.

When it comes to seeing rape statistics, it is critical for us all to understand the context: most rapes go unreported. When we make it safer for survivors to report, we will likely see an increase in the numbers of reported rapes.

But that does not mean that rape is necessarily on the increase – or that it is necessarily higher in the community that is receiving a high number of reports! It may simply mean that law enforcement there is doing a much better job dealing with this issue. And let’s make sure that we aren’t punishing them (and the brave women who report) for this success!