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How Many Rapes Occur Per Year?
According to the OSU Daily Baramoter the number is quite high.
According to a press release issued by the Women’s Center, 2,000 rapes occur every five minutes.
But Eugene Volokh found the source:
About 2,000 rapes are committed daily at the rate of about one every 5 minutes.
And then he checks the math (via Insty).
2,000 rapes every five minutes. That would mean 2000 x (60/5) x 24 x 365 = 200 million rapes a year (presumably in the U.S.). Many people underestimate the frequency of rape. Still, one would hope that it doesn’t happen 200 million times a year; at least a little bit of multiplication should have alerted the writer and the editor that something was wrong.
…
Not 2,000 rapes every five minutes, it turns out, but 2,000 rapes daily, or one every 5 minutes. Off by a factor of 300 (5 x 60) from how the newspaper rendered it.
But wait! A “rate of about one every 5 minutes” would be about 300 daily ((60/5) x 24), not about 2000 daily. The Women’s Center press release was also mistaken (on at least one of the statistics, and maybe both); and again a little multiplication would have helped catch this.
In the comments section on his post, Eugene is getting some heat for his observation, as some readers are inferring that he is indicating that rape is not a serious problem. I think his point is that sloppy reporting and the lack of critical thinking can lead to false statistics which can discredit the validity of the reporting and in fact undermine the severity of the problem through transparently inflationary reporting (whether intentional or not).
http://myopiczeal.blogsome.com/2006/01/30/how-many-rapes-occur-per-year/trackback/
