‘Did he drug me too?’: how daughter of Gisèle Pelicot feared she had also been a victim of her father

2 comments

1. [Low-rate persistent sex offenders typically begin offending during their late teens and offend less than once per year with the most offenses in their 30s. This group was equally as likely to commit rape as child sexual abuse. This is the most common type of sex offender](https://smart.ojp.gov/somapi/chapter-3-sex-offender-typologies), so [testing kits](https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-state/) even when the statute of limitations has passed [can](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2024/09/26/michigan-rape-kit-case-part-1/74620143007/) help protect adults as well as children.

   r/stoprape

2. It’s so much more common than people seem to think.

   By their own admission, [roughly 6% of unincarcerated American men are rapists, and the authors acknowledge that their methods will have led to an *underestimate*. Higher estimates are closer to 14%.](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/repeat-rape-and-multiple-offending-among-undetected-rapists)

   That comes out to somewhere between 1 in 17 and 1 in 7 unincarcerated men in America being rapists, with a cluster of studies showing about 1 in 8.

   The numbers can’t really be explained away by small sizes, as sample sizes can be quite large, and statistical tests of proportionality show even the best case scenario, looking at the study that the authors acknowledge is an underestimate, the 99% confidence interval shows it’s at least as bad as 1 in 20, which is nowhere near where most people think it is. People will go through all kinds of mental gymnastics to convince themselves it’s not that bad, or it’s not that bad *anymore* (in fact, [it’s arguably getting worse](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-sexual-attacks-teen-girls-increased-lockdown-rcna70782)). But the reality is, most of us know a rapist, we just don’t always know who they are (and sometimes, [they don’t even know](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquaintance_rape#Motivations), because [they’re experts at rationalizing their own behavior](https://web.archive.org/web/20191102225207/https://sapac.umich.edu/article/196)).

   Knowing those numbers, and the fact that [many rapists commit multiple rapes](https://willamette.edu/about/leadership/president/pwgsah/pdf/lisak-undetected-rapists.pdf), one can start to make sense of the [extraordinarily high number of women who have been raped](https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence). This reinforces that our starting point [should be to believe (not dismiss) survivors, and investigate rapes properly](https://www.startribune.com/a-better-way-to-investigate-rape-denied-justice-part-eight/501636971/).

   > Some law enforcement agencies may be under-investigating sexual assault or domestic violence reports without being aware of the pattern. For instance, in most jurisdictions, the reported rate of sexual assaults typically exceeds the homicide rate. If homicides exceed sexual assaults in a particular jurisdiction, this may^62 be an indication that the agency is misclassifying or under-investigating incidents of sexual assault. Similarly, studies indicate that almost two-thirds to three quarters of domestic violence incidents would be properly classified as “assaults” in law enforcement incident reports.^63 Therefore, if the ratio of arrest reports for lesser offenses (e.g., disorderly conduct) is significantly greater than that for assaults, this may indicate that law enforcement officers are not correctly identifying the underlying behavior – i.e., they are classifying serious domestic violence incidents as less serious infractions, such as disorderly conduct.^64

   -https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/799366/download

   ​

   [False accusations are rare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape#False_accusation), and [typically don’t name an offender](https://search.proquest.com/openview/6cdfce302d24baf26d72790d2bf2feba/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=41641).

   ​

   > [It is notable that in general the greater the scrutiny applied to police classifications, the lower the rate of false reporting detected.](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1077801210387747)

   ​

   [Rape is one of the most severe of all traumas, causing multiple, long-term negative outcomes](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/38d2/cc8df92f64acb9141d6d8ef0d79d0ce2fe15.pdf), [regardless of perpetrator tactics](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3262661/).

   ​

   ###[Take action](https://www.reddit.com/r/stoprape/wiki/index/#wiki_take_action)

   r/stoprape

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