Male Rape Victims: Let's Talk About the Men

A few months ago, this video was posted.



Very shortly thereafter, a blogger posted an objection to one line of the video:

I love the organization and I support them in doing great things. However, there is one thing that rubs me the wrong way. Watching this video, I get the message that men don't get raped.

Yes, I am aware that the video portrays a woman, Shoshannah Stern, and shares her perspective on the rape culture. That's fine. The part that bothers me? At the end, she signs, and the message is printed on the screen: "Rape is hate crime against women." Not people. Not humans. Women. Just women.

This is a very measured version of an objection that is raised whenever women talk about the experience of being raped and about the culture and myths that support rape in our society. Men get raped too.

It's true, of course. Fewer men are the victims of rape than women (about 10% of rape victims), but the number is still not small. And we know there's at least one important difference when a rape victim is a man instead of a woman: Men are even less likely to report the crime. Aside from that, though, how well do women's descriptions of rape fit men's experience? Aside from not consistently naming men as victims, do women's discussions of rape do any disservice to male victims?

Luckily, although the phenomenon of rape of men outside of prison populations wasn't acknowledged immediately when rape became a major topic of scholarly study in the 70s and 80s, the literature has had some time to catch up. The following is very U.S.-centric and may not apply uniformly to childhood sexual abuse, but it is a quick review of what we know about the experience of male rape victims. Prison rape is included in this discussion, even though it isn't usually mentioned specifically because rape in prison looks very much like rape in the general population.

Definitions
Counting rapes is made more difficult by legal definitions that relate rape directly to procreative sex and direct violence. In many U.S. jurisdictions, rape is still defined as forced penile-vaginal penetration, although other types of rape are covered under other sexual assault charges. Making the term "rape" more general, to recognize other types of contact and situations in which consent cannot be effectively given, is controversial, but if male rape victims are to be treated seriously, changes need to occur.

The Rapists
Whatever the gender of the victim, rapists are overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly heterosexual. This lends extra weight to the statement that rape is not about sex but about power, as does the fact that males are relatively more likely to experience gang rape. The relationship of the rapist to the victim is one of authority rather than sexuality. The exceptions to the heterosexual male rapist are generally found in date and domestic rape, in which people are forced or coerced by their romantic or potential romantic partners. As we see more women in positions of stable power from which they are able to apply coercion, this may change, but that's the picture at the moment.

Hate Crimes
What Shoshanna said in her video is true. Rape is a hate crime against women. It is also a hate crime against non-heterosexuals, those who don't conform to stereotypical gender expectations, those on the receiving end of racial or religious hatred, civilians on the "wrong" side of a military conflict, and those who are otherwise disenfranchised. This goes along with rape being a crime of power.

In men and women, bisexuals are at the greatest risk for sexual assault, then homosexuals, then heterosexuals. Men pay a stricter penalty in terms of increase in risk for non-heterosexuals. Women's rates of victimization are consistently higher, only beginning to approach equality in bisexuals.

In all these cases, the sexual assault itself, as well as the reactions of others afterward, can reinforce the self-hatred of internalized oppression.

Coercion
Coercion is another controversial topic in rape education. There is constant pushback from those who feel that enthusiastic consent is too high a bar, but the fact remains that many people don't feel free to say, "No." Whether they are dependent on a partner for emotional or financial support or housing, whether they are dependent on a colleague for career support, saying, "No," often comes with unacceptable consequences, even if those consequences are never stated directly. Just as we have come to recognize that "Yes," when said at knifepoint or in another physically threatening situation, is not consent, so do we need to realize that consent given under other kinds of duress is not consent at all.

There is a great deal of irony in this being a controversial assertion among the same people who usually complain that those who speak of rape aren't speaking about male victims. There is evidence to show that rates of coercion by sexual partners is higher among lesbians than among gay men, but that statistic is likely skewed by women's higher sensitivity to issues of coercion. By attempting to stop those who speak about rape from identifying coerced sex as rape (the "If they didn't call it rape, how can you?" argument), these people are continuing to deny male victims an equal understanding of their experiences. This is particularly relevant for those men who are coerced into having sex by a woman.

Rape as Sex
Rape defense and denial works very hard to confuse rape with sex, similar to the enormous amount of effort made to blur the very simple distinction between flirting and sexual harassment. To put it simply, sex and flirting are things that both parties want. Rape and harassment are one-sided. It's very simple for all the argument that goes on.

It's also quite an important distinction when we're talking about male victims of rape. The ongoing confusion between rape and sex is particularly bad for male victims, because erectile response and even ejaculation can occur in the presence of fear and other negative emotions. This can lead to men under-recognizing rape when it happens to them--again, particularly with female assailants. It can also lead straight men who are raped by other men to question their sexuality, even as they have to deal with the other aftermath of their rapes.

Rape Trauma
Rape trauma, the post-traumatic stress disorder associated with sexual assault, needs to be understood well for two reasons. The first, of course, is that it is critical for proper treatment. The second is that the presence of rape trauma can be used as corroborating evidence in rape trials in at least some jurisdictions. The research on rape trauma specifically in men is scanty. However, the literature that exists does suggest a similar spectrum of symptoms is present in men and women who are raped, with the individual constellation of symptoms varying from person to person.

Heterosexual men may additionally, as noted above, question their sexuality after a rape in a way that is unique to them as victims. They may also view the assault as a failure on their part to fulfill their masculine gender identity, in a way that women may not.

Attribution of Blame and Social Support
Social support is critical for the recovery of rape victims of all genders. It is perhaps the single most important factor determining recovery outcome, and influences treatment by the criminal justice system. Due to a number of rape myths, however, victims are often judged when they should be supported.

Both women and men face disbelief when they report rape: women are thought to have changed their minds after consensual sex, men are told it is impossible for them to be raped by women, and vast numbers of all genders have to try to be heard and believed over attackers whose social status is much higher, as discussed under Hate Crimes above. Men report rape so rarely that there aren't any good statistics on rates of false report, but automatic disbelief is an issue for men just as much as it is for women.

Similarly, men are also on the receiving end of victim blaming, even if some of it varies slightly in the details. They "should have known" that this part of town was bad. They shouldn't have committed a crime if they didn't want to be raped in prison. They should have known better than to flaunt their sexuality in front of aggressively heterosexual men. And even more than women, who are expected to be the weaker sex, they should have fought back. Male survivors of rape, like any other victims, need us to break down the practice of deciding that anyone who has been attacked must deserve the attack in some way.

The idea that rape is a form of sex instead of a crime that uses the trappings of sex is also a problem when it comes to attributions of blame. If the attacker is of the appropriate gender to be desired by the victim under other circumstances, rape is viewed as less of an assault, denying some degree of social support to the victim. Gay men are considered to be more complicit in their own rapes by men than heterosexual men are.

Institutional Support
This is where we most fail male rape victims. From education to collection of evidence to rape counseling, so few men attempt to use services for rape victims that the services are often not put in place in time to help them. As we continue to work to improve services for women and to make rape a safer topic of public conversation for everyone, we also need to insist that those providing the services--at a minimum--know where services for men are provided by trained, compassionate professionals. And while we are doing that, we need to make sure the same is provided for those whose gender expressions don't fit the standard binary as well.

Happily, I can say that the group that provided the video at the top of this post pointed to this one as well. We need more of these (though perhaps with better treatment options recommended).

Citations
Anderson, I., & Lyons, A. (2005). The Effect of Victims' Social Support on Attributions of Blame in Female and Male Rape Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 35 (7), 1400-1417 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2005.tb02176.x

Balsam, K., Rothblum, E., & Beauchaine, T. (2005). Victimization Over the Life Span: A Comparison of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Heterosexual Siblings. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 73 (3), 477-487 DOI: 10.1037/0022-006X.73.3.477

Davies, M. (2002). Male sexual assault victims: a selective review of the literature and implications for support services Aggression and Violent Behavior, 7 (3), 203-214 DOI: 10.1016/S1359-1789(00)00043-4

Doherty, K., & Anderson, I. (2004). Making sense of male rape: constructions of gender, sexuality and experience of rape victims Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 14 (2), 85-103 DOI: 10.1002/casp.765

Lipscomb, G., Muram, D., Speck, P., Mercer, B. (1992). Male victims of sexual assault JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 267 (22), 3064-3066 DOI: 10.1001/jama.1992.03480220082032

Waterman, C., Dawson, L., & Bologna, M. (1989). Sexual coercion in gay male and lesbian relationships: Predictors and implications for support services Journal of Sex Research, 26 (1), 118-124 DOI: 10.1080/00224498909551495

Lady Gaga Versus The Secret

If you don't know what The Secret is, consider yourself lucky to have escaped one more instance of the sort of pseudo-mystical self-help craze that mostly helps the author. If you don't know who Lady Gaga is, you don't actually live on this planet, so please leave a comment in the interest of furthering human knowledge. If you've been tormented by the desire to know which of these media darlings would win in a head-to-head battle, your life is about to get so much better.

The battleground:

Just like Lady Gaga herself, her motivational advice is controversial. Essentially, she suggests that images of success (e.g., trophies) can take the place of actual successes (i.e., more victories). So instead of going out and making it happen, we reflect on past or imagined glory and do nothing. The symbol replaces the reality. On the other hand we have Rhonda Byrne, the Australian TV ad executive who wrote The Secret. A perpetual bestseller, The Secret advocates creative visualization, which involves creating vivid and compelling pictures of your heart's desire, with the aim of drawing this vision toward you. If you believe and even act as if your accomplishments have already happened, Byrne argues, then happen they will.

The test:

The first clear voice on this issue of fantasy was that of Sigmund Freud, who wrote about the "irrational libido," the part of our psyche that lives for immediate pleasure. To accomplish this, the libido uses what Freud termed a "primary process," where it "produces a memory image of an object needed for gratification in order to reduce the frustration of not having been gratified yet." So we imagine everything from revenge to accomplishment and then, without doing anything more, receive pleasure from the image alone. When we mature, we put primary processes in check and graduate to "secondary processes," which deal with reason and reality. So as adults, we are able to delay gratification and endure the pain necessary to bring our plans to fruition. In short, Freud is definitely a Lady Gaga fan. Images and symbols, such as trophies, may be pleasurable to gaze upon but they can prevent us pursuing the real thing.

Alright, psychoanalysis is more than a century old and not exactly cutting edge science. But we can do better. Over the last decade, Gabrielle Oettingen of New York University has done a string of studies that test the power of fantasy on everything from romantic success to getting your dream job. Her basic design is to have three groups of subjects: a fantasy group, a control group, and a mental contrasting group. Fantasy groups are just that: essentially, proponents of The Secret who imagine they already have their desired outcome. The control group is the baseline, people left alone to their own devices. Then there is the mental contrasting group, basically following a form of Lady Gaga's recommendation. They mentally contrast by fantasizing about what they want but then immediately afterwards compare where they are now with where they want to be. So if they want a better relationship, they fantasize about being with that gorgeous guy or gal but then deeply reflect afterwards on how they don't have him or her. The mental contrasting group always ends by contrasting fantasy with reality.

Who wins? Lady Gaga or The Secret?

The answer. I only wish the stakes were higher.

The best things come across Twitter. Thanks to Sigrid Ellis for this one.

With Friends Like These

Times Higher Education has just posted a rather amusing defense of evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa. If you managed to miss the poorly analyzed Psychology Today blog post he wrote that put him in a defensive position, I recommend you catch up here before reading the letter.

All set now? Good.

We believe the recent criticisms of Satoshi Kanazawa's work cannot be justified ("Damage limitation: evolutionary psychologists turn on controversial peer", 2 June). Contrary to the assertion that Kanazawa does poor work, he has published 70 articles in peer-reviewed journals in the fields of psychology, sociology, political science, biology and medicine. These are listed on his London School of Economics web page and many of them have been published in top high-impact journals.

I'll let someone from Retraction Watch weigh in on how well peer review guarantees that poor work is never published.

Kanazawa's publications are listed here. I note that whatever "top high-impact journals" Kanazawa has published in, he's also published in Intelligence, which still (unironically) prints papers treating IQ testing as a valid measure for cross-cultural intelligence comparisons. Someone for whom impact factor is a big deal will have to do the research on whether the letter writers are correct, but I would love to see the results.

Why? Because there are a number of fairly staid topics and treatments among Kanazawa's publications. It wouldn't be the first time I'd seen that kind of work used to put someone's name in the "right" places while the iffy political pieces went elsewhere. In fact, Pharyngula had a post up yesterday documenting that kind of behavior in a geologist. If anyone matches articles to impact factor, please let me know.

The critics assert that many of these papers are "bad science" and have been published only as a result of a faulty peer-review process. This cannot be accepted. The editors of journals send the papers submitted to them to reviewers with expertise in the fields in question and publish only those that are deemed to be sound. Thus, all of Kanazawa's papers have been judged as sound by competent reviewers. Others may disagree, and in the case of innovative papers of the kind Kanazawa writes, frequently do. Time eventually tells whether the authors or their detractors are right.

This is just silly. Bad science gets through peer review, even when one's peers don't have the same political bent you do. On the day this letter appeared, Times Higher Education also ran an article about a mathematics journal withdrawing a paper written by a proponent of intelligent design that claimed to disprove the second law of thermodynamics. The editor apologized for even considering it, but the article had passed peer review.

The critics complain that when Kanazawa has a paper rejected by one journal, he sends it to another and publishes it there. Who among the academy's members has not done that? Reviewers frequently misjudge a paper and editors accept their recommendations. The author then sends it elsewhere and it is accepted. If there were anything wrong with this practice, then, as the first online comment under "Damage limitation" puts it: "A few Nobel prizes will have to be returned."

The detractors assert that Kanazawa rarely responds to brickbats. On the contrary, we believe that while he sometimes does not respond immediately, he frequently deals with criticisms in his subsequent work.

Actually, the objection was not that Kanazawa submitted papers after they were rejected. The section in question:

The peer review process is not perfect and appears to have failed when dealing with Kanazawa's poor quality work. Those of us who have reviewed his papers have had experiences where we have rejected papers of his for certain journals on scientific grounds, only to see the papers appear virtually unaltered in print in other journals, despite the detailed critiques of the papers given to Kanazawa by the reviewers and editors of the journals that rejected his papers.

Thus, not only is Kanazawa's work an example of poor science on theoretical and methodological grounds in our view, but we also believe it violates the central purpose of scientific discourse, because he rarely engages with his scientific critics. He rarely considers the criticisms of his work that have been published as well as those given to him during the peer review process: to our knowledge he has published counter-responses on only two occasions to critiques of his work (separate responses to two critiques of a paper published in 2001; and a response to one critique of a paper published in 2002). Since then, he has not published a full length response in the academic literature to any of the numerous critiques which have been published against his work, nor has he published corrections to the papers for which doubt has been cast on the conclusions.

There are legitimate discussions to be had on the role of peer-review feedback in shaping the final published product. However, having that discussion and recasting a complaint about Kanazawa's resistance to incorporating feedback are two very different things. Also, given what the criticism of Kanazawa actually was (that he doesn't interact with feedback prior to publication) it seems a little odd to note that he incorporates feedback into later work. If the criticism is important enough to be dealt with, wouldn't he produce stronger papers by dealing with it up front?

But back to the letter. There are a few short paragraphs providing information about two times Kanazawa later responded to criticism, followed by this closing:

Finally, we believe that the proper place to make criticisms of academic papers is in the journals in which they were published, not in letters to the press where they cannot be adequately answered.

This--this!--is what makes this letter so entertaining. Even forgetting that Kanazawa brought himself and his work into the general public eye by writing a blog post about his "findings," this is the richest vein of irony I've mined in some time. You see, while the idea that scientific ideas and their validity should be hashed out in journals is relatively common among scientists, it's pretty rare among the signatories to this letter.

• Christopher Brand has spoken publicly in favor of selective human breeding.


• Bruce Charlton has advocated for the stricter rationing of education.


• Eric Crampton has blogged to defend sweatshops.


• Paul Gottfried has used his history background to advocate for a one true version of conservatism.


• Richard Lynn has advocated for eugenics.


• Kevin MacDonald has written an article positing a choice between immigration and peace.


• Gerhard Meisenberg wrote a book outlining the consequences of not using eugenic technology.


• Helmuth Nyborg has advocated for eugenics.


• Byron Roth wrote an anti-immigration book on the "perils of diversity."


• J. Philippe Rushton spoke at a white nationalist convention to state that the problem of Islam is genetic.


• Donald Templer spoke at a different white nationalist convention suggesting whites should be in charge because they're just smarter.


• Tatu Vanhanen coauthored a book blaming inherent differences in intelligence for global wealth inequalities


• Erich Weede has written an article advocating for peace and prosperity through global capitalism.

With the exception of Lynn, who cowrote the book with Vanhanen, that's just one example per signatory for those who were easy to find in a very quick Google search. If there is one thing this group is not, that would be in favor of keeping science discussions contained in journals. The fact that they want everything contained and compartmentalized in this case makes a far stronger argument than anything in Kanazawa's CV that, at least in this field or subfield, there may be some serious problems with peer review.

But it was terribly sweet of them to write a letter and make it obvious.

More on the Science of Rape "Adaptations"

In yesterday's post, I noted the attempt of certain proponents of evolutionary psychology (specifically that dealing with matters of gender and sexuality) to position themselves as skeptics resisting the dogmatic pressures of societal group think. I contrasted that with actual, procedural analysis of evolutionary psychology practices and claims. I also documented how one set of researchers is spending time selectively looking into evolutionarily adaptive reasons for behavior, when we already know that behavior looks much like other behavior with no reasonable adaptive value. (Yes, that's vague. The post itself it much less so. I promise.)

I wrote all this in the context of a web page and email that the Michigan CFI put out promoting a lecture by one of the researchers I critiqued, hosted by a local student group. Then I ended the post with this sentence: "That is what makes it disappointing that CFI Michigan has chosen to uncritically promote his work."

The objections have been interesting, both to my post and to Bug Girl's post at Skepchick, which is a rantier take on the same topic. Today, I'll summarize the objections to how we dealt with the science, although the one I got here was not exactly helpful:

You have a very poor understanding of evolutionary psychology, evolutionary theory, and human origins. I suggest going to Shackelford's talk or contacting him for more information and explanation. I would not consider him a "rape expert" nor do I think he considers himself as such either, but he is a very well-respected evolutionary psychologist. You are misinterpreting his research and related research.

It doesn't note anything in particular that I'm supposed to be wrong about, acknowledge that I read his papers, or seem to understand that not being familiar with the literature on rape while studying the topic is a rather large problem. It makes it incredibly difficult to design studies, much less understand what your results are telling you.

Comments both here and on Skepchick, as well as Bug Girl's post itself, note that there are a rather large number of rapes (non-vaginal, involving males or females outside reproductive age ranges) that have no chance of increasing the rapist's odds of reproduction. One Skepchick commenter attempted to address this criticism:

If we’re talking about rape as an evolutionary strategy, then it would be as a built-in instinct. As such, it would need to do little more than create a forced copulation with a subject to be useful in that manner. In that context, a child rape and etc. could be thought of as a misfire of the rape instinct.

My response, which also applies to those who criticize Bug Girl's statement that rape is not an adaptation, was that, yes, it is possible that there could be an instinct for rape that misfires, is warped by cultural pressures, etc. It is also possible that there is an instinct for sex that misfires, is warped by cultural pressures, etc. In fact, that would be the parsimonious explanation. However, scientists working on this rape adaptation theory are advancing their theory without doing the work that would be able to support something more than the parsimonious explanation. Until they produce some work that does counter the simple explanation, or even a testable theory that encompasses all of what is already known about rape, the simple explanation is the more reasonable one.

There also seems to be an idea that criticizing these researchers is somehow limiting the topics that it is acceptable for science to touch. I addressed that yesterday at Skepchick.

There are a number of comments that seem to be suggesting Bug Girl is making a moral argument in the place of a scientific one. There are a couple of problems with that. First off, she’s linked to three people (me included) discussing the scientific problems with this research. Any moral argument is being made on top of a scientific argument.

The second problem is that there’s absolutely nothing wrong in making an argument for the moral practice of science. We do this already. That’s why institutional review boards exist--to (ideally) ensure that the fewest people and other organisms are put at risk or injured by research. Bug Girl certainly isn’t saying that no research should be done on rape. What she is pointing out is that this research is bad (badly designed, badly reasoned, and badly represented–as supported by her links), and that the quality of this research puts people at risk, making it even worse research. It’s nifty to point out that the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy, but that won’t prevent the idea that rape is promoted by evolution from becoming just another excuse to rape–unless someone knows how to abolish the naturalistic fallacy.

Rape is an issue that touches an incredibly large number of people. I fully support researching rape, and I highlight the results of that research on this blog. I also demand, and intend to keep demanding, that this research be of as high a quality as we can manage. Scientists can, and many of them do, do much better than to produce studies and statements that completely ignore vast swaths of our knowledge of rape and of victimization in general. We produce good science on this topic. There is no reason to tolerate bad science and every reason to sharply criticize those who produce it.

In a day or two, I'll come back to this issue to talk about the response to my one sentence about the promotion by Michigan CFI. The issues and people involved are different enough that it warrants a separate post.

Skepticism and Rape Adaptations

It isn't terribly difficult to find well-written, skeptical pieces on evolutionary psychology. In fact, several have come out quite recently. They examine current evo psych theorizing in the light of scientific requirements for proof of any such theory.

Kate Clancy wrote a post on the variety of human behavior that evo psych studies attempt to represent by using mostly college undergraduate research subjects. In addition to her concern over undergraduates' WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) demographics, she notes other ways in which these research participants aren't representative of the whole of humanity they're being used to study:

Another problem is that most work on relationships in EP tends to be heteronormative, meaning that they think nothing of assuming that either everyone is straight, or the universally best behavioral strategy is to be straight. They also tend to assume that the best strategy is to be monogamous, with occasional sneaky infidelity permitted if one can get better genes or more offspring that way (keep in mind that there is a difference between what might be biologically advantageous in a certain context, and what is culturally appropriate – the argument here is not against the culture of monogamy).

But heterosexual monogamy is only one reproductive strategy of many that humans employ. Depending on how you measure it, monogamy and polygyny (single male, multi female marriage) vie for the most frequent strategy – in fact, polygyny occurs in about 80% of modern human societies (Murdock and White 1969). There are even a few rare populations that practice polyandry, which is the marriage of a single female and multiple males. And, even in those populations where monogamy is practiced, serial monogamy is far more frequent than lifetime monogamy: this means that individuals have a series of monogamous relationships rather than find one mate for life (so no, divorce is not a modern human invention).

And that's not even getting into the nonhuman primates with whom we share a fair amount of evolutionary history. In short, Clancy makes the case that if we wish to describe a behavior as evolutionarily adaptive in humans as a whole, we need to consider more than a subset of the behavior in a single culture.

Also looking at the challenges that evo psych must meet in order to scientifically determine the adaptive value of a behavior is Jeremy Yoder. In a multipart series examining the evidence that homophobia is an evolved trait, he breaks down the multiple lines of evidence required:

When evolutionary biologists say a trait or behavior is "adaptive," we mean that the trait or behavior is the way we see it now because natural selection has made it that way. That is, the trait or behavior is heritable, or passed down from parent to child more-or-less intact; and having it confers fitness benefits, or some probability of producing more offspring than folks who lack the trait. Lots of people, including some evolutionary biologists, speculate about the adaptive value of all sorts of traits—but in the absence of solid evidence for heritability or fitness benefits, such speculation tends to get derided as "adaptive storytelling."

A few particularly interesting points were brought up in these posts. One, which should be obvious but often seems not to be, is that evo psych is talking about biological mechanisms for behavior, which means that a demonstration that the behavior is widespread is not enough to support claims that a behavior is evolved.

To recap: Gallup proposed that homophobia could be adaptive if it prevented gay and lesbian adults from contacting a homophobic parent's children and—either through actual sexual abuse or some nebulous "influence," making those children homosexual. In support of this, he published some survey results [$a] showing that straight people were uncomfortable with adult homosexuals having contact with children.

I pointed out that all Gallup did was document the existence of a common stereotype about homosexuals—he presents no evidence that believing this stereotype can actually increase fitness via the mechanism he proposes, or that it is heritable.

The next item of interest didn't come from Yoder, but from Jesse Bering, who wrote the article to which Yoder was responding. Bering described his affection for research that is done "without curtseying to the court of public opinion." Yoder points out that a study providing a rationale for homophobia didn't exactly run counter to public opinion in 1983, when it was done.

Later, in a response to Yoder's first post, plus those of others, Gallup himself suggests that his critics "tip-toe around the fact that my approach is based on a testable hypothesis" and "go out of their way to side-step the fact that the data we’ve collected are consistent with the predictions" because the hypothesis is "politically incorrect or contrary to prevailing social dogma." Given that Yoder specifically discussed the relevance of his data to his theory, it's difficult to award Gallup the mantle of abused maverick he and Bering both claim for him.

Earlier this year, Jerry Coyne wrote (in response to another Bering article), a caution about building strong evo psych edifices on slim foundations. In this case, he examined the idea of the "rape module"--a genetic, inherited predisposition among human men to commit rape--and of specific, genetically programmed, inheritable behaviors in women designed to avoid this "rape module."

Well, one can debate whether reading a story about rape is the same thing as being sexually assaulted, or whether a marginal increase in handgrip strength would have been sufficient in our ancestors to fight off a rapist. But the important part of these studies is that they were apparently one-offs—they have not, as far as I know, been replicated by other researchers. Do we accept single results, based on surveys of American undergraduates at a single university, as characterizing all modern women?

As we know, many studies in science, when repeated, fail to replicate the initial results. Think of all the reports of single genes for homosexuality, depression, and other behavioral traits that fell apart when researchers tested those results on other groups of people! And if an author did an initial study (not a replication) of handgrip strength that didn’t show the relationship with ovulation, would that even be publishable? I think not.

I suggest, then, that the results of evolutionary psychology often reflect ascertainment bias. If you find a result that comports with the idea that a trait is “adaptive,” it gets published. If you don’t, it doesn’t. That leads to the literature being filled with positive results, and gives the public a false idea of the strength of scientific data supporting the evolutionary roots of human behavior.

In addition to critiquing the studies themselves, Coyne also notes that this is not the first time the "rape module" idea has been criticized.

Thornhill and Palmer’s book was controversial, with many critics claiming that the authors were trying to excuse or justify rape. Bering takes after these critics, properly noting that “‘adaptive’”does not mean ‘justifiable’,” but rather only mechanistically viable.” But what he doesn’t mention is that there were strong scientific critiques of the “rape module” idea as well. I produced two of them myself, a long one in The New Republic and a short one with Andrew Berry in Nature, pointing out not only scientific weaknesses in the evolutionary scenario but Thornhill and Palmer’s unsavory fiddling with statistics, distorting what the primary data on sexual assault really said. Bering doesn’t mention the scientific controversy, noting only that “it’s debatable that a rape module lurks in the male brain.”

The New Republic article is itself a strong skeptical look at the science used to bolster the concept of the "rape module." I recommend reading it in its entirety. Coyne discusses the various versions of the idea that rape is a product of evolution (one trivially vague enough to be meaningless--but intuitively acceptable--and one stronger and requiring proportionally more evidence) and how they are played against each other in such a way that they could describe any evidence. He also applies a broader understanding of crime to provide alternate explanations that don't require a biological predisposition to explain patterns of victimization, and he explains how the evidence in three studies used depend on statistical manipulation. He also examines claims that rape can only be prevented properly using an evo psych framework for understanding it.

Given the availability of people like these, with the tools and inclination to turn a skeptical eye on the topic of evolutionary psychology, it is perhaps no surprise that Center for Inquiry Michigan is promoting a speaker tomorrow night on the topic of evo psych and rape. What is surprising, however, is the identity of the chosen speaker. Dr. Todd Shackelford is the director of the Evolutionary Psychology Lab at Oakland University.

Dr. Shackleford will present a talk on the competing theories of rape as a specialized rape adaptation or as a by-product of other psychological adaptations. Although increasing number of sexual partners is a proposed benefit of rape according to the "rape as an adaptation" and the "rape as a by-product" hypotheses, neither hypothesis addresses directly why some men rape their long-term partners, to whom they already have sexual access. He will present the findings of two studies that examined these hypotheses, discuss the limitations of this research and highlight future directions for research on sexual coercion in intimate relationships.

Now, the problem is not that Dr. Shackelford is an evo psych researcher. There are people doing good work in evo psych. The problem is that Dr. Shackelford isn't doing good work on this topic. In particular, the work he is presenting, relating female infidelity to rape of female partners by male partners, doesn't tell us anything that the already robust scientific literature on rape hasn't already told us.

In the 2006 paper that Shackelford will be presenting tomorrow, "Sexual Coercion and Forced In-Pair Copulation as Sperm Competition Tactics in Humans," (pdf available) Goetz and Shackelford demonstrate a correlation in heterosexual couples between the likelihood of female infidelity (past or present, rated by the male or female partner) and the likelihood of male sexual coercion, up to and including rape via physical assault. This isn't news. We already know that men who endorse rape myths and the acceptability of sexual violence against women under certain circumstances are more likely to rape. One of the common attitudes that predicts rape is that "sluts" lose the right to say, "No." ("Nice girls don't get raped.") Non-monogamy is used to excuse rape, and not merely rape by prior sexual partners.

Non-monogamy also isn't alone among excuses for rape (Scully and Marolla, 2005, pdf available). The idea that women secretly want the sex is common. Rapists claim that the circumstances of the rape were beyond their control due to drugs, alcohol, or emotional problems. People see demands for sex as more reasonable in circumstances where financial contributions to a date or relationship are uneven. None of these, however, are examined whether they similarly contribute to rape within an existing relationship. Without that, the 2006 paper tells us nothing about whether potential female infidelity triggers "sperm competition tactics."

Nor is this Shackelford's only study that ignores our broader knowledge of crime in a way that selectively supports evo psych explanations for violence against women. In the 2002 paper, "Understanding Domestic Violence Against Women: Using Evolutionary Psychology to Extend the Feminist Functional Analysis," (pdf available) Peters, Shackelford, and Buss note the trend toward fewer domestic assaults of post-menopausal women as support that domestic assault is evolutionarily selected as a means of controlling fertile women. They do this using New York City police incident reports for assaults against women only.

They don't use data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, despite the fact that they cite the survey in the paper. Nor do the results for female victims don't look substantially different than those they do use. From the NCVS:


Then there is the NCVS data for males:


There are fewer assaults overall, but the pattern isn't much different. In fact, the pattern isn't much different if you look at other types of crimes, either.


Given this information (the report on the age of crime victims dates to 1997), the challenge isn't to explain why the rates of domestic assault fall off near menopause, but to explain what is common to all crime experienced by females in the U.S. that produces that age curve, whether the crime is sexually motivated or not. This study, by again ignoring the data on the broader topic, fails to tell us anything about what it purports to be studying.

In order to actually present a skeptical view of a topic, it is not enough to assert, as some evo psych advocates do, that yours is the minority viewpoint or not widely accepted. That is simple contrarianism. Skepticism and honest inquiry require that one deal with all the information available on the topic. They also require that we not use the absence of information that would allow us to choose between explanations to argue for only one of these explanations.

The studies produced on this topic by Dr. Shackelton don't meet either criteria. That is what makes it disappointing that CFI Michigan has chosen to uncritically promote his work. [ETA: This topic is discussed at some length in the comments. They're worth reading.]

Citations

Goetz, A., & Shackelford, T. (2006). Sexual coercion and forced in-pair copulation as sperm competition tactics in humans Human Nature, 17 (3), 265-282 DOI: 10.1007/s12110-006-1009-8

Peters J, Shackelford TK, & Buss DM (2002). Understanding domestic violence against women: using evolutionary psychology to extend the feminist functional analysis. Violence and victims, 17 (2), 255-64 PMID: 12033558

Rape Myth #1: She's Probably Lying

Tawana Brawley. Duke University men's lacrosse team.

If you see a rape allegation in the news, those words aren't far behind. They are talismans, touchstones for the idea that we must never, ever forget that women lie about rape. These women lied; therefore, women lie.

The truth is, of course, that some women do lie about having been raped. That shouldn't surprise us. People make false accusations about every type of crime, even murder, where it is excruciatingly difficult to do. If no woman ever lied about being raped, the gender might have some collective claim to sainthood.

The difference with rape is the reminder. Name someone who gave an acquaintance a gift then accused them of robbery. Find me a blog post about a robbery where one of these people is mentioned. Name someone who is used to demonstrate that insurance fraud occurs--every time a large insurance payout for theft makes the papers. Name one of those audacious people who tried to frame someone for a murder that never happened, even in fiction, then show me how their name comes up every time a body isn't found.

It doesn't happen. We're not told that people lie about these things. We're told that women lie about rape.

The implication in the "women lie" narrative is that we must be particularly on our guard against false accusations of rape, that any particular accusation is unlikely to be true. But is it?

The Rate of False Report
The standard figure passed around by victim advocates suggests a rate of false reports of 8% based on FBI crime statistics from 1997. This is comparable to rates for other crimes. However, citations can be found for rates as low as 1.5% and as high as 90%. In other words, huh? How do we deal with a range that big?

Luckily for those who want to sort out the truth of the matter, two papers came out in 2010 that shed considerable light by examining how false rape report rates are generated. David Lisak, Lori Gardinier, Sarah C. Nicksa, and Ashley M. Cote collected those prior studies that had the best (and most transparent) processes for sorting between false and merely unproven allegations. They also used a similar process for determining the rate of false reports of rape at a U.S. college.

Their results were interesting in two respects. The first is that all the credible studies produced rates close to the standard figure. Rates ranged from 2.1% to 10.9%, with the college study falling in the middle at 5.9%. The numbers on rape just don't support the idea that extra vigilance is required for this crime over others.

The second finding of the study is even more striking. In the authors' own words, "It is notable that in general the greater the scrutiny applied to police classifications, the lower the rate of false reporting detected." Those studies that relied on sorting done by the police produced the highest rates of rape. Those that examined the details of the cases labeled as false and required evidence of lies, rather than merely suspicion, produced the lowest rates. The 2.1% represents accusers who were charged with making false reports, the strictest criteria. (See this post for some thoughts on applying the presumption of innocence equally to accusers and accused in cases of rape.)

What Is A False Report?
The paper from Lisak and his coauthors discusses the criteria that must be met in order for a police report to be classified as false, noting that official statistics frequently include cases not meeting the criteria. Liz Kelly, in a separate paper released in 2010, examines two "attrition" studies, studies that track the ways in which rape cases fall out of the criminal justice system. Aside from convictions, how can rape cases end up classified?

• Declined to prosecute: Not enough evidence has been turned up to comfortably persuade a jury. Although the legal standard here is "reasonable doubt," prosecutors also face human prejudices when making these decisions, their own and those of potential jurors.


• Uncooperative victims: The victim has stopped cooperating with investigators or refuses to testify. This will include cases where the victim doesn't want to be responsible for the rapist going to prison, common in all types of domestic assault. It will also include cases in which dealing with the criminal justice system has become too traumatic. More discussion on that later.


• Victims deemed not credible: The police or prosecutor have decided that the victim is not to be believed. The victim may have personal characteristics that are considered untrustworthy (such as mental illness), or may have memory impairments (such as intoxication) making a clear picture of the rape difficult. This may also cover victims who withhold details of the rape or events leading to the rape out of embarrassment or fear of incrimination. I'll also discuss this in more detail in the next section.


• No crime occurred: This is different than false reports. This category includes incidents that may have occurred but did not rise to the level of a crime in the jurisdiction involved (for example, failure to stop sex when consent is withdrawn is not codified as a crime in legal statutes in the vast majority of the U.S.). It also involves complaints by third parties that did not hold up when the "victim" was interviewed and cases in which someone went to the police for help determining whether they had been sexually assaulted, usually after a period of unconsciousness, but no evidence of sex was found.


• False reports: The reporter has plausibly recanted, or substantial evidence exists to show that the accusation is unfounded.

Only the last of these is actually a false report. The rest of them either don't involve an accusation, or they exist in that murky land where we don't know what happened. So how do so many of them end up being included in the false report statistics?

Making the Numbers

It is notable that in general the greater the scrutiny applied to police classifications, the lower the rate of false reporting detected.

Both the Lisak and Kelly papers include multiple studies that compare actual police classification procedures to international standards. To put it briefly, they don't measure up. Depending on the location, any of those other classifications, aside from reports ending in convictions, might end up being included in official figures on false reports.

Some of this may be sloppy paperwork or coding, but part of the problem is the officers themselves. Kelly reports that even among those who are supposed to be experts in rape, the following attitudes can be found:

We have a lot of allegations that are then retracted, we have a lot of allegations that it comes out in the wash one way or another that it was consensual. He says it’s consensual and she doesn’t, or they’ve been together for like hours beforehand, she’s gone back to his flat. . . . But stranger rape, you immediately start to think, “Oh God, this could be a real proper sort of drag you in the car,” absolutely nothing beforehand has happened. I think subconsciously you would consider it more serious. . . . I think I’d have more belief in the victim, that that was saying it was by a stranger, that . . . it was a proper rape, rather than perhaps someone who said “It’s my ex-boyfriend, he came round,” because then you start to think things like, “Oh, she’s just getting back at him now.” (Female detective constable 2)

I have dealt with hundreds and hundreds of rapes in the last few years, and I can honestly probably count on both hands the ones that I believe are truly genuine. (Male detective constable 2)

In addition to finding that coding procedures weren't followed, the attrition studies Kelly reviewed also uncovered investigation techniques that violated international standards. The most egregious of these was offering lie-detector tests to victims, a practice widely viewed as hostile and accusatory toward victims. Using procedures such as these is one way to inflate the number of cases in which victims stop cooperating.

The prevalence of rape myths among the police forces coding reports as false should also be cause for concern when looking at their uncorrected numbers. When the women they consider untrustworthy match the profiles for those most at risk of rape (mentally ill, developmentally disabled, intoxicated, previously victimized--although the papers don't mention it, racial and sexual minority status fall here too), or those exhibiting rape trauma (scattered, faulty memory, embarrassed, ashamed), they are making decisions that push these cases out of the system on a prejudicial basis, not a factual one.

Then there is the fact that law enforcement is under continual pressure to reduce crime rates. That can lead to situations like that uncovered in Baltimore last year by the Baltimore Sun:



The problem in Baltimore is striking, but Baltimore is hardly the only city affected. If you need to change your crime rate, deciding that more rape accusations are "unfounded" is a simple administrative solution.

These examples are why we can't trust raw law enforcement numbers, which provide the citations for "women lie" arguments. If a police force doesn't know what is and isn't rape, how can it decide which rapes are falsely reported? If a police force decides that in he-said, she-said situations, "she" is arbitrarily not to be trusted, how can we trust their decisions on whether or not she lied? If a police forces continue to endorse rape myths, why would we trust their reporting numbers uncritically?

These are decisions that have consequences. They have consequences for the recovery of victims, as being disbelieved is a risk factor for poor recovery after rape (Ullman 1996). And they have consequences for the rest of us as well. The re-offence rate for rapists isn't entirely clear, but the low estimates put it around 20%. Kelly cites three cases of serial rapists in which early victims were recorded as having filed false reports.

Given the small number of false reports found in well-built studies, and the large number of repeat rapists, it might be time to give some serious thought to how well our societal strategy of disbelief serves us.

A Note on Real False Reports
Kelly's paper provides some interesting detail on a sample of reports that were accurately coded as false. Unlike the stereotype, most of the false reports did not involve direct accusations of a particular person. They were stranger-rape scenarios.

Also, in both the stranger-rape and acquaintance-rape scenarios, the false accuser was generally a victim of some sort. Some had been otherwise abused by those people they accused, including prior sexual abuse. Some were reporting rape to avoid abuse they would have otherwise received, as is suspected to the case for Tawana Brawley.

None of that excuses the false reporting of rape. It simply provides an opportunity to think about what might be done to reduce the rate of false reports even further.

Citations
Kelly L (2010). The (in)credible words of women: false allegations in European rape research. Violence against women, 16 (12) PMID: 21164212

Lisak D, Gardinier L, Nicksa SC, & Cote AM (2010). False allegations of sexual assualt: an analysis of ten years of reported cases. Violence against women, 16 (12), 1318-34 PMID: 21164210

Ullman, S. (1996). SOCIAL REACTIONS, COPING STRATEGIES, AND SELF-BLAME ATTRIBUTIONS IN ADJUSTMENT TO SEXUAL ASSAULT Psychology of Women Quarterly, 20 (4), 505-526 DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-6402.1996.tb00319.x

Sex, Science, and Social Policy

When it comes to the politicization of scientific topics and science denialism, everyone knows about the forces opposing our understanding evolution and global warming. Would it surprise you to see similar tactics on display when the subject is sex?

In the well-known cases, political actors band together with researchers who continually produce results favoring the politicos pet topics. It's not that hard to produce the desired results, even when the mass of evidence doesn't support your side. It simply requires that these researchers restrict themselves to dealing with tiny slivers of the available information on their topic. Global warming deniers look at temperatures in only one location or across one short period of time. Evolution deniers focus on unanswered questions and stay far away from the genetic evidence.

The results are what you would expect. They see what they want to see. They support what they want to support. If I were to do what they do, I could declare downtown Minneapolis to be a residential district--based on only looking at the condo high-rises.

Someone would come along very quickly and point out how badly I had bungled my research, but by then, the damage might be done. A politician could still push through a zoning decision using my study (or one slightly less obviously biased). And if I wanted to make it easier for the politician, I could do another study focused on riverfront condos to support my original bad research. Two studies! The "evidence" mounts!

It shouldn't be a surprise that more groups than just global warming and evolution deniers use this strategy of designing bad studies and legislating from them. They might be the best known, however, because their motivations are so easily understood. They're downright transparent. A few scattered cranks (there are always stray cranks) aside, the political forces behind evolution denial are religious. Those behind global warming denial represent economic interests that are threatened by our need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. These groups are easy to spot because we understand their motivations for winnowing information down to only what they want to believe.

There are topics, however, where the deniers are less obvious, even when they engage in similar tactics. Their motivations are subtle or complex, or they form unlikely coalitions, bound together only by their views on a single subject. The strict marginalization of sex-oriented businesses is one of those topics. It unites pro-business conservatives who are appalled by sex and pro-sex liberals who consider profit equal to exploitation, plus a lot of people whose reasons are as varied as their sexual interests.

Whatever their motivation, those who argue that the presence of adult businesses has a detrimental effect on crime rates and property values are still engaging in the same kind of denialism. They're relying on just a small portion of the available information to make their case.

Why would anyone feel the need to produce anti-sex-business research? At least within the U.S., sex-related expression is protected under the First Amendment, with a few exceptions. Expression for profit falls under those protections. Those who would prefer such things not happen where they can see them have to find another reason to ban stripping, purveyors of pornography, and toys stores for grown-ups. They need a legal basis that amounts to more than "Ew."

Rising crime rates and declining property values can provide that basis. Want to say, "Not in my town/neighborhood"? Just produce a few studies saying bad things happened in other communities when they allowed adult businesses, and you have a non-speech-related reason for putting your foot down. Plenty of other communities have already done it. (I'm simplifying this drastically. For a really in-depth discussion of the legal standard, called the Secondary Effects Doctrine, check out this article. Pdf available here.)

There's just one little problem: The studies themselves. In 2001, Paul, Linz, and Shafer took a look at what kind of evidence was being used by those who wanted to marginalize sex-related businesses. What they found was impressive...but not in the way one would hope.

The researchers started with a list of four requirements that would need to be met for a study on the topic to be considered scientific. In situations like this, where laws and regulations may be challenged in court, scientific evidence isn't just a good idea. It's the legal standard, so meeting these scientific criteria is important.

1. The control areas (areas without sex-related businesses used to measure the effects of everything else happening during the study period) must be, well, comparable to the areas with new sex-related businesses. Because we can't just randomly assign adult businesses to various areas and see what happens, these studies should use a matched control approach when possible. That means the study and control areas should match in factors known to affect crime, if crime rate is the topic of interest, or factors known to affect property values, if that's what's being studied. This means they should be comparable in things like population density, traffic, median income, land use, industry mix, etc.


2. The study should cover as much time as possible both before and after the adult business is established. Crime rates and home values both have a seasonal component that can make short-term studies nonrepresentative of longer trends. Crime rates, particularly for individual types of crimes with low overall rates, can fluctuate wildly in the short term. As an example, at this time last year, Minneapolitans were flipping out over the murder rate. In the first eight days of January, we'd had five murders, after a total of 19 in 2009. Our city was falling apart. However, checking again at the end of January, we'd had only two more. By the end of June, we stood at 24. In all of 2010, we had 39. That's still more than twice the count in 2009, but it's the same as in 2008, which makes it the second lowest rate in the last decade, with 2009 being the lowest. The study period matters.


3. The source of the data must be valid and comparable across study areas and times. The second part of this is simple. If you use one type of report or source of data to measure crime or property values, use the same measurement everywhere. That's standard research methodology. So is the first part, validity, but in the context of these studies, it deserves a special mention. Why? Because despite crime rates, property tax valuations, and sale prices being public information, many of the "studies" cited didn't use this information. They relied instead on asking people what they thought their exposure to crime would be or what property values in the area would do if a sex-related business opened. In other words, in order to show that they weren't exercising bias against sex-related businesses, communities were relying on studies that measured people's biases.
   


4. Survey data that is used should come from properly conducted surveys. The authors mention this benchmark as something of an afterthought. While they didn't find circumstances in which surveys would be appropriate, they did note several surveys that didn't clear this hurdle.
   

Once Paul, Linz, and Shafer had laid out their requirements, they turned a critical eye to the studies that various governmental bodies (generally cities and towns) had used as evidence that sex-related businesses needed to be marginalized. They pulled together a list of 107 reports, which most, if not all, the reports on the topic available at the time.

The results were dismal by scientific standards. A full 73% of these reports were records of political discussions on the topic, not studies of any sort. Removing these, and anecdotes such as reports of arrests that happened near sex-related businesses, the authors were left with 29 studies of any sort.

They rated the ten most frequently cited reports on whether they met the four requirements above, as well as how clearly their results demonstrated secondary effects (click to enlarge the table).


None of these ten reports met all of the applicable requirements. Two were not even studies. One study, with its flaws, showed positive evidence of undesirable secondary effects. Four of the remainder showed mixed evidence for and against negative secondary effects, and fully half of the top ten most-cited reports completely failed to support the idea that sex-related businesses lead to higher crime rates or lower property values.

In other words, towns and cities that were using these reports to justify marginalizing sex-related businesses were relying on poorly produced information. Beyond that, they were using only the bits of information that supported what they already wanted to do, and misrepresenting much of it at that.

That was 2001. Has the situation changed since the Paul, Linz, and Shafer paper? It's not easy to say. I wasn't able to find a summary of recent use of secondary effects reports in zoning or other government decisions, so I can't say whether the bad reports are successfully being challenged.

In the peer-reviewed literature, the situation is a little brighter. Studies are addressing the scientific requirements above. McCleary and Weinstein's 2009 study on secondary effects in Sioux Falls, SD (pdf here) reports what it did to match its study and control areas, covers a substantial period of time, and reports an estimated error rate. McCleary's 2008 study on the crime rates before, during, and after the operation of a rural porn and adult toy store (pdf here) does no matching to a control, and it has some other problems with drawing conclusions that aren't supported by the data as presented, but it does cover an extended period of time and report error rates.

These two studies found evidence for secondary effects. However, that doesn't mean the post-2001 peer-reviewed literature unambiguously supports the idea that sex-related businesses lead to higher crime rates. Linz, Land, Ezell, Paul & Williams found in 2004 (pdf here) that, when sites in Charlotte, NC were closely matched to controls on variables already known to be related (statistically) to crime, there were largely no significant differences between the sex-related and other businesses. Where there were significant differences, there was less crime surrounding the sex-related businesses. Linz, Paul & Yao also failed to find any higher crime rates surrounding sex-related businesses in San Diego in a 2006 study (pdf here).

The picture is neither clear nor simple, unless care is taken to only look at the evidence that tells you what you want to hear. Unfortunately, that does still seem to be happening.

I don't know what the legal status of sex-related businesses is in Britain. I'm sure the topic is just as complicated and nuanced as it is here in the U.S. What I do know is that I am seeing a picking and choosing of evidence on the relationship, if any, of sex-related businesses and crime.

Dr. Brooke Magnanti (yes, aka Belle de Jour) recently published a green paper on the topic, a report meant to stimulate public and governmental discussion of a topic. The topic at hand? A reanalysis of a 2003 study suggesting a link between the addition of a lap-dancing club in Camden and increased rates of sexual assault.

Rather than go into a great deal of detail about the study or the reanalysis, I'll let the paper do the talking. The original 2003 results:

In 2003, a report was released by Lilith Research and Development, a subsidiary project of Eaves Women’s Aid, a London women’s housing agency. The report examined the phenomenon of lap-dancing clubs in the north London borough of Camden and its effects on crime rates from the late 1990s onward. One conclusion that received considerable attention was the statement that following the introduction of lap-dancing clubs, rape in Camden rose by 50%. In 2009, corrections to the statistics were reported in the Guardian stating that the change between 1999 and 2002 was a somewhat lower increase of 33% (Bell 2008). It still however implies evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between lap dancing clubs and rape. The uncorrected claims that rapes rose by 50% after lap dancing clubs opened and that Camden’s incidence of rape is three time the national average are still reported in national and international media (Hunt 2009, Guest 2010).

In this paper, Magnanti added a longer time-frame, adjusted for population increases, and added other rates (all of England and Wales, plus two other boroughs) for comparison. Islington was included in the original report and has lap-dancing clubs. Lambeth was chosen by Magnanti as being of a similar size and ethnic makeup to Camden but without the clubs. The same information presented visually after the additional information is incorporated (red added to show the information from the original report):


As the graph shows, adding information changes the picture considerably. It no longer appears that adding lap-dancing clubs leads to an increase in rapes. The original study is shown for the artifact it likely was.

However, just as with the citations presented under the U.S. secondary effects doctrine, the reaction to Magnanti's green paper suggests that finding out the truth about the societal impact of sex-related businesses is not the point for many people. The Lilith report she examined received lots of press. It was cited repeatedly in the shaping of public policy. Her analysis has...not.

Picking and choosing the studies that support your existing position. Picking and choosing the data within studies that do the same. What is that but scientific denialism?

Citations:
Paul, B., Shafer, B., & Linz, D. (2001). Government Regulation of "Adult" Businesses Through Zoning and Anti-Nudity Ordinances: Debunking the Legal Myth of Negative Secondary Effects Communication Law and Policy, 6 (2), 355-391 DOI: 10.1207/S15326926CLP0602_4

Linz, D., Paul, B., Land, K., Williams, J., & Ezell, M. (2004). An Examination of the Assumption that Adult Businesses Are Associated with Crime in Surrounding Areas: A Secondary Effects Study in Charlotte, North Carolina Law Society Review, 38 (1), 69-104 DOI: 10.1111/j.0023-9216.2004.03801003.x

Linz, D., Paul, B., & Yao, M. (2006). Peep show establishments, police activity, public place, and time: A study of secondary effects in San Diego, California Journal of Sex Research, 43 (2), 182-193 DOI: 10.1080/00224490609552313

McCleary, R. (2008). Rural Hotspots: The Case of Adult Businesses Criminal Justice Policy Review, 19 (2), 153-163 DOI: 10.1177/0887403408315111

McCleary, R., & Weinstein, A. (2009). Do “Off-Site” Adult Businesses Have Secondary Effects? Legal Doctrine, Social Theory, and Empirical Evidence Law & Policy, 31 (2), 217-235 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9930.2009.00295.x

Readings in Geek Communication

This post continues the setup for a session I'm running at ScienceOnline 2011 with Maria Walters and Desiree Schell called, "It's All Geek to Me." We'll discuss what we can learn about communicating science by looking at differences between a general audience and science's most solid audience--geeks.

Geek is not the default in our society, so when someone describes the differences between geek and non-geek communications, they tell us about geeks. Still, by looking at what geeks do "differently," we can gain insight into both geeks and non-geeks. The following are posts that tell us what sets geeks apart from everyone else.

Toni Bowers at TechRepublic lays out how the communication mismatch is generally addressed and asks a question that reframes the problem:

“The tech worker, the geek, is a problem solver; the businessman, the suit, is a people influencer. The geek likes to fix things, the suit relies more on people skills,” said Zetlin. Technology for suits is a “means to an end”-business success-while for geeks (who see themselves as outsiders and artists) it’s a “living, breathing thing.”

This is one of the reasons you hear so many career professionals advising IT folks to develop good communication skills. The better able you are to interpret what the business folks are asking for and turn it into a useful tool or technology, the better off you’ll be.

So should the other side of that equation be the suggestion that business people hone up on their technical skills? Well, you certainly don’t hear that as much. Wonder why that is?

A post and comment thread at Geek Etiquette specifically looks at differences in behavior:

The best is enemy of the good. Geeks often seek perfection, where non-geeks are more prepared to accept “good enough”. Lots of arguments occur around this.

Relevance mismatch. Geeks think some things (eg. how someone dresses) should be irrelevant, and largely disregard them. Non-geeks tend to place greater emphasis on personal grooming and dress codes. Conversely, non-geeks might think that something like desktop operating system is irrelevant, when it’s highly important to geeks. Either group will disregard what they consider “irrelevant”, not realising it’s relevant to the other party.

Another Geek Etiquette post takes on multitasking and balancing it with non-geek expectations for interaction:

If we’re not running a sideband conversation about the presentation topic, we’re often googling for more information on the presenter’s topic, or downloading and trying out the code in real-time. Those of us who are presenting later on are probably working on our slides at the last minute, and those of us who are taking time off from work to attend probably couldn’t do so unless we kept up with our email. All worthwhile things, one might argue.

On the other hand, the one-day London Perl Workshop last December didn’t provide WiFi, saying (in their FAQ) “it’s rude to type during someone’s talk and when you’re out of talks you should be socialising :)”

And yet one more Geek Etiquette post addresses geek literalism and the differences in producing and interpreting verbiage with only social content:

Most non-geeks have outbound tact filters: they filter what they want to say and add polite noise as it passes through. Geeks have inbound tact filters: they take bare communication with no politeness and just wrap it in assumed politeness as they interpret it.

When non-geeks talk, geeks think the polite sounds they make are redundant.

When geeks talk, non-geeks just think they’re being incredibly rude.

Adam Bluestein at Inc. magazine produces a user manual for geeks that discusses motivating geeks and the particulars of geek psychology:

Systematic thinking. Geeks see nothing magic about technology, only problems to be broken down and solved. "They tend to view the world in black-and-white terms," says Frazer. "They're very good at looking at a problem and reducing it to its component parts."

Wrong? Never. Geeks often have a powerful intellectual vanity. That makes it hard for them to admit mistakes. Hence, the plethora of expressions that blame the victim (see glossary, below).

Competitive nature. Being smarter than their peers is really important for geeks. Developers are constantly honing their skills with the aim of doing something that no one's been able to do.

Rands in Repose provides a similar guide for women dating a geek (a nerdy one in this case):

Nerds are fucking funny. Your nerd spent a lot of his younger life being an outcast because of his strange affinity with the computer. This created a basic bitterness in his psyche that is the foundation for his humor. Now, combine this basic distrust of everything with your nerd’s other natural talents and you’ll realize that he sees humor is another game.

Humor is an intellectual puzzle, “How can this particular set of esoteric trivia be constructed to maximize hilarity as quickly as possible?” Your nerd listens hard to recognize humor potential and when he hears it, he furiously scours his mind to find relevant content from his experience so he can get the funny out as quickly as possible.

Bex Huff discusses one implication of the geek's strong problem-solving drive:

Now... empathy is not easy, and its extraordinarily difficult for engineers.

Most technical people have been brainwashed by years of "education" into believing that there's a "right way" to do everything, and that its our job to fix it. When something is "wrong," we want to dive in and tell everybody how to make it "right" again. Its a trained compulsion. This is why engineers make lousy lovers, but excellent terrorists. In both cases, its a lack of empathy that dooms us to this fantasy world of absolute right and wrong, making it impossible to see things from another perspective.

Sound like anybody you know?

Finally, a favorite of mine and one from a geek culture that isn't a computer culture. This has more to do with interpersonal interactions than online communication, but it's still worth reading for insight into the different ways geeks and non-geeks process social interaction. Cally Soukup summarizes a talk by a speech therapist on how science fiction and fantasy fans communicate differently than "mundanes."

What we say in those large word groupings is also different. We tend to use complete sentences, and complex sentence structure. When we pause, or say "uh", it tends to be towards the beginning of a statement, as we formulate the complete thought. The "idea" or "information" portion of a statement is paramount; emotional reassurance, the little social noises (mm-hmm) are reduced or omitted. We get to the heart of what we want to say -- if someone asks us how to do something we tell them, not leading up to it gently with "have you tried doing it this way?"

This leads us to body language. Our body language is also different from mundanes. We tend to not use eye contact nearly as often; when we do, it often signifies that it's the other person's turn to speak now. This is opposite of everyone else. In mundania, it's *breaking* eye contact that signals turn-taking, not *making* eye contact. She demonstrated this on DDB; breaking eye contact and turning slightly away, and he felt insulted. On the other hand, his sudden staring at her eyes made her feel like a professor had just said "justify yourself NOW". Mutual "rudeness"; mixed signals.

We use our hands when we talk, but don't seem to know what to do with our arms. When thinking how to put something we close our eyes or look to the side and up, while making little "hang on just a second" gestures to show that we're not finished talking. We interrupt each other to finish sentences, and if the interrupter got it right, we know we've communicated and let them speak; if they get it wrong we talk right over them. This is not perceived as rude, or not very rude.

So, what other good resources are there for describing the differences between geeks and non-geeks in communication and expectations?