Re: Fact check
Posted by kit on 2026-October-26 14:25:49, MondayIn reply to Re: Fact check posted by monkeyLostInHead on 2026-October-26 14:15:14, Monday
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I shouldn't really need to point this out to you, as I'm quite sure you know this already. But those statistics do not show the number of rapes in England and Wales, but rather the number of "police recorded rape offences" in England and Wales. As the website you link to observes, the apparent increase is "possibly due to better reporting practices by the police as well as an increasing willingness of victims to come forward, including historic victims of sexual violence." In fact actual levels of rape and other sexual offences are always extremely difficult to determine with any accuracy, both because of under-reporting and also because of differing cultural and historical understandings of what is and isn't rape. A few years ago, for instance, it was very widely reported that Sweden was the rape capital of the world. On closer examination, however, it proved that the apparent anomaly was an artefact of high levels of reporting sexual violence, meticulous police recording of complaints, and a very expansive cultural understanding of what constitutes rape. (Julian Assange can attest to the last of these.) Nevertheless, the very uncertainty around these numbers will always provide a certain amount of ammunition for determined racists resorting to the time-honoured trope of saving the virtue of white womanhood from the depredations of sexually-predatory non-white men. |
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