The media this week is trumpeting a study that makes a shocking claim: One in every 16 women say their first sexual experience was rape. As NPR notes, this is just “the tip of the iceberg.” The one-in-16 figure — over 6% of all women between the ages of 18 and 44 — could even be an “underestimate,” we’re assured.
News reports on this study have, of course, tied these revelations to the #MeToo movement. We are meant to come away with the impression that America is chock-full of rapists, and millions upon millions of women have fallen victim to the millions upon millions of predators lurking behind every corner. A closer look at the data, however, reveals a drastically different picture. There is no reason to artificially inflate rape statistics — rape is horrible enough, and far too common already — but this study does just that.
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