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Comment by aswanson | Hacker News Reader

some 400,000 women are rendered unconscious and subsequently raped each year

This is unbelievable. If this is true, and assuming most of the victims are not repeat ones, it stands to reason that almost every woman that goes out drinking for more than a few years will be raped. How can there be that many rapists out there?

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The 400,000 figure does not seem to exist anywhere else online. Searching "400,000" and "rape" returns no results regarding date rape, the closest results I can find relate to the number of rape survivors in the Congo (400,000). This wikipedia article on date rape suggests that roughly 2% of date rape victims have been drugged, so if the 400,000 figure is to be believed that means there are 20,000,000 date rape victims every year? That seems... unbelievable! This figure seems to be pulled out of nowhere. Also worth mentioining that the #1 date rape drug is... alcohol! This article smells a lot like FUD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_rape_drug#Frequency_of_occ...

edit: and in the video the project creator claims over a million people are victims every year, again no citation.

edit edit: found a study that claims 4% of rape victims had been drugged[1] and according to RAINN there are ~200,000 rape victims every year[2]

[1] https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/212000.pdf

[2] http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/frequency-of...

So assuming the RAINN figure is accurate and the study figure is accurate that means there is ~10,000 drug involved date rapes per year.

I would not be surprised if a factor was mixed in for the "most rapes go unreported, especially date rapes," estimates.[1] Given these figures, either the 3% conviction rate or the 46% reporting rate, a person could take numbers that may or may not already include these adjustments and apply the most helpful. 10,000 x 33 = 330,000, might as well round up to 400k.[2]

I'm not saying that's what happened in this case, but abuse of confidence intervals is an common problem, even among those with good intentions and little idea that what they're doing is misleading.

[1] http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting-ra...

[2] This guy says 400k, but we know that less than half are ever reported, so it's probably closer to a million. And so on.

RAINN's numbers only cover the US, as far as I can see, and the US is only about 5% of the world's population. So if we extrapolate naively from your numbers, we end up with 160,000, which is a lot closer to the figure from the article.

Are you assuming no repeat rapists?

No, let's assume that the average perpetrator commits four felonies before being charged or otherwise removed. That's still 100,000 active felons at any given instant.

Eyeballing that figure tells me that the true number for this sort of thing is actually higher still (US population 313 million). Although in the vast majority of cases, no formal charges will be made, and little will be done about those carrying these sorts of things out, and it is likely that those carrying these sorts of things out do this much more than four times

You're probably right, sadly. Maybe clubs serving alcohol should require some type of pat down/search for drugs as well as firearms. I don't have any good preventative answers for this one. Females have a very dangerous life to navigate; can never let their guard down.

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