Anti-rape (and in fact, all social justice) work presents a number of compelling and confounding challenges, and one of these is the relevance and use of statistics.  In the little experience I have with anti-rape work, I have made frequent use of a number of statistics, many of which are known to anti-rape activists: the ‘1 in 3/4 women will be raped, beaten, or molested in her lifetime,’ the infamous study asserting that during their college years, 20% of women are likely to be raped or sexually assaulted.  For the series on intersectionality, I once again turned to statistics as a measure of intersectional oppressions and how these affected rape.

Statistics are at once useful and at once dismissible.  In the case of rape, stats are dampened by one: namely, that fewer than 40% of rapes are even reported.  This overarching statistic obfuscates all others, because it means that we cannot use the available statistics to say anything definitively.  So, that is the downside of statistics—they are often misrepresentative, skewed, and in the case of rape, inadequate measures in light of the fact that so many rapes are unreported.

But the challenge is this:  in matters of social justice, the difficulty is in ‘proving’ that these injustices even exist.  Working on any issue, from race to sexuality to disability to sex, means that one of the most urgent tasks is rendering visible a system that we are taught from birth not to see.   And in our society, things like statistics are taken as incontrovertible, bona fide, concrete facts.  So the challenge is that when working on these issues, where ‘facts’ are few and far between but so necessary, statistics are inevitable but wholly problematic.

Since this issue is certainly unresolved, feel free to offer your feedback.  Thoughts? Suggestions?