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Thank Feminism

Jill

Rape has significantly decreased over the past 40 years. You know who to thank.

The most likely explanation involves impressive generational developments. In 1970, women made up one-third of all college students (versus 57% today), earned about one-fourth of all young-adult income (versus nearly half today) and made up small fractions of doctors and lawyers (versus majorities of new entrants into these fields now). Women’s rapidly rising status and economic independence in the larger society fostered new attitudes and laws that rejected violence against women.

That younger people growing up in this environment of greater gender equality should show the biggest decreases in rape, while older generations lag behind, is consistent with this explanation. The youngest teenagers (presumably those raised with the most modern attitudes) show the biggest declines of all. Over the last 30 years, rape arrest rates have fallen by 80% among Californians under age 15, much larger than the 25% drop among residents age 40 and older.

Ultimately, however, sexual violence remains a serious danger. That is the best reason for rigorously scrutinizing its real patterns and trends (rather than taking tiresome potshots at “young people” and “popular culture”) to learn how to further reduce it.

7 thoughts on Thank Feminism

  1. Rape has increased because more women are REPORTING it. There were probably just as many or more back in the ‘good olde days of yore’, but now women (supposedly) aren’t blamed for it and (supposedly) arent supposed to be shamed into silence by parents, pastors and peers.

  2. I think the author’s point was that rape has decreased.

    I agree that there are definitely more reported rapes today than there were forty years ago; that being the case, it’s even more astounding that rape rates have decreased. That said, rape remains one of the most under-reported violent crimes, and one of the least successfully prosecuted. So we definitely haven’t succeeded yet, but women’s equality movements, which have legally enshrined the idea that women are people, are making some progess.

  3. I’m a little annoyed the author got all the way through that article without using the word ‘feminism.’ It’s not like all those social shifts happened on their own,,,,,,

  4. Jill — now that any discussion of rape has some cobag trotting out the “70% of rape reports are false accusations!” bullshit, and high-profile cases like the Duke Lacrosse and Kobe Bryant cases — we’re probably going to see a drop in successfully prosecuted rape cases and overall reporting of rape. It feels like we’re losing ground these days. 🙁

  5. Blair –

    They do give feminism some credit, Jill just didn’t quote that part.

    But can we trust these statistics? Rape is an underreported crime: Only four in 10 victims told the National Crime Victimization Survey that they had reported their rapes to police. But rape is less hidden than before. Thanks to feminist campaigns, laws have been extended to criminalize nonconsensual sex with intoxicated, disabled, same-sex and acquaintance victims and other offenses that narrower rape laws excluded. All this makes the recent declines in teenage sexual violence even more impressive.

  6. Something else that has decreased in the past thirty to forty years is the incidence of spousal murder–women who kill their husbands, that is. The number of choices a woman has to escape an abusive relationship and live independently is inversely proportional to the number of husbands being killed by their wives. I thank Feminism. (You can find these stats at the Bureau of Justice Statistics)

    Good news that rape has decreased overall over the course of several decades. I was disheartened to read that rape reports had increased in the past few years as other violent crime decreased.

  7. Those rape statistics are based on surveys, so it’s likely that laws that expand the definition of rape don’t increase the incidence of rape. The current statistics are about how many women perceive themselves to have been raped, which may or may not be illegal.

    On another note, rape has largely declined together with other violent crimes. The reduction in rape between 1975 and 2000 was matched by a similar reduction in assault and robbery. In the last 6 years the US rape rate has gone down 50% without any similar reduction in the incidence of other violent crimes; that alone can’t be credited to feminism without further research, since nothing special happened in 2000 that would obviously reduce the rape rate.

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