Re: there's a disappointing surprise

Max Vasilatos <vasilatos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:CD6if.20704$7h7.7232@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

> Well, the UCR is only for purposes of reporting national
> crime statistics. It uses 8 index crimes: murder, rape,
> arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated assault, larceny,
> and motor vehicle theft. The states have their own
> definitions of rape for purposes of charges and trial.
>
> I'm just surprised that as far as the FBI UCR is
> concerned, male rape doesn't exist. The NIBRS (the
> National Incident-Based Reporting System, different
> data collection procedure) apparently doesn't allow
> for female-female rape either. You'd think they
> would update the definitions. That this is in their
> FAQ indicates that they know it's an issue.

Well, does it really not exist, or is it just not distinguishable
in
the statistics from other forms of assault?

Changing statistical reporting systems is hard, because you can end
up making your new statistics not comparable to the old if you're
not careful about how you do it.

Seems to me pretty obvious that they ought to be able to sub-report
male-male and male-female rape (amd female-female, I guess), and
then one could reconstruct the stats for the old reporting system
from that (by subtracting the male-male figures from rape and
adding
them to assault), but there are problems, especially with rapes
where there are assailants of both sexes. Since some of those would
have been reported as rape (when at least one of the assailants was
of the sex opposite to that of the victim), I guess the
sub-categories for that would have to be reported, too.

But the problem may be that the reporting agencies may not be set
up
to report this data in the new form. Just changing the organization
of the statistics sounds relatively simple (and probably is), but
it
has trickle-down effects on all the agencies from whom the stats
are
collected, who may or may not be able to easily derive that
information without major changes to their own data collection
systems.

The current definition certainly has the virtue of being clearly
understandable, even if it's nonsensical in the real world.
Statistics are like that sometimes, because capturing "real life"
sometimes makes the stats unusable. Of course, when the stats don't
reflect "real life" they may very well be, to some degree,
meaningless or nonsensical.

And then there's always the problem that re-organization may result
in reports of crimes that would not have been reported in the past,
even buried in among the assault stats. That would make the new
stats not comparable to the old ones if the reorganization resulted
in a whole class of crimse being reported that were previously
mostly absent.

Of course, the question is whether the benefit is worth the
disjunction in the historical stats. Certainly this kind of thing
happens all the time, and mostly isn't a justification for avoiding
reorganization that reflects changes in the area being reported
upon. In this case, though, it's not really a change in the crimes
that would be driving the change, but a change in the culture that
alters the way we view the crimes in question. Perhaps statistical
reorganizations driven by cultural re-evaluation of the data are
less likely to be implemented than those that simply reflect new
issues that develop in the data.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
dfenton at bway dot net http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
.

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