An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential

Thanks for this post. It's brave, thorough, fair, and well-researched--a breath of fresh air compared to 99% of internet discussion on this topic.

People seemed to appreciate it when I laid out my points of disagreement with the last post of this sort, so I'm going to try doing the same for this post. Feel free to let me know (including via PM) if you think it's a bad idea for me to do this.

Like the last post, I think this post could benefit from less uncritical acceptance of social science research. That said, my sources aren't any better. So my comment is just an attempt to present a coherent worldview--take it with a grain of salt.

I think this post underrates the degree to which effective altruists are likely to be unrepresentative of the population at large. In particular, all the EAs I've met are really smart. And all the discussion I see in online EA communities is really intelligent. I don't think there's any IQ data that backs up these observations directly. But the 2015 EA survey found that Less Wrong was the most popular way to discover EA, and survey data on Less Wrong users seems to indicate that the average IQ on Less Wrong is around 140. My impression is that Less Wrong is responsible for a lot of "founder effects" in the EA movement (the fraction of EAs from LW was even higher in the 2014 EA survey), and that being a magnet for high-IQ people goes along with this.

Why does this matter? Because the sexual behavior of high IQ people seems to be much different than the sexual behavior of the population at large. Check out this graph from this blog post. High IQ male teens are about 3x more likely to be virgins than average, and high IQ female teens are about 5x more likely.

Why is this? There are a few possible explanations. Personally, I suspect it's a combination of smart people prioritizing other things, and having lower libidos. (Consider that only 20% of female graduate students at MIT masturbate, compared to 70% of the female population at large--source.)

You quote a study which found that frottage offenders targeted an average of nine hundred people each. That's definitely an interesting stat, but I think you have to be extra careful when extrapolating from "institutionalized sex offenders... mandated to receive specialized treatment" to EAs, especially given that all the research I've heard about indicates that prisoner IQs tend to be well below average.

Furthermore, I would expect that sex offenders who actually get imprisoned are much more blatant than average. So that's a reason why it could be unsafe to extrapolate data from imprisoned rapists to your "average" undetected rapist.

That all said, I believe you when you say there have been cases of sexual assault in EA, and I think you have good ideas about how to stop it. Here are some of my thoughts. In some cases, I'll be emphasizing points you already made, because our worldviews overlap a fair amount.

I think that sexual assault prevention presents a different challenge relative to a lot of other causes EAs are interested in. We are used to seeing causes as bottlenecked on money or talent, but sexual assault strikes me as a cause bottlenecked on experimentation and tribalism. It's a topic that's difficult to have a two-sided conversation about due to the current political environment. People tend to retreat in to bubbles lead by the most motivated individuals, who are often extremists. Sometimes the extremists suggest interventions which may actually hurt their cause, because they don't have good awareness of how people in other bubbles are thinking.

I was really impressed by how aware you seem to be of these issues. But, I think it's important to recognize that your willingness to write a ~30 page essay on this topic is an indicator that sexual assault is something you're unusually sensitive to. (That doesn't mean you shouldn't work on it; I'm glad it's something you feel motivated to work on. I'm just saying you should keep this in mind.) Furthermore, I think it's interesting to contrast your suicide stats with the fact that sexually harassed employees are only 1.63 times more likely to have turnover intentions. See also this article about women in Washington DC who prioritize their career over making sexual harassment allegations.

This isn't meant to excuse sexual assault or sexual harassment. It's meant to indicate that sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape are offenses of much different magnitude. Similar to how shoving someone, punching someone so hard they get knocked out, and murdering someone are offenses of much different magnitude. Unfortunately, it seems to me that a lot of feminist discourse serves to lump these offenses of different magnitude together using terms like "rape culture". Equivalently, imagine someone shoved another person during a bar dispute, and we condemned their action as indicative of "murder culture".

Why does this matter? As you state in this post, our legal system doesn't work that well for sex offenses. Our legal system works on the presumption of innocence and tries to gather evidence that a person committed a crime. But for sex offenses, there typically isn't much evidence to gather.

Because the legal system doesn't work that well, we have to fall back on the court of public opinion. My issue with a term like "rape culture" is that it pushes us closer to a world where a person receives the maximal sentence in the court of public opinion even for the most minor offense.

Why is this a world we don't want to be in?

• The punishment doesn't fit the crime. This undermines the legitimacy of the effort to fight sex offenses.

• In the traditional legal system, a person can commit a minor offense, pay their debt to society, and stop thinking of themselves as an offender. But if a person who commits a minor offense has no chance of re-integrating with society, that creates an incentive to attack the legitimacy of the entire system. See above.

• It frames a minor sex offense in a way that's likely to cause greater psychological harm. See also Lila's comment.

• Outrage is like antibiotics: The more it's overused, the less well it works.

However, even if many women tolerate sexual aggressiveness well, I suspect the EA movement has an unusually high density of women who don't. As I mentioned, high-IQ women seem to have much less sexual desire, and high-IQ people in general seem to be more anxious. So you may not be all that unrepresentative relative to the _EA_ population.

This ties in to the whole Red Pill/pickup topic. There's a lot I could say about that, but one major point is that it is targeted at average-IQ women who like going to bars--sorority girls who say things like:

Don’t ask for permission for a first kiss. Dear lord, I hate that nonsene. Things are great and then whoa, I’ve got a pushover on my hands. No, you can’t kiss me, pussy. Goodbye.

Personally, I know of approximately 0 sorority girls in EA. And more broadly, I don't see attitudes like this expressed frequently by women in the EA movement.

I could write another long comment on my issues with Red Pill ideas, and why I think feminist writing fails to engage productively with them. But I don't have a ton of confidence in my views, and I'm also not sure how many guys who read that stuff will end up reading my comment. So for now I'll just make a few points directed at those guys:

• In the same way reversed stupidity is not intelligence, reversed censorship is not intelligence. Just because feminists furiously condemn red pill ideas using arguments that are bad does not mean that red pill ideas are correct.

• In general, the epistemics of red pill discussion sites aren't that great. Ideas are selected for based on whether they spread virally within the echo chamber rather than whether they're factually supported. Reading something frequently enough can cause you to believe it's true even if it isn't. (This is how propaganda posters work.) If you want an evidence-based dating guide, prominent evolutionary psychologist (and effective altruist) Geoffrey Miller has a book and a website.

• If sexual gratification is what you seek, there's a lot of data showing that it's easier for a man to get laid in environments with more women than men. Effective Altruism is not such an environment.

Researching treatments for sexual offending has a chance to be the most cost effective option

I'm not convinced.

The Cochrane review on psychological treatments for sex offenders mentions a number of studies, each including hundreds of participants, that still weren't sufficiently well-designed to tease out a signal from the noise. Suffice it to say that this doesn't seem like a neglected area. It's not clear what low-hanging fruit there are re. psychological treatments; I doubt that the EA community is going to be able to run randomised controlled trials on hundreds of people at a cost of tens of millions of dollars given that many other scientists have failed to do so.

The other Cochrane review, on drug treatments for sex offenders, which shows that there's basically no evidence that e.g. testosterone-reducing drugs are useful and that there haven't been any RCTs published in two decades. So the fruit there are lower-hanging, but again, studies are going to be very costly.

As a meta-level aside, I'm also a bit worried about being too blasé about suggesting very radical interventions. From the Cochrane review:

It is a concern that, despite treatment being mandated in many jurisdictions, evidence for the effectiveness of pharmacological interventions is so sparse and that no RCTs appear to have been published in two decades.

So basically a bunch of places inject people with powerful hormonal drugs, against their will, with no evidence this will treat their problem. This is a clear human rights violation, and likely a violation of medical ethics too[1].

Given that we don't have any good evidence that testosterone-reducing drugs help sex offenders, I think it's a huge leap to then suggest investigating "testosterone reduction surgery" – by which I presume you mean castration. (You also say that sex offenders are likely to be willing to pay for their own treatment; something tells me most men aren't going to be willing to pay to be castrated.)

On an object level, this seems like a suggestion not worth taking seriously (there are a whole bunch of studies on testosterone-reducing drugs we'd need to do first before advocating sex offenders get castrated). And on a meta-level, I think outsiders with even the remotest sense of the unfairness of the criminal justice system would think us incredibly naïve to see us seriously suggesting performing surgery on sex offenders.

[1] http://jaapl.org/content/31/4/502.long - "When the promise of freedom is predicated on mandated treatment, the clinician must carefully assess the validity of informed consent."

103 - 607 male rapists in EA

False precision much? This seems like an inappropriately specific number - it makes it sound like you have concrete evidence, but in reality you're just multiplying the number of men in EA by 6%. I hope that this number won't start getting spread around.

A more tractable approach to reducing the trauma from sexual violence might be to change perceptions of sexuality. Many people believe that it's important for women to be sexually "pure", which is one reason that female victims experience trauma.

Feminists, to their credit, reject such notions, but if anything they interpret sexual violence even more symbolically - as an attempt to have power over women and "violate" them, whatever that means. According to feminist theory, rape is never about sexual gratification. However, there isn't much evidence for this interpretation. Interviews with convicted sex offenders reveal a mix of motivations. In addition, there does seem to be a relationship between sexual attractiveness and probability of rape. For example, one study looked at female robbery victims, using age as a proxy for attractiveness. (For obvious reasons, we can't actually study the attractiveness of victims.) Middle-aged and older women were far less likely to be raped by their assailant.

Setting aside the empirical question of whether rape is actually about destroying the victim's autonomy, it seems unhelpful to interpret negative events in one's life symbolically, personalize them, or cast them as part of a larger conspiracy. Cognitive behavioral therapy and other techniques may help victims overcome irrational negative beliefs.

First of all, thanks for making this extremely detailed post that addresses a tough issue in a diligent fashion. I especially admire your evenhanded tone.

I do have two points to make:

Firstly, when we discuss impact the effectiveness of an intervention, we are usually discussing things which effect huge numbers of people - perhaps all people who will ever exist - or interventions which effect hundreds of thousands of people at a very low per-person cost, like deworming. Here you're discussing this for an intervention that targets just EAs, which is a very small number of people. There may be ~13,000 people in the facebook group, but the vast majority of them have no in-person interactions with the EA community. As such, the interventions you mention would have to be very efficacious at reducing sexual assault within the community to be competitive. Unless I'm reading this wrong, and you were more just suggesting these would be good things to do, though maybe not candidates for the best thing?

Secondly, I think Scott has a good criticism of this statistic:

What percentage of rape accusations are false? According to DiCanio, the researchers and prosecutors generally agree on a number somewhere in the range of 2% to 10%.

He suggests this is reasonable for a lower-bound, but the upper bound on false reporting is significantly higher:

Attempts to use this methodology return varying results. Lisak lists seven studies he considers credible, which find false accusation rates of 2.1%, 2.5%, 3.0%, 5.9%, 6.8%, 8.3%, 10.3%, 10.9%. The two with 10%+ mysteriously go missing and thus we get the commonly quoted number of “two to eight percent”, which is repeated by sources as diverse as Alas, A Blog, Slate, and Wikipedia (Straight Statistics keeps the original 2% – 10% number)

Feminists make one true and important critique of these numbers – sometimes real victims, in the depths of stress we can’t even imagine, do strange things and get their story hopelessly garbled. Or they suddenly lose their nerve and don’t want to continue the legal process and tell the police they were making it up in order to drop the case as quickly as possible. All of these would go down as “false allegations” under the “victim has to admit she was lying or contradict herself” criteria. No doubt this does happen.

But the opposite critique seems much stronger: that some false accusers manage tell their story without contradicting themselves, and without changing their mind and admit they were lying. We’re not talking about making it all the way through a trial – the majority of reported rapes get quietly dropped by the police for one reason or another and never make it that far. Although keeping your story halfway straight is probably harder than it sounds sitting in an armchair without any cops grilling me, it seems very easy to imagine that most false accusers manage this task, especially since they may worry that admitting their duplicity will lead to some punishment.

The research community defines false accusations as those that can be proven false beyond a reasonable doubt, and all others as true. Yet many – maybe most – false accusations are not provably false and so will not be included.

...

What is an upper bound on the number of false rape accusations? Researchers tend to find that police estimate 20%-40% of the rape accusations they get to be “unfounded”, (for example Philadelphia Police 1968, Chambers and Millar 1983, Grace et al 1992, Jordan 2004, Gregory and Lees 1996, etc, etc). Many scholars critique the police’s judgment, suggesting many police officers automatically dismiss anyone who doesn’t fit their profile of a “typical rape victim”. A police-based study that took pains to avoid this failure mode by investigating all cases very aggressively (Kanin 1994) was criticized for what I think are ideological reasons – they primarily seemed to amount to the worry that the aggressive investigations stigmatized rape victims, which would make them so flustered that they would falsely recant. Certainly possible. On the other hand, if you dismiss studies for not investigating thoroughly enough and for investigating thoroughly, there will never be any study you can’t dismiss. So while not necessarily endorsing Kanin and the similar studies in this range, I think they make a useful “not provably true” upper bound to contrast with the “near-provably false” lower bound of 2%-10%.

source

Thanks for writing this, I had not seen any public posts on this topic before, and the loss of productivity considerations etc. are novel arguments to me.

I have no object level comments, but a few meta level ones:

1. As Denise mentioned, this post is very long, and I think would probably benefit from being split into multiple shorter posts.

   In particular the two strands of 'preventing sexual violence within EA' and 'preventing sexual violence in the rest of the world' seem suitably different in both arguments for their importance and calls to action that clearly splitting them into two posts might add clarity. (Although they clearly share some backbone in the discussion of the effects and severity of sexual violence).

2. I found the post structure not especially clear, and on multiple occasions was somewhat confused about what exactly was being discussed (an example of which is the "Observations about sexual violence in the EA network" section). I also found the formatting a bit confusing and this made reading somewhat more challenging.

   I find writing lengthy posts like this very challenging, and I am not trying to claim any objective problems, just that I often found it difficult to keep track. (Note, since I read the post a table of contents has been added, which should help).

3. Whilst you were very careful to try and discuss the uncertainty when numbers were first introduced, I think you occasionally later used them in more 'soundbite' form without sufficient qualifiers (or at least less than I would feel comfortable with). (Examples are the 'Inside EA: A 1:6 ratio means 7 rapes per 6 women on average.' section and the "rough estimate of 103 - 607 male rapists in EA" quote, when these depend strongly on assumptions about the relationships of demographics and criminality etc.).

   This may just be a matter of taste, as as I said you do already go to lengths to discuss the uncertainty, and I seem to to favour much more discussion/labeling of uncertainty than average.

I think 2&3 might somewhat explain why you seem to have felt that other commenters had not read the post.

Hi Kathy,

as I said before, thank you very much for your research into this! I agree with you that it is an important issue.

I'd be interested to hear about estimates of how much sexual violence lowers quality of life compared to other issues like poverty and depression. My hunch is that it causes similar amounts of suffering (whereby similar means 'within an order of magnitude') but I don't have any evidence for this.

Unfortunately your post is somewhat long which makes it a bit hard to read. More structure and maybe splitting it up into a few posts would help. People, even EA forum readers, tend to be lazy - and it'd be disappointing if thereby fewer people get informed on potential strategies to address sexual violence. I'm happy to work with you on this if you like.

I have to admit that I haven't read your post completely yet myself, so therefore I'm only commenting on one point related to the content for now.

I disagree with your characterisation of people who commit rape. [Edit: Kathy actually doesn't mischaracterise this in the article, but since it's a common misconception which is important to avoid I'll let the rest of the comment stand.]

I think the idea of the dichotomy of 'rapists' and 'non-rapists' is fundamentally misguided and a case of fundamental attribution error.

The type of rapist which you describe in your post who consciously makes the decision to ignore lack of consent isn't the only type of person who commits rape. Therefore the study you're citing only constitutes a lower bound of the number of rapists.

This is more speculative, but I think it's likely lots of people have done sexual activities with someone else without having sufficient evidence that their sex partner is consenting. It's only most of the time they get lucky and the other person wanted the sexual activities as much as them. If they're not so lucky, that makes them rapists.

That said, I do think there's a spectrum here - between people who cannot quite be bothered to properly check for consent to sex every time and people who will happily ignore lack of consent to sex in most situations.

Only addressing the latter of those can thereby only be a start to addressing the whole problem. This also leads to the important question of how the number of rapes committed is distributed. Are most acts of sexual violence committed by a select particularly egregious few or by the presumably more common 'casual rapist'? Answering this question is relevant for picking the strategies to focus on. This is because it seems plausible that different types of people who commit rape require different strategies to stop them.

Thank you for putting so much time and thought into your post.

Denise

Are you assuming that crimes committed by people in EA will be towards other people in EA? According to RAINN, 34% of the time the sex offender is a family member. And most EAs have social circles which mostly comprise people who are not in EA, I would think. (This is certainly the case if you take the whole Facebook group to be the EA movement.)

I think that for all intents and purposes we should just use the survey responses as the template for the size of the EA movement, because if someone is on Facebook but is not even involved enough that we can get them to take a survey then we generally have little hope of influencing their behavior, if they even are in EA.

This seems like a well researched post with accurate statistics, but you didn't note that EA is demographically somewhat different from the rest of the population. According to (https://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/SOO.PDF), 58% of American sexual assault offenders are white (this includes Hispanics), 40% are black, and 2% are "other". Meanwhile the EA survey (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1ex/demographics_ii/) showed that 89% of EAs identify as non-Hispanic white, 3.3% identify as Hispanic, 0.7% identify as black, and 7% identify as Asian (i.e. other). These stats are quite different from the base rate for the US, in a way that suggests the base rate of offenders in EA is lower than it is for the general population.

The 7.2 rapes per offender figure seems like it comes from a survey of paraphiliacs? Lisak and Miller say it is 4 rapes per offender. Maybe that is just because college students are younger.

Encourage or host dry events and parties.

I think that should be an obvious thing to do. Alcohol already costs money and reduces the intellectual caliber of conversation, we are better off without it.

As I understand it, there are two arguments in this article:

• Sexual violence is bad for individuals.
• Reducing sexual violence substantially is unlikely to be too difficult/costly.
• Conclusion: We should generally look to evaluating/fund/spend time on solutions to sexual violence.

and

• Sexual violence reduces EA's impact
• Preventing sexual violence in EA is unlikely to be too difficult/costly
• Conclusion: We should spend more effort on reducing sexual violence in EA because it will increase our effectiveness.

###Sexual Violence in the world### On funding/spending time on sexual violence reduction programs generally. We all agree that sexual violence is bad. The question is whether there are cost-effective ways to tackle it. Your statistics indicate that rape has a 1 in 208 chance of leading to death. Let's adjust that figure for the suffering rape causes even when non-fatal and say that 100 rapes are as bad as 1 death. We can currently save a life or equivalent for $1700 deworming givewell analysis. Assuming you agree with my rape to death badness ratio, that would imply that a rape prevention program would have to prevent 100 rapes for $1700, or one rape per 17$, with a high degree of certainty to be competitive with our current best option. While I don't think that is impossible, I also don't think there's any strong evidence in the article that this is the case.

As for the more meta level claim that the EA community should devote more resources/time to research in the area. I agree that while there is a lot of attention given to the issue, very little evaluation of program effectiveness is currently being done. I agree that this means there is likely a great deal of low hanging fruit for EA in terms of redirecting funding to more effective interventions. I'm just not sure that sexual violence is a better investment of our time or attention than other problems such as ethnic violence/warfare, drugs, crime, environmental damage, mental health, AI etc..

###Sexual Violence within EA### On reducing sexual violence in the EA community. I think there are a few major issues with your analysis:

• You assume that EA's are about as likely to experience sexual violence as the population norm. I'm not sure this is justified, but others have already commented on this so I won't repeat it here.
• An extreme focus on sexual violence prevention within EA (sting operations, consent training, profiling etc..) may repel potential members if it creates a perception that sexual violence is a significant problem in the community or that EA is dominated by the far-left.
• Your policy recommendations contain a number of suggestions that seem likely to be ineffective, legally dangerous and morally dubious.
  • 3: Sting operations. They expose anyone participating in them to massive liability. By running one, you are at the very least knowingly putting another person in a situation where you suspect sexually assaulted is likely. You are likely recording someone without their consent, a crime in some jurisdictions, or not doing so and hence having no evidence even if the sting is successful. You're also creating significant reputational damage for the employee/person in question at the point at which you have an operation involving a significant number of other employees and superiors conspire against them around the shared belief that they are a sex offender. At the very least this opens you up for civil liability for libel/defamation/harassment at work. It may well constitute criminal harassment depending on the jurisdiction. On top of the legal risks, these kind of operations in an NGO could have a severely negative reputational effect.
  • 5&7 : robust sex offender detection strategy\minimising bad attitudes. We can take into account behavioural risk factors such as whether the person believes rape myths. We can then tweak a probability further using personality research. Male patriarchal values [66] Men's acceptance of traditional sex roles This is profiling and, while possibly effective, is morally dubious. If being introverted increases risk of sexual assault, does that mean we should avoid hiring introverts or letting them into EA? What if devout Muslims/Christians/Xs have an increases rate of sexual assault? What about race? What about political opinions, gender, age, sex, IQ, nationality, etc.. A general moral principle I stand by is that we should treat people as individuals and judge them by their own actions rather than by those of others who share traits with them. Discrimination based on group level risks violates this principle and hence is morally unacceptable to me in all except the most extreme situations. Admittedly, whether you feel the same way depends on your moral intuitions, which may well differ from mine.

There was a project in London where we decided on where to donate £1000. The participants were EAs in London who have non-utilitarian ethical intuitions that equality / justice are intrinsically morally valuable. The result was a sexual violence prevention charity called 'No Means No' that runs education workshops in the developing world, and has a few RCTs that support their claims about impact.

Project written up here: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1fe/the_effective_altruism_equality_and_justice/

Someone is also working on a write up of the evidence base behind 'no means no' but this is not ready for publication. If you are interested I can try to loop you in (PM me on Facebook: Samuel Hilton).

(Disclaimer / apologies: I have a lot on and have not read the whole article or the comments, it looks well researched so good job. But I just wanted to make sure you had seen this project as it maybe relevant for your research.)

Posting these links here for cross-reference:

• Remembering the passing of Kathy Forth (a)
• If I Can’t Have Me, No One Can (a) [Content warning: a suicide note that deals heavily with sexual violence]

Thanks for writing this, Kathy! You pointed out some things which I hadn't really internalized yet, plus some statistics that I found surprising. I hope this sparks a good conversation.

As I see it, the case is basically: (1) Rape & other forms of sexual violence, harrassment, etc. are common enough that we should expect them to be significantly hurting the effectiveness of the EA movement. (2) Insofar as we think EA movement building is important (and it is), reducing sexual violence etc. in the EA movement in particular is also important. (from 1) (3) Is it neglected? Yes; the EA movement hasn't done much so far to deal with this. You are the first to seriously research it and write it up, for example. (4) Is it tractable? Yes; lots of effort has been put towards reducing workplace sexual violence in the wider world; presumably some best practices have been found somewhere and with careful research we can identify and implement them. (You give many examples of possible interventions with research behind them) (5) So we should do it. (from 2, 3, 4)

I'd be interested to see more work in particular on (4). What are some examples of communities that made significant progress in reducing the prevalence of sexual violence? Ideally we'd find examples of communities that were similar to us and made progress, and then do what they did.

Thanks for this, Kathy. I feel like you've taken multiple academic fields and worked them into one blog post, so I appreciate the length and detail. Also looking forward to shorter posts that tease out more concrete info and next steps.

To that end: would it be worth pulling apart the term "sexual violence" into a broader spectrum? Possibly:

• rape
• sexual assault (unwanted touching, but not meeting above criminal standard)
• sexual harassment (i.e. sexualized/objectifying conversation, but not touching)
• gender-based implicit bias

For example, the EA who read pickup literature and then groped another person committed sexual assault. But EAs who espouse pickup culture in an EA forum/workplace would be committing sexual harassment.

I liked your thoughts on how sexual violence in EA networks has a cost of driving women out of the area, which thereby reduces impact on the field. Here, including harassment and bias could provide a more robust picture. Women who may not have been physically touched may experience a range of other gender-based aggressions that let them to abandon the movement: being interrupted, ignored, getting more online abuse, having a man repeat a comment and gain credit for it, etc.

By the way, I think the below sentence is slightly wrong?

The ratio of male rapists to women outside the movement is around 1:8 (3:25), based on a 50/50 gender ratio.

Shouldn't that be 3:50 (in a group of 50 men and 50 women, you expect 6% of 50 = 3 male rapists)?

Just want to say I value that this topic is now openly discussed and considered. A few 'bad apples' (or to put it in more nuanced terms, people who're trying to get their sexual desires/needs met without considering the needs and feelings of the other person enough) in our community can kill off the open, supportive and trusting atmosphere I often experience myself.

An intuition I wanted to bring up: if we'd slam down too hard on the topic of rape, this might create a taboo the other way where it's hard to discuss a possible incident with someone who instigated it because of the shame and social punishment associated with that.

I don't have much experience here but here's a thought: many milder forms of harassment in the EA could plausibly arise from males having poor social awareness and encountering difficulty and frustration trying to date one of a few girls they come into contact with (this seems the most common case to me but there are others as you mentioned).

Setting out 'bright line' rules would still help them gauge when they're going to far. However, this is only one tool, and a rather crude one at that (since it reacts to incidents on the extreme end of the spectrum as they happen, rather than prevention on the lower end).

Personally, I want to work on empowering fellow men to be more emotionally involved and understanding and to seek out and build healthy relationships (such as by hosting circling sessions and practicing non-violent communication together).

Noting that I've scanned through your post and haven't gone through your arguments extensively enough.

The case in this article draws heavily on the field of sexual violence research, but methodological problems in this field and premature thinking on the part of the author make this piece suffer from several problems: it skips over important methodological questions, misleads the audience about the rates of sexual violence, and advises hasty and socially punitive solutions.

It sounds like most of the audience hasn’t read the article closely and they are greatly underestimating the problems with it. As someone familiar with a lot of the literature referenced, my perception is that this article is recapitulating the standard feminist model of sexual assault, and attempting to insert this bottom line into an EA impact framework. My comment here is going to be a detailed multi-part rebuttal.

Sexual assault research is not valid

To understand what’s wrong with the validity) of the sexual assault research field, we will first examine the biasing incentives, and then we will break down the methodology of these studies in more detail.

Social science has a reputation for being a soft science, and sexual assault research is the softest corner of a softest field. Most of the researchers involved identify as political activists, feminists, or victim advocates. That’s not the most neutral approach. They get funding from government bodies with agendas, and their findings are used for political reasons: to expand the power of the federal government over universities, cause media outrage, create kangaroo courts, and to provide campaign-fodder for politicians. Sexual assault researchers have been caught committing outright fabrications and academic misconduct, which nonetheless become the basis for policy. Feminist researchers who produce high prevalence numbers will get lucrative consulting gigs or awards.

There is a strong incentive for sexual assault research to produce figures like “X% of women have been assaulted,” or “Y% of men admit to being rapists.” This article itself relies on these sorts of claims to present sexual assault as a common problem, and sexual assault prevention as a high-impact cause.

The original post cites figures like "36.3% of women and 17.1%” have been sexually assaulted. Elsewhere you, may see figures like “1 in 4” or “1 in 5” women have been raped. The article also cites a figure that 6% of men admit to committing rape.

Are these figures really credible, though? Of course not. Let’s take a look at these studies with our skeptic hats on.

You might be forgiven for thinking that 36.3% of women label themselves as sexually assaulted, or that 6% of men admit to committing rape. This is absolutely not how these surveys work. If people are asked such questions directly, there is a very low rate of agreement. For instance, in crime surveys, few women define themselves as a victim of the crime or rape or sexual assault.

Feminist researchers and activists had a bottom line: they believed that the true rate of rape was much higher, and that women were underreporting their victimization. So they started searching for a methodology to “prove” what they already believed, such as a Mary Koss’ “Sexual Experiences Survey”, which asks people if they were in certain situations, and then categorizes some of these situations as rape or sexual assault (based on conformance to a legal definition, or to the researchers’ own definition). This methodology generates much higher prevalence rates, which is why subsequent feminist researchers started using similar approaches. Very few people have pushed back against this approach, such as Christina Hoff Sommers. My argument here will be a more detailed version of hers.

So far we have reasons to distrust the field due to being greatly politicized or biased, but next we need to look at their actual methodology and see whether it is also biased. We can find the questions in the 2010 NIVS, Appendix C. I will excerpt some of them:

When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever…

• had vaginal sex with you? By vaginal sex, we mean that {if female: a man or boy put his penis in your vagina}
• {if male: a woman or girl made you put your penis in her vagina}? {if male}
• made you perform anal sex, meaning that they made you put your penis into their anus?
• made you receive anal sex, meaning they put their penis into your anus?
• made you perform oral sex, meaning that they put their penis in your mouth or made you penetrate their vagina or anus with your mouth?
• made you receive oral sex, meaning that they put their mouth on your {if male: penis} {if female: vagina} or anus?

Feminist sexual assault researchers count a “yes” on this question as evidence of sexual assault. But there are some obvious problems:

It’s ambiguous whether “unable to consent” modifies the whole list of situations, or just passed out. I think society generally agrees that sex with someone “passed out and unable to consent” is rape. But that question can be read in a way that someone could answer “yes” if they have had sex while drunk or high. But society does not agree with feminists that drunk or high sex is necessarily rape. In fact, it’s common for people to get drunk or high together as part of consensual sex.

Next question:

How many people have ever used physical force or threats to physically harm you to make you…

• have vaginal sex?
• {if male} perform anal sex?
• receive anal sex?
• make you perform oral sex?
• make you receive oral sex?
• put their fingers or an object in your {if female: vagina or} anus?

Surely an assent on this one is clearly sexual assault, right? Not so fast. Remember, we are reading this with our skeptic hats on, and our chivalrous hats off (and definitely with our feminist hats off). To people who are not bourgeois feminists, it’s likely that this is actually a loaded and convoluted question, which is not perfectly correlated with rape.

• Physical force? It may shock feminist academics, but many consensual sexual relationships have some level of light physical forcefulness, which is sometimes referred to as “rough sex” or “passion.” Feminists themselves sometimes admit that sex is not always people gently caressing each other, on the condition that people engage in complex verbal rituals for consent if they want to get wilder. This is known as “BDSM” among people with high verbal IQ. However, much of the population doesn’t agree with feminists that rougher sex requires tedious verbal negotiations, and they negotiate it nonverbally. Sometimes this results in rape, but it is incorrect to equate physical force with rape by definition, because it’s part of the fabric of common sexual patterns. (As an extreme example, try to define consent in a mutually violent relationship, like portrayed here.

• Similar problems with the wording of “make you.” Maybe it means rape, but it’s not analytically equivalent to “rape.” There is no guarantee that respondents understand it to mean rape. If the researchers were asking about rape, why not ask explicitly?

What is the false positive rate on these questions? 1%? 10%? 50%? Who knows, but it’s definitely not 0%. And that poses a problem for these prevalence figures, and any activists who are hawking them. They are being dishonest by not acknowledging this.

The same logic and methodological problems apply to the claim that 6% of men are admitted rapists. No, they aren’t. 6% of men answer convoluted questions on surveys that cause feminist researchers to categorize them as rapists. That’s not the same thing as being rapists.

Sexual assault prevalence rates are highly sensitive to methodology and operationalization. There may be no way to find the “true” rate of rape or sexual assault, because the answer to those questions is “it depends on how you ask the questions.” The way that feminists ask the questions is very convoluted and idiosyncratic, and an assent on a sexual violence survey has low external validity and does not generalize well to real-world situations.

If your female friend comes to you in real life and says that she was raped, then you have a large amount of information from her body language, and you can hear her story. This is a totally different level of evidence from someone checking a box on a survey and the researchers categorizing that response as rape.

Feminist researchers could have sidestepped a lot of these questions by using a less broad and more defensible definition of rape. For instance, they could ask “have you been raped,” or “have you ever raped someone.” There would be a lot less debate about what responses to those questions mean. However, this approach would have generated much lower prevalence numbers, and meant that the researchers got scooped by other feminist researchers using a broader definition. There is a general statistical problem that the larger the magnitude of your results, the less probable they are.

After looking at these studies with a critical eye, do EAs really want to bet that the approach here is optimal?