[FrenchAmerican]

This reflects the abnormally high proportion of people jailed in the USA: - 80K inmates for 68.5M inhabitants in the UK => 0.12% - 1,215K inmates for 331M inhabitants in the US => 0,37%

There are therefore around 3 times more people incarcerated in the US than in UK, proportionally.

As rapes are very frequent in the US jails (as this terrible report points out) and most of the jail population are men, then indeed, what can conclude that - statistically speaking - that most rape victims are men.

But if you take apart the population in jail, most rape victims are women.

Of course, one can argue that prisoners are human beings like others: they are. But the gendered statistic on rape is turned upside-down by the totally abnormal proportion of people in jail in the US, when compared to comparable countries, PLUS the totally despicable jail system where rapes are numerous.

Note that rapes are very common as well in jails of comparable countries. I have no information about this, but I can't see why rapes would be more frequent in American jails rather than British jails - all others things being equal. But maybe the US jail system and/or the US jail population may lead to more (or less, why not) rapes: I have no clue about this.

I'm not saying that they are in jail for no reason, but that the US society is ... dysfunctional. That analysis may appear outrageous in the US, but it is something obvious to many other countries.

But from saying "dysfunctional" to point out why it is so, there is a huge leap where political inclinations are bound to express themselves. In this case, these are not biases, because politics is precisely about how we live together in a society. And indeed, people don't live in the same world, in the sense that their interpretative frameworks are so diverse.

That's why I find the formulation of that figure problematic. I would find it less click-bait-y and trolly to say: "Rapes of men in the US jails are incredibly numerous" - maybe adding "to the point of outnumbering the rapes of women".

Why is it problematic? Because it echoes a large incel, masculinust, far-right discourse against feminism. Each time women (and "woke" men, to use their vocabulary) denounce something, there are always troves of righteous men pretending that the issue is true for all sexes alike (since in their views, sex and gender are the same thing).

The formulation "Most rapes victims in the United States are men" is a way of saying that all genders are equally victims of rapes in general. But they are not. In the world, and probably in all countries except the US, rape victims are overwhelmingly women and girls. The US exception is not related to a gender equality but to the abnormal rate of incarceration.

I don't know if there was an intention in the formulation or not. Maybe not, so I'm not at all in an accusatory mode. I'm just saying that this formulation offers ground to misinterpretation.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/prison-population-f... https://www.statista.com/statistics/203718/number-of-prisone...

[travisjungroth]

I find your analysis abhorrent. It’s like you begrudgingly acknowledge the humanity of men prisoners.

> The US exception is not related to a gender equality but to the abnormal rate of incarceration.

It’s related to a gender inequality. The US incarceration system has gender inequality built into it, so more incarceration means more inequality.

You could say indigenous people didn’t really have a childhood sexual abuse problem, but an abnormal rate of state-mandated religious schools. Sounds pretty gross, right?

[leephillips]

What does “statistically speaking” mean in your comment? If I say “There are more species of beetle than species of octopus”, does that mean the same thing as “There are more species of beetle than species of octopus, statistically speaking”?