California and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad "Affirmative Consent" Law

[choclytgremlins]

I wrote a thing.  It's very long, kind of rambly, and gets emotional in places.  I was originally just going to sit on it.  Then I received encouragement from multiple sources that I trust to share it with other people.  I also received encouragement, in not so many words, to not be a goddamn coward.  When I spend so much of my time telling people

Comments

[choclytgremlins]

"Well, this is not as bad as I feared it would be

[choclytgremlins]

"You get that the inconvenience of a no-contact order isn't the same stake as loss of liberty and shouldn't require the same evidentiary standard

[choclytgremlins]

"you need a clear standard definition for the thing you're trying to measure, and then you should ask about that specific definition

A minor statistical quibble

[sixafterseven]

You can't meaningfully compare statistics about the rate of incidence of some event without accounting for the timeframe over which the event occurred. The crime rate and NCVS studies you linked both discuss the number of occurrences in a year. If the study cited for the 1 in 5 number is this one, it reads from the abstract that they asked undergraduates if they'd been raped in their time at college, which could be anywhere from zero to four (or more) years.

(But it means that the proportion of women who have graduated from college that were raped during their time at college would be even higher.)

Re: A minor statistical quibble

[choclytgremlins]

Oh, good catch, Greg. I suppose I should add the addendum to the NCVS thing about how the stat I pulled from it was just for 2013. Since you know way more about how stats work than I do, is there a way to meaningfully extrapolate for a per-year basis based on the Campus Sexual Assault Survey?

Re: A minor statistical quibble

[sixafterseven]

Not without making some really big assumptions. First off is what the time period measured actually is, which'd require knowing more about the sampling methods. And even if you said that everyone spends four years in undergrad, and the sample was purely random, giving an average period of two years, it's not a straightforward calculation since whether or not you're raped freshman year and whether or not you're raped sophomore year are likely not independent events.

(And I'm not even sure off the top of my head that taking the average that way is meaningful. There's an old chestnut that asks if you go halfway from point A to point B at 30 mph, how fast do you have to take the other half to average 60 mph for the whole journey.)