One in 20 of all women in England and Wales have been raped, declared the headlines in British newspapers last Tuesday. And some 167 women are being raped every day, the reports continued - Tuesday included, presumably. These two appalling facts about sexual violence will probably become a staple of feminist lore everywhere; yet they are utter rubbish.
So where did this lie, that one in 20 British women have been raped, come from? Home Office officials interviewed 6,944 women last year, and using the information gathered, statistical extrapolations concluded that 754,000 women in England and Wales had been raped in adulthood. Moreover, some 61,000 women, it alleged, were raped in 2000 - 167 a day.
Yet police statistics show just 7,007 cases of reported rape. So even allowing for the reluctance of women who have been violated to report the attack, it hardly explains a reality-to-report differential of nearly 11 to 1, leaving 54,000 unreported cases of rape a year.
Campus feminology
How is this possible? Well, this is how. Some 40 per cent of the women who were alleged to have been raped did not know that they had been raped until Home Office told they had been. So what kind of rape is that? Is it the rape which has emerged in the looney-bin of American campus feminology and which the writer Camille Paglia has so frequently denounced? This allows a woman to say the next day that she wasn't so sure when she said Yes - maybe she was a little bit drunk, or had smoked too much dope; and then to cry: Omigahd, I've been raped! Actually, the rape-claim survey wasn't even made on an analysis of all 6.944 interviewees, but a smaller number within that group. Nor do we know about the "complex mathematics" used to transform a study of this group into a study of all of England and Wales. Nor do we know anything of the "weighting" that the statisticians - if we may use that word without collapsing in mirth - employed to make up for "under-representation of certain ethnic groups".
For this was one of a number of arbitrary variables which seem to have been introduced to ensure the worst possible rape situation was statistically generated. Even by the authors' own extrapolations, total numbers of women raped in England Wales vary from between 660,000 to 849,000, and the figure of 754,000 is a (sort of) happy medium. And as for the number of women raped every year, well, the report said 61,000, but the mathematical possibilities also suggest that the figure could be 34,000, or 89,000.
At which point, all I can say is: Jesus Christ Almighty. Try getting away with that kind of imprecision in any other area of life, outside the realm of the politically correct. For here is the real bottom line. Just one indisputable figure emerges from this survey, and that is that, in total, some 32 women of the nearly 7,000 interviewed said that they had been raped in the previous year.
Ideological tools
So what use are any of these figures? How is that so many journalists printed these spurious allegations as irrefutable truths? Did Home Office officials, aided by the correct ideological tools, reinterpret the stupidity, the incomprehension, the persuasion, the wheedling, the confusions and the emotional deal-making which are commonplace in all human relationships into the criminal simplicity of "rape"? And what is going on when government money is being used to massage figures to create ideological landscapes to suit the feminological agenda, leading to laws which befit only those wholly imaginary landscapes?
For justice is no longer important; what is important is that in legal resolutions of sexual conflict, the woman must always be seen to win. Otherwise, the outcome is sexist A few years ago, a young Irish woman accused two Irish soldiers on holiday in Cyprus of rape. They were arrested and thrown into jail. Suspecting her allegations, the Cypriot police questioned her more closely. After hours of interrogation, she confessed she had been lying. There had been no rape.
She was very properly arrested and very properly - if briefly - imprisoned: and uproar promptly erupted in Ireland at the savagery of the Cypriot courts. This will stop women reporting rape, thundered the feminologists; Free The Nicosia One!
So rape is no longer just an evil in itself, but is now the weapon of choice of feminologists. If rape figures are low, it's because the male patriarchy is either concealing the scale of the crime or because it's defining it too narrowly. Therefore we'll secretly redefine it to encompass all sorts of unrapish things. And we'll allow women to make vindictively baseless allegations of rape, and without legal consequence, because, well, it's only right that women are judged by different rules from men.
Moral self-righteousness
And that's the core of all ideology, which infantalises and seeks different pleading for its hero-species, for that species never lives up to expectations. Intellectually and spiritually, feminologists have inherited the political mantle of the old Marxist left, which similarly defended a pseudo-scientific mythology with a vindictive moral self-righteousness. The old left also patronised the real working classes, who never voted for it: equally, women never vote in numbers for feminologists, to the latter's perplexity.
But why would anyone vote for people who exaggerate the level of human misery in the world when there is enough already? For feminologists are professionally unhappy. They make their living by plotting daily to set the bounds of victimhood wider still and wider, so that the ceaseless sun of sisterly suffering never sets on it. And who wants that? Not women.