Kat Banyard And Her Ludicrous Rape Statistics

At page 2 of the 2011 paperback edition of her polemical book The Equality Illusion: The Truth about Women and Men Today, loony feminist Kat Banyard claims: “At least 100,000 women are raped each year in the UK and the rape conviction rate is 6.5 per cent.”

There is an easy response to the second factoid: women should stop making false allegations of rape, and the Crown Prosecution Service should stop handling so many hopeless cases, but let us examine the first claim in some detail.

To begin with, this is a figure that has been pulled out of a hat, literally. The simple truth is that no one knows how many rapes in the UK go unreported, but we do have some other statistics which, unlike Miss Banyard, are reasonably reliable.

Let us work with 2009 figures. There were estimated to be 61,792,000 people in the UK at mid-2009. Of these, around half were males, say 30.75 million.

Around 20% of the population is under the age of 16, and around 16%  is 65 and over. These figures will vary from year to year and country to country, but not by much for the UK.

Although sexual offences are committed by both those aged under 16 and over 65, rapes committed by either age group are extremely rare for self-evident reasons. Certainly the number of rapes we are talking about are statistically insignificant.

That leaves us with 30.75 million less 36% of 30.75 million, which is 19,680,000 potential male rapists. Dividing that by 100,000 gives 196.8.

This means that if one rape is committed by one perpetrator per year then around 1 able-bodied man in 200 is a rapist and one woman in 200 is a victim.

These figures would probably require some adjustment because while extremely few rapists are under 16 or 65+, rape victims can be any age.

Working on the fictional extrapolations supplied by Kat O’Tall Tales, the number of female rape victims could be somewhat higher, and the number of male perpetrators could be lower, if one makes allowance also for men who are not able-bodied, and for homosexuals.

We have not allowed either for multiple rapes or serial rapists, but can we credit that one man in two hundred we pass in the street has committed a rape within the past year, or that one woman in two hundred has been raped in the same period?

Furthermore, if we work on a 3, 5 or 10 year time period, the picture begins to look shocking. The third of these means that around one woman in less than 20 has been raped and perhaps one man in 21 or 22 has raped in that period.

Common sense alone tells us this is not the case, for if it were, and regardless of rapes being planned or opportunistic, what woman would dare to venture out alone?