Feminist Lies & Damn Statistics!
Feminists lie about rape conviction rates to promote the myth of "rape culture". The UK rape conviction rate is 62% not <2%.
This is a longer draft of an op-ed entitled “The Unethics of Denial” first published on Helen Dale’s Substack here.
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off!”
Gloria Steinem.
Indeed, Gloria. Indeed.
In March the world celebrated International Women’s Day. Or should that be International Feminism Day? As I have written previously, there is a pervasive myth that the words “feminist” and “woman” are synonyms. They aren’t. Feminists are defined by their politics, not their sex or gender, and as polls regularly demonstrate, most people, including women, do not identify as feminists even as they do agree with the reasonable egalitarian concept of equality between the sexes. The only time people as a majority identify as feminist, is when feminism identifies itself as egalitarian. Women forsaking the label of feminist is a well-studied dilemma in feminist academia. There are many studies discussing recruitment tactics which have found that reminding women about sexism and female vulnerability increases feminist – as opposed to egalitarian – identification.
YouGov Feminist split test. 2023.
The quest for sex (now “gender”) equality is one of the most popular marketing and recruitment strategies for feminism, but this goal is at odds with the latest #IDW23 slogan — #EmbraceEquity — which reveals, equality is not the primary goal of feminism at all. Back in 2018, then leader of The Women’s Equality Party campaigned in the General Election against Conservative MP for Shipley stating, “Philip Davies is a proponent of the idea that you can achieve equality by treating everybody equally.” It wasn’t a slip of the tongue.
Equity is not the same as equality but is often used interchangeably, but what is the difference? Feminists explain it themselves here:
Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities.
Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances, and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
Like many, I began adulthood in the enlightened late 20th century West identifying as a “liberal” feminist. It took me some time and a lot of research to realise that the liberal ideal of “equality of the sexes” before the law was not at all what feminism or more accurately, feminisms, stood for at all.
It is at this point that I hear the familiar cry that feminism is a broad church that defies a simple description and, indeed, were any layman or woman to attempt to list and define the many different feminisms, they would find it a Sisyphean task. I’ve come to think that this is a feature, not a bug. I have also discovered another way of defining the many feminisms which is not to look at the differences but to look at the similarities. It has far greater intellectual utility.
In 1963, the second wave of feminism was launched with the publication of The Feminist Mystique by Betty Friedan. In the book, she talked about a “problem with no name”. In 1970, the radical feminist Kate Millett named it: Patriarchy.
Friedan’s personal journey as a feminist is instructive for us all. The second wave began with Friedan’s liberal vision but very quickly became dominated by radicals who wanted complete liberation from patriarchy, which they described broadly as the primary cultural mechanism whereby all men oppressed all women.
Friedan acknowledged this radicalism, calling it “pseudo-radical infantilism” and noted, “Many women in the movement go through a temporary period of great hostility to men when they first become conscious of their situation,” but grow out of it “when they start acting to change their situation.” She additionally noted, “Man-hating rhetoric increasingly disturbs most women in the movement, in addition to keeping many women out of the movement.”
She was ejected from her own feminist organisation NOW by the radicals in 1970. By 1972, she began to warn about the threat of female chauvinism.
“The assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class or that men share some brute insensitivity as a class—this is male chauvinism in reverse; it is female sexism…It is in fact female chauvinism, and those who preach or practice it seem to me to be corrupting our movement for equality and inviting a backlash that endangers the very real gains we have won these past few years.”
Many of the criticisms levelled at Friedan’s book across the decades of it being “white and middle class” are correct. In the book, Friedan complained of middle-class women being forced to give up work upon marriage, a privilege working-class women did not enjoy whilst, nonetheless, still being subject to the endemic male chauvinism of the time. Perhaps the reactionary oversteer towards female chauvinism was inevitable or even thought to be essential in the circumstances. Regardless, the idea of liberal feminism was short-lived. It is an idea that still exists, but in reality, it is a myth.
Friedan had a specific goal in mind, however, not perpetual war against a nebulous “patriarchy”, and so failed to see the political utility of pseudo-radical infantilism. Today, the dominant feminism is intersectional feminism (aka intersectionality) which is an amorphous mass of feminisms which emerged from radical feminism and which includes, inter alia, critical race theory, black socialist feminism, gender feminism, postmodern feminism, critical theory, ecofeminism and postcolonial feminism – all things which can be reliably described under the description “woke”. #
What is Woke?
Rather than a passing fad, pseudo-radical infantilism is the fuel which drives this - and all - ideology and by necessity, it must be re-ignited in every new generation: new blood prevents ideological entropy. At some point, feminists — especially the founders of critical race theory and intersectionality, respectively Derrick Bell and his student at Harvard Law School, Kimberle Crenshaw — realised this. There has recently been a flurry of confused activity on Twitter under the hashtag #WokeDefined. In reality, it is not confusing at all. Parsimony is our friend. ‘Woke’ is intersectional feminism.
As a standalone concept, patriarchy has been described as panchreston - a useful but meaningless cultural panacea. Via intersectionality, the project of dismantling a vague “patriarchy” has now ballooned into dismantling “imperialistwhitesupremacistcisheterosexistcaptalistpatriachy” (henceforth patriarchy+). A concept that is altogether more specific and sinister.
It is the job of Black, BAME and anti-colonial feminists to dismantle the “imperialist white supremacist” part; trans and gender feminists muster to dismantle “cis”; radical feminists dismantle “hetero” which of course includes the family; socialist/Marxist feminists tackle “capitalism” and they all go hell for leather on “sexism” and “patriarchy”. Crucially, unlike previous feminisms, intersectionality commands unprecedented global institutional power and influence.
How do ideologues reach new generations? Via schools and something called critical pedagogy.
Critical pedagogy has quietly been making inexorable progress in the education system for decades. The mythical totem of “liberal” feminism was used to pry open the doors to our institutions and radical intersectionality - aka woke ideology - stormed in. Transgender ideology (remember, the facet of intersectionality with the goal of dismantling the “cis” of patriarchy+), has entered schools, and even medical institutions. Seen from this perspective, the culture war is largely the battle over access to young, soft, malleable minds.
As we’ve seen, feminism often uses popular and reasonable definitions such as the quest for equality as the carrot and, when the actual definition of equality is questioned, then unleash outlandish claims such as institutional misogyny and endemic rape culture as a stick - or hammer - to beat the critics back. These claims are then disseminated unquestionably by almost all media.
The trope of ending all violence against women is a popular example. Who would not be in favour of this? Who would not like to end all violence against everyone and all bad things? Such questions and goals are, of course, impossible and largely rhetorical. They are the opposite of a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goal; Rather — if you will allow me a moment of brevity — they are DUMMB goals: Diffuse, Unmeasurable, Unachievable, Meaningless and Brobdingnagian.
Despite this—and the fact most people aren’t feminists—a majority of people in our institutions are and they garner huge sums of money to pursue the unachievable. Feminists often like to claim that people like myself — we unenlightened lumpenfrau — disavow the term feminist because we just don't understand what feminism is. I beg to differ!
“We’ve gone as far as we can with this equality nonsense. It was always a fraud!”
Germaine Greer. 2014
Today, contemporary radical feminism has launched an attack for ownership of the feminist brand against their even more radical intersectional daughters, but their disagreement is only over the “cis” part. Once they have defended the right for lesbians not to be labelled transphobic (who isn’t these days?!) for rejecting translesbianwomen’s c0ck, they will be right back on board with dismantling the rest of patriarchy+, aka western civilization.
Friedan famously named the radical lesbian faction of the second wave “the Lavender Menace '', many of which were responsible for the “man-hating rhetoric” mentioned above. They marched for gay and lesbian equal rights - and were the closest allies of gay men for many years (alas, dear Stonewall!) but were - and still are - very much on board with the project of dismantling the imperialistwhiteheterosexistpatriachy-cis. It was this faction that championed political lesbianism and would at times host feminist consciousness-raising groups which were basically to teach heterosexual women how to be lesbian via group masturbation. At the time, many radical feminists — much like intersectional feminists today — believed sexuality was performative, not innate. Somehow, I don’t think they thought about the possible unintended consequences of such bonkers logic some sixty years later. The postmodern chickens have most definitely come home to roost!
Feminist group masturbation has not gone away. In honour of International Women’s Day 2014, HuffPost published a glowing review of the legacy of sex positive radical feminist Betty Dodson who ran Bodysex group masturbation workshops in the 70’s “to help women connect with their bodies” and where, “women were guided to explore their bodies and masturbate together to learn, with guidance, how to have an orgasm as a woman alone and with a sexual partner.” The sex of the abstract partner wasn’t mentioned. Men were not allowed at the workshops. Dodson identified as queer, probably because she liked women and also liked to use vibrators, so likely couldn’t call herself a genuine lesbian at the time without expecting some pushback from the lavender hill mob. Oh, what a tangled web!
The aim of this digression is to go some way to head off the “feminism defies simple definition” defence at the pass. There are many feminisms and yes, some are in disagreement with dismantling all the appendages added to ‘patriarchy’ over the years. But on most things they agree, and most especially on patriarchy. This goal of dismantling patriarchy+ is set higher than female individual autonomy. This is why “choice” feminism is such a dirty word in the feminist hinterland. This is interesting as in evolutionary biology and psychology — perspectives most feminists reject — female choice is recognised as a powerful mechanism of Darwinian sexual selection: One which utterly liberates females from the dogma of passivity. Don’t feminists want women to be strong?
“[Rape is] nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. 1975
Let me fix that for you Susan…
We will now turn to a more serious issue which goes to the heart of feminist ethics and their claimed duty of care to women.
Feminist Lies and Damn Statistics!
As mentioned above, I once, like many, considered myself a feminist. The liberal kind. I do not consider myself a feminist of any creed today.
This change came about when I began researching the seemingly inscrutable problem of low rape conviction rates. For decades we have been told that rape convictions are scandalously low.
When I began to look at the issue in the mid-2000s, the UK rape conviction rate was said to be around 7%. I remember being utterly dumbfounded by a scene in a mainstream TV drama about rape named The Innocent in 2001, starring the hugely popular actress Caroline Quinten. Her character laid down the following shocking indictment of the justice system, “Only 7% of rapists are convicted, does that mean 93% of all victims are lying?!” It was a scandalous problem and I did not understand why no one could seem to solve it. It seemed unfathomable. Unbelievable.
It was.
Today we are told that things are even wors, that convictions are now less than 2% and institutional misogyny is a problem that never goes away…
What if I told you that the actual rape conviction rate in the UK is not 2% but 62%.
To many that is unfathomable and unbelievable. Yet, it is the truth.
Feminists reach the shockingly low figure by conflating all complaints made to the police with all eventual convictions. If other crimes were calculated this way, the overall conviction rate for all crimes would hover around 6%. Yet, only rape is calculated this way. When compared to other crime statistics, the rape conviction rate is higher than that for threatening to kill, attempted murder, manslaughter and GBH. Why isn’t this common knowledge? It is an understatement to say that the dissemination of the <2% statistic is a gross misrepresentation. Yet the media and even politicians, do not challenge it:
“...with rape convictions at a shocking all-time low, how will the Home Secretary ensure that women can come forward with confidence that they will be believed and that they will receive justice?”
Rosie Duffield, Labour MP for Canterbury stated this in the British House of Commons days after the tragic murder of Sarah Everard in 2021. It’s a shockingly common occurrence.
Let's just pause to consider this for a moment.
If one of the major self-declared goals of feminism is to get more victims to “come forward with confidence”, which statistic is likely to do that? 2% or 62%?
Let us also remember the finding in academia that people are more likely to identify as feminist and not egalitarian when reminded about women’s vulnerability, greater fear and shockingly low statistics.
Outright lies and misrepresented statistics are good for feminist recruitment. And feminism is a gravy train. That is the bottom line.
Sarah Everard’s autonomy as an individual was violated by both her murderer and feminists
After the tragic rape and murder of Sarah Everard by an off-duty police officer in early 2021, there was a wellspring of feminist activism on the subject of violence against women which received widespread dissemination. As well as Rosie Duffield above, Angela Eagle, Labour MP for Wallasy used Sarah’s death as an opportunity to claim “rape has effectively been decriminalised,” and echoed Duffield’s claim that, “prosecutions are at their lowest ever level.” It is all recorded in the official Hansard Record. The mainstream media backed up these claims with numerous features on femicide and depicted a police force and justice system rotten to the core with institutional sexism and misogyny. The message was loud and clear: The justice system is failing women and victims of sexual assault. Except it isn’t.
The feminist attack on our criminal justice system is relentless. The collision between our media institutions and feminism cannot be ignored. The BBC recently broadcast the Deputy Labour Party leader repeating the 2% claim across the dispatch box. Below are recent front pages from weekend supplements from The Guardian and The Times respectively.
Sarah’s murderer was caught and imprisoned. He was a disturbed man — a police officer, yes — who used the fact that Sarah was breaching Covid lockdown to get her into his car. It’s arguable that if there was no lockdown Sarah would not so easily have been duped. None of that mattered of course. Nor did the fact that friends of Sarah insisted she would not agree with her tragedy being used for political purposes. Tragically, Sarah’s autonomy as an individual was violated by both her murderer and ideological feminists.
At the end of March her autonomy was violated once more with the publishing of The Casey Report, which was commissioned after “Recognising the grave levels of public concern following the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met officer and other deeply troubling incidents, the Metropolitan Police Service (the Met) appointed Baroness Louise Casey to lead an independent review of its culture and standards of behaviour.”
In the foreword of the report, Casey states:
“I am unconvinced that police forces are fully alive to that risk, nor that the Met fully understands the gravity of its situation as a whole. If a plane fell out of the sky tomorrow, a whole industry would stop and ask itself why. It would be a catalyst for self-examination, and then root and branch reform. Instead the Met preferred to pretend that their own perpetrators of unconscionable crimes were just ‘bad apples’, or not police officers at all.”
This had the effect of reminding me of another statement I had read recently: Patriarchy is “characterised by power, dominance, hierarchy, and competition. It cannot be reformed but only ripped out root and branch.”
The overall findings of the report? You’ve guessed it. "Institutionally racist, homophobic & woman-hating". The evidence? Largely attitudinal surveys and anecdotes. It talks of falling conviction rates for sexual assault without the context of Covid and the fact all convictions have declined. It discusses “high attrition rates among victims” without mention of why that may be, especially since most people believe justice is impossible to achieve and the police are corrupt.
It makes no mention of the accurate rape conviction rate. Will there be problems in such a huge institution? Without a doubt but the agenda of this report is explicit and ideological. I do not think any victims of crime are served well by such practice. No doubt I will be excoriated by feminists because of it. So be it. But that the messages of feminism are at odds with its supposed ‘liberal’ goals is an empirical fact.
Sadly, because the feminist media disseminate this statistic without challenge, ordinary people believe it.
This is troubling as public confidence in the criminal justice system is central to the rule of law and by their own estimation, if the system does not inspire confidence “there is a fundamental risk to how society views the effectiveness of justice.” In view of the fact that destroying confidence in the “racist, homophobic and misogynistic” justice system is contiguous with that of dismantling patriarchy+, one reasonable hypothesis has to be this is more than a happy coincidence for feminists. This media collusion crosses political lines.
“Someone who is raped has between a 1.1 and 1.8 per cent prospect of seeing their rapist convicted.”
The New Statesman. 2018
There would appear to be a mismatch between the declared goals of feminism and its recruitment strategy in spreading myths about rape. One which benefits feminism, but harms women and victims of sexual assault. Perhaps this misrepresentation is not a conscious strategy on the part of feminists, but the empirical evidence suggests otherwise.
Feminist Lies and Damn Statistics!
In 2017 feminists petitioned UK Parliament to request changes in policy which would mean that all jurors in rape trials undertake compulsory training about rape myths both before and during the trials. (Note: they are attempting to end trial by jury in Scotland so all rape trials will be overseen by similarly specially trained judges. Thankfully, this has been robustly challenged by lawyers in Scotland.) The 2017 petition reached the needed 10,000 signatures meaning Parliament was duty-bound to respond. It did. A government study was commissioned and led by Professor Cheryl Thomas QC, Professor of Judicial Studies at UCL. Thomas is the author of previous groundbreaking studies Diversity and Fairness in the Jury System (2007) and Are Juries Fair? (2010).
This report, The 21st-century Jury: Contempt, Bias and the Impact of Jury Service was the first empirical study of its kind to use actual jurors. All previous data on rape and rape myths used by feminists have used self-selected mock jurors, anecdotes, or opinion polls. This is still the case. Thomas’ research, commissioned by the British government in response to a feminist petition to parliament at a huge cost to the taxpayer, is completely ignored.
Counter to the petition’s central claim, “Research shows that jurors accept commonly held rape myths resulting in many incorrect not guilty verdicts. Rapists are walking free from court although evidence is robust” Thomas’ study actually found that juries were not overwhelmingly influenced by rape myths or negative stereotypes of rape victims and convicted far more than they acquit. One would think this was good news.
For non-ideological empirical researchers, this result was not a surprise. Seven years earlier, in 2010, another governmental report on rape, The Stern Report concluded with the same findings. Further, in its recommendations, it found that the feminist misrepresentation of statistics could stop victims from coming forward. This garnered a total of two mainstream media reports, one of which appears to have been memory holed. Stern explicitly requested feminists to report statistics more responsibly. This never happened. As I have written previously, feminist arguments never develop, they are only recycled. This is one of the necessary definitions of dogma.
What of the “research” cited in the petition to Parliament? The petition began with a familiar assertion:
“Research by Rape Crisis & Alison Saunders, Director of Public Prosecutions, finds that jurors often accept rape myths & thus acquit rapists who are in fact guilty. 66% of jurors do not understand judges' legal directions which attempt to dispel rape myths but fail. Jurors need proper rape myth training prior to & throughout trials.” Thomas tried to verify these “research” findings and could not. Instead, she found that:
“The petition provided no references that corroborated any of the statistics cited. The petition simply provided links to a Rape Crisis webpage describing different rape myths, a general Wikipedia page about rape myths and a BBC news story about a Scottish public information campaign about sexual violence.”
Here were feminists campaigning against supposed rape myths, rape culture and juror bias, lobbying UK parliament by citing ‘evidence’ that would not be admissible in a school project.
In spite of Thomas’ study finding juries convict more than they acquit and are not biased by rape myths, we today find Scottish feminists currently lobbying their parliament to end trial by jury for rape, by claiming the opposite is true.
This year, Thomas published a further article once again calling for more clarity about rape prosecutions, stating that the rape conviction rate needs to be seen in relation to the conviction rate for other offences.
She also warns as The Stern Report on Rape did: “Knowing the truth about jury decision-making in rape cases is important for all complainants in rape cases, especially those complainants who may be reluctant to pursue a case through to trial because they incorrectly believe that juries are unwilling to convict in rape cases.”
This International Women’s Day, feminism has decided to come out and be honest about its non-egalitarian goals with a theme which “seeks to get the world talking about why "equal opportunities are no longer enough”. This – and the actual rape conviction rate – should be celebrated. Further, a wider discussion urgently needs to be had.
Feminists receive millions in the name of women, a demographic which is not aligned with feminist aims. They appear to use “woman” as a trojan horse to gain access to political power and then do little to help women when they get there. The fact that today the meaning of “woman” is being dismantled by the people who claim to represent women’s interests has never more clearly demonstrated this.
Lies, Up In Lights On Broadway
This spring, the one-woman drama Prima Facie will play to packed audiences on Broadway. The play is described as a tour de force for its star, the protean actress Jodie Comer, the breakout star of Killing Eve, and a timely reminder of the horrors facing victims of rape and sexual assault who must muster gargantuan levels of courage when attempting to find justice in an institutionally sexist and misogynist justice system. It was just awarded an Olivier award for Best New Play but, other than it being a one-woman show, the narrative appears to be exactly the same as the 2001 TV drama mentioned above.
I have no doubt that will undoubtedly launch a fresh flurry of global headlines informing the public of the rot deep in the heart of our supposedly enlightened institutions. I hope one thing becomes clear from this essay: we cannot and should not ever take feminist claims about anything on face value.
As I write a new headline appeared on the front pages claiming that at least 1000 sexual offenders had escaped justice by simply “saying sorry”. It is a ludicrous claim and the article provides no source for it. All hyperlinks of suggested sources in the article lead to The Daily Mail loading page. After a cursory search, I discovered the same narrative (I cannot in good faith call it a story) published a year earlier. On further investigation, I discovered these were all cases involving minors.
And, on the evening of the 29th March on the BBC six o’clock news broadcast to the entire nation an exchange across the dispatch box during Prime Ministers Questions between Angela Raynor, Shadow leader of the Labour Party and Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab in which Raynor stated that “the charge rate for rape had "collapsed" under his watch to 1.6%.” and further, “He hasn't answered my question because he is too ashamed of the answer: 1.6% of rapists faced being charged for their crime - 1.6%...Only 98% of rapists will see a courtroom, never mind a prison cell.” The BBC followed up, not with a fact or context check, but with a segment in which a journalist interviewed an anonymous woman on the shortcomings of the police.
I hope to garner some response from feminists to explain or defend this practice. I expect silence. Not least because we know, after both The Stern Report on Rape and Professor Thomas’ research, such inaccurate narratives stop victims from coming forward.
Another unintended consequence is even harder to contemplate.
Social scientists posit via deterrence theory that some criminals weigh up the odds of capture and punishment for committing a crime before they offend. If potential and serial rapists do this, the mainstream message in our media that less than 2% of them will be convicted does nothing but give them a green light.
To end, I’d like to revisit the point I made in my first paragraph regarding the fact that “feminist” and “woman” are not synonyms. Another proof of this is the fact that people are afraid to “call out” feminists for fear of being labelled anti-woman. Even the fearless Piers Morgan kowtows to the liberal feminist myth.
We readily criticise the priesthood but anointed feminists are above criticism. We alll know the adage about absolute power leading to absolute corruption.
I eagerly look forward to the responses and debates.
*All cartoons are copyright Paula Wright except black & white “if I had a hammer” zine.
thanks for the article I really enjoyed it. it's crazy to think how rational women were kicked out the feminist movement. so their goal is not equality and the don't even really respect women's autonomy. so it seem to be evident that their goal is retribution but even at the cost of their fellow feminists. who would you say key feminists are to the movement are?
I have been a victim of crime dozens of times. Bikes stolen, employees ripping me off, and so on. Also assaults. I am a guy who grew up in a rough neighborhood. Not once has anyone been prosecuted. Ever. Various crimes. Also, how would one classify this: I met a woman, she was separated, her ex husband lived in a separate town. She gave me a ride home from a party and asked to see my place. I was working like a nut and I was tired but I said yes. She came on to me forcefully, wouldn’t take no for an answer. I was not attracted to her. But I was 29 and had a near constant erection. I wasn’t seeing anyone. After gently rebuffing her for 20 minutes I thought ‘whatever, lets get this over with’. This was pre rampant disease. Over 40 years ago. Her husband had had an affair. He was out of town working. She did this to get back at him and after it was over she went home and phoned him. He was a hot headed violent guy. He finished his one month work contract and came back to town - they weren’t separated - with the intention of killing me. He didn’t. We talked it out. But it was close. He had a loaded rifle with him. That close. So, was that sexual assault? She was physically climbing on top of me. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was the physical female equivalent of date rape. She also stoked a very dangerous situation. If I had gone to the police they would hVe shrugged it off.