If you are interested in the subject I'd like to repeat my suggestion: ask women around you. Real, live women. You don't have to talk to them about rape -- ask them if they are afraid to be on the street alone. afraid to leave the house. afraid to be near male strangers. Listen to what they say.
Do you really believe that the quality of most studies on this topic is so poor that this extremely flawed research strategy you recommend is more likely to be reliable? That seems like an unjustifiably dim view of the relevant research community.
I don't disagree that asking women you know is one easy way to get evidence on this question, but I would think that even a pretty poorly conducted scientific study would constitute superior evidence.
Do you really believe that the quality of most studies on this topic is so poor
Yes.
P.S. I do love how directly querying the reality surrounding you is described as an "extremely flawed research strategy" X-D
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.