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Intrism comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong Discussion

27 [deleted] 10 April 2013 07:54PM

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Comment author: Intrism 11 April 2013 10:49:20PM *  6 points [-]

Over 20% of women in the U.S. experience domestic violence. The incidence of sociopathy is at or below 5% so it's more likely that an abusive male in a relationship is not a sociopath.

That isn't logically valid. It's possible for a single person to abuse more than one woman. Therefore, the percentage of abusers in the population is likely lower than the percentage of abused. I don't know how much lower that is, but "less than 10%" is entirely plausible.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 11 April 2013 11:40:22PM *  4 points [-]

It's also possible for the same person (e.g. a child or teenager) to receive abuse from more than one person (e.g. both parents). This may counterbalance the above somewhat.

(On the other hand, it seems rather certain that the proportion of rape victims is higher than the proportion of rapists, since IIRC almost all rapists are repeat offenders.)

Comment author: Intrism 11 April 2013 11:53:44PM *  8 points [-]

I'd argue that being a repeat offender is, for any crime and especially those with low conviction rates, more likely than being a repeat victim, by simple logic of "an offender chooses, a victim does not." You are right, though, in that I should have mentioned the possibility.

Comment author: MugaSofer 12 April 2013 01:28:36PM -1 points [-]

IIRC almost all rapists are repeat offenders.

Don't suppose anyone has a source for this? I can see how it could come about, but it would be nice to have something solid.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 12 April 2013 03:18:00PM 4 points [-]

Good catch. The Harvard rape study (Lisak & Miller 2002) claims 63%, which my brain had apparently rounded up to "almost all". Sigh. Silly brain.

Comment author: Pentashagon 13 April 2013 06:43:04PM 0 points [-]

That isn't logically valid. It's possible for a single person to abuse more than one woman. Therefore, the percentage of abusers in the population is likely lower than the percentage of abused. I don't know how much lower that is, but "less than 10%" is entirely plausible.

There's also a potential confounding effect if a higher percentage of abusers and abused remain in the same set of relationships, e.g. an abused person moves from one abuser to the next. It looks like sociopathy/psychopathy has a higher prevalence in the abuser population, about 15% to 30% for "batterers", from Domestic violence and psychopathic traits: distinguishing the antisocial batterer from other antisocial offenders., with a non-paywall version here. Most of the studies those results are based on seem to be relatively small (N < 100) and essentially self-selected, but I couldn't find anything better.