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In reply to the discussion: Stop Telling Women How to Not Get Raped [View all]justiceischeap
(14,040 posts)but declines to press charges, that statistic is still counted as a sexual assault (since rape is a legal term) by someone somewhere.
You ask how people know about the 80%, well, there are these things called surveys and people fill them out, then the folks conducting the survey do some math and figure from the surveys the percentage. Most women who don't report their rapes do so because they say it's too personal. Of course, they've been traumatized and in order to report and prosecute rape, one must be traumatized over and over again. Still, in many cases that do go to court, the women have to prove they didn't somehow deserve the rape. That's standard defense strategy and really, who wants or should have to go through that?
Finally, why is this argument so important to you? Why are you bothered by the fact that you personally don't know how that number is arrived at?
Instead of arguing that rape is somehow akin to ufo sitings, do some Googling and get yourself educated about how it's done instead of somehow subtly suggesting that rape statistics are false. I wish we had a way to have an anonymous thread for a day (since the polls aren't working yet) and post the question, "Have you ever been raped?" and see the number of replies that come back. Of course, you'd probably argue that those replying in the affirmative are lying. That seems to be the tenor of your post anyway.