Survey Results Are In

SOURCE: http://nsvrc.org

I am constantly appalled by what I see happen to friends, what I read about, what I hear about. What I wonder all the time is what does everyone else think? Are they all as disturbed as I am? Or am I alone in this?

To find out, I surveyed 100 people that I am friends with on facebook, 15% men, 84% women, 1% transgender. It was a random sample of my friends, whoever was online at the time. I asked them nine questions. Here is what I found.

100% of the people I surveyed believed that sexual assault is something that affects the victim a lot after it takes place. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being survivors highly affected and 1 being barely affected, 61% ranked it a ten.

85.56% believed that it would take the survivor more than 1 year to recover, and many left comments saying things like “you will never truly get over something like rape.”

71.72% ranked rape as the second worst crime out of vandalism, murder, armed robbery and theft, second to murder. 14. 14% ranked it as the very worst.

When I asked if there is any instance in which rape is okay, 100% emphatically said “NO.”

On a scale from “Never” to “Always” when asked if victims are asking for it, 73.74% said “Never”. And only 3.03% of them believed that they were “Sometimes” asking for it.

I asked them how they would feel if they heard someone they knew had been raped by someone they knew or didn’t know. When asked about it being someone they knew, the majority said they would be shocked, heartbroken, etc. They wouldn’t know what to do. They would leave it up to the victim. Many said they would cut ties with the rapist, but many also said they wouldn’t know what to do, and would just hope things worked out. But the majority also said that they would do their best to support the victim.

And when asked about it being someone they didn’t know, they all had similar responses. But the key difference is many admitted to being more inclined to be angry at the perpetrator. It’s easier to fully side with the survivor when the other side is a stranger.

100% said they were really disconcerted, disgusted, or angry over how our society deals with rape. They all believe that it is a heinous crime, but that people are not convicted enough, and it is not prosecuted enough and just in general not taken seriously enough. Most believe that no one takes it seriously until it happens to someone close. Many were horrified by our victim blaming society. And many said that they hated to hear “rape jokes.”

I also asked who of them is a survivor or know someone who is. 20% of the people I survey are survivors. That’s 20 random friends who just happened to be online at that moment who have been assaulted. 47% had never been assaulted but knew someone who had. 33% have never been touched by assault it any way.

This data is biased, as every survey is. My selection of participants, while random, is still from a small pool of people that I know. The demographics are not evenly distributed. But it still gives a glimpse of how society feels.

If so many people agree that rape is so wrong, why is it still a fact that 25% of women will be assaulted in their lifetime? Why is it still taken as a joke? And how do victims really feel?