In fact, my educated guess is that far more women die from
car accidents than from crazy murderers.
That's true. However, if I'm doing my math right, the statistics for rape and sexual assault are an entirely different story. The US isn't on both of these lists[0][1], so we'll take a proxy and compare: Germany has 6.5/100k deaths/year in accidents and 8.9/100k rapes/year. Note that that's per 100k people, not per 100k women. Then note that, in the US, we have 28 rapes per hundred thousand people, more than three times the rate in Germany. Then note that something like half of rapes are never reported to the police [2].
Right, but I was really objecting the "American killed in Baghdad" vs "woman murdered/raped in the US" comparison. What I meant is that the risk of a woman getting raped/murdered in the US is much closer to the risk of getting killed in an accident than of walking at night in Baghdad. I'm still sure there are far more than 8.9/100k deaths in Baghdad.
Are you suggesting that knowing the gender of people is a risk factor for rape?
It seems like a few people are making this odd connection between assault, stalking and rape with knowing somebody's gender. You do realize that most humans can sit on any street corner and identify the gender of passers-by with a high degree of certainty, right?
I was simply being annoyed at an unbacked statement like that, especially given the topic. We always seem to forget that being a woman is, in fact, bloody dangerous. Something like one in five American women experiences a rape. We aren't discussing some abstract edge case; half of the population lives in completely justifiable terror of something that actually happens.
I mention gender because that modifies the statistics. Women get raped much more often than men do, so the rapes/person stat is misleading; rapes/woman, the stat we care about here, is almost twice the number I quoted.
I don't see how you arrive at the statistic of "one in five american women experiencing a rape" from 28 rapes per hundred thousand people. Even if we considered that only women were victim of rapes and that half of the incidents weren't reported, it would still amount to something like 112 rapes/100k so around 0.1%.
Anecdotically, none of my female friends were ever raped which doesn't match with your assertion that "one in five American women experiences a rape".
I do think that our culture tends to objectifying women in the medias but I don't think that rape and sexual assault is as prevalent as many people think it is... There's also a lot of paranoia due to the media looking for good sensational stories and latching on any sexual assault story they can find.
Incidence varies by community and definition. Sexual assaults are very common on college campuses.
The stereotypical scary guy with pantyhose pulled over his head is only one manifestation of rape. "Date-rape" and taking advantage of people not capable of giving consent (drunk, drugged, etc) happens all of the time.
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#UN_Statistics
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_accident#Statistics_...
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#Under-_and_over...