When good guys lie: misleading the public is no way to make the world a better place - baseless, alarmist statistics in publicizing social concerns

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 1997 by Glenn Hodges

Many studies fall somewhere in between Koss's and Gordon's, and it's a legitimate arena of contention. Rape has traditionally been vastly underreported. But swinging the numbers to the other extreme has problems of its own. As a 20-year old University of Michigan student told the Toledo Blade in 1993, "It makes a big difference if it's I in 3 or 1 in 50. If it's 1 in 3, that's something you could reasonably expect would happen in your lifetime. I'd have to say, honestly, I'd think about rape a lot less if I knew the number was 1 in 50." Another student said, "The numbers scare me a lot. I find myself sitting back and saying, 'Should I count on having this terrible experience sometime in my life?'''

But fear is only one consequence. Transforming debatable studies into steadfast slogans - one in three will be victimized - universalizes the problem: All women are equally vulnerable. But it's poor and minority women who are at the highest risk, and middle-class white women - especially college students - who get most of the support services. According to the U.S. Department of Justice's National Crime Survey, black women are more than twice as likely to be raped as white women, and low-income women are raped five times as often as high-income women. Meanwhile, as community rape crisis centers are habitually under-funded and short-staffed, their well-funded university counterparts in some instances may have little reason for being: Many universities - even large state schools - report fewer than one rape or attempted. rape each year. There may be a significant underreporting problem, but when reported rape victims in non-university settings go begging for support services, the situation smacks of misplaced priorities. Instead of "taking back the night" on college campuses, energies might be better spent volunteering at local rape crisis centers.

Inflated and misleading numbers can not only lead to the wrong solutions; they can lead to no solutions. When the National Association for Perinatal Addiction Researrh and Education said there were 375,000 babies born each year who were exposed to drugs while in the womb, Washington threw up its hands. Douglas Besharov, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs, says that when Congress was debating how to address the problem of "crack babies" in the late 1980s, it was immobilized by the immensity of the problem. The 375,000 figure, Besharov says, "had a chilling effect on Congress. I was floating around there, testifying at hearings, and you could just watch their faces blanch" Meanwhile, he says, the real number was one-tenth that figure - closer to 35,000. It turns out the larger statistic counted babies whose mothers ingested alcohol or a drug at any point in their pregnancies. In other words, a wide net was cast to make the problem seem larger than it really was. And almost a decade later, Besharov says, there's still no federal program to address the problem of children born to drug addicts, and "a big reason is people thought it was too big to deal with."