#bruh i have no idea how to tag this besides a bunch of trigger warnings aaaaaaaaaa

[reigen-small-naturals]

okay i am knees deep in the UK law and i just want to vent all my findings please lawyers and data analysts correct me if i am wrong about anything.

huge trigger warnings for transphobia, rape, prisons, UK law fuckery. it's a post from somebody who isn't qualified to talk about law and statistics around rape, correcting somebody who is also super unqualified to do it. reblog with caution, or better just steal my ideas and improve them in your own posts.

so i saw this data viz under JKR's tweet

first thing that caught my attention is WOW that's an awful viz???? sample size of trans women is so much smaller than cis ppl like you can't just make this visual of 1177 per million trans women rapists out of 56 bcs there are just no million trans women in the UK????

but okay let's start with the elephant in the room: this viz is mostly to show that trans women rape much more often than cis women and trans men. so it turns out that UK law only recognizes rape done by somebody with a penis (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/1/2009-11-12). therefore obviously the percentage of convicted of rape trans women will be much higher than of cis women.

now to the fact that trans women rape more often than cis men. i am less sure about this part, bcs it all generally deals with sampling issues, so please please please fact check me here. i went to read the article this picture is from (https://scientificparentofatranskid.substack.com/p/fact-check-rates-of-sexual-offending). they get 1177 per million sex offenders if they look at a proportion of sex offenders (56) to all trans women in the UK (47k). however, when they look at a proportion of sex offenders to all AMAB transgender individuals in the UK (120k), they get numbers that are very close to what they have with cis men.

then they later conclude that 1177 per million stat is more accurate, because the gov official replied to them that all of these 5 offenders identify as trans women only, but then also they say that non-binary AMAB individuals don't commit rape, which is... weird? i think it makes more sense that the percentage would be more or less equal between all genders (obviously, we still have to deal with the fact, that in UK only people with penis can rape, but you know what i mean)? like i guess it's harder to identify as non-binary in prison, which gives you only two options of where to be incarcerated.

BUT 'the numbers just line up better that way' is a biased reasoning. there could be many more reasons, why percentage-wise the number is much higher. an example that comes to mind is the fact that more black people are incarcerated in the US. we would make a mistake to assume that it's because they are more dangerous than white people. and, once again, oh boy these sample sizes.

i want to end this post with another mention of the fact that this topic is extremely complicated, rape is extremely under reported, it's even worse when we are talking about rape in queer relationships and when rape is done by a cis woman, which isn't a thing in UK's legal system apparently. it must be repeated, because JKR and her supporters talk about these issues very carelessly. they don't talk about prison rape, they don't talk about prison rape done by officers, both of which are very common. they are not careful with their findings, with statistics, with sample sizes.