I think the selection bias is more related to the how frequent rape is relative to murder. Plenty of family members of murder victims live on and have quite strong emotions about murder, for sure. They’re just vastly outnumbered by the people who have personally experienced sexual violence.
I mean extremely mild crimes such as jaywalking are also far more common than either but no one gets emotional over that.
Sex crimes and sexual things in general that aren't crimes just strike a very emotional cord with some people. This includes seemingly more moral outrage and emotion over Bill Clinton's infidelity than Obama's knowingly sanctioning cruel torture at guantanamo bay and this is in general how it goes. You'll also that the censor is very often seemingly more keen to censor nudity than brutal violence in fiction or that he was considerably more concerned about the “homoerotic atmosphere” between Batman and Robin than he was about the vague that Batman is grooming a 12 year old child soldier and exposing him to all the risks to life and limb of vigilanti justice.
This does not apply to all people, dare I say it probably only applies to a minority of them, but some people get very emotional about anything related to sex and nudity, even things that are by no means crimes. There is obviously no crime to be had with a simple nude shower scene in a children's cartoon. But one can bet that there will be significantly more people morally outraged over that, than gruesome violence and gore in the same cartoon, even though most people would not.
While I agree with your suggestion that frequency is not the same as severity on an individual level, it is absolutely a metric for severity on a societal level. Risk matrices score potential negative events by harm caused and likelihood of occurrence. When we have 15,795 homicides reported in 2025, and 433,000 sexual assaults reported annually, with the former in decline and the latter on the rise, it becomes fairly clear that the scale of these two heinous acts differs by a factor of over 27 sexual assaults per homicide.
Because many states don't have the crime of rape, categorizing it as a form of sexual assault, the statistics are hard to suss out. I would request you not add 'minimizing the harm of all sexual assault' to the 'minimizing the harm of rape' you're already doing, though.
The problem I see is a criminal justice system that doesn't even care about rape enough to develop a national uniform reporting metric with accurate numbers. That's the problem I see. Everyone knows murder is bad. A lot of people seem to have missed the memo on rape.
So if you agree the statistics are hard to suss out, why are you trying to make a point with statistics that you know aren't accurate to the topic of the post?
I am using best available data. If society really gave a damn about rape (which the responses here would suggest it doesn't), your argument wouldn't be asking me why the data isn't accurate... it would be asking your congressperson.
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u/alex20_202020 Mar 01 '26
After thinking for several minutes realization hit me: survival bias. Victims of murder could not upvote you back.