Lies, damn lies & statistics

I was having a chat with the Big Swede today, and he told me about his house getting burgled last year. It got me thinking and one thing led to another and I tried to work out (mathematically) my chance of being burgled whilst living in London. A quick search on google provided a link to the Home Office crime statistics website. As I'm flicking throught the site I come across the sexual offence statistics page.

I'm totally shocked by what it says.

"Seven per cent of women had suffered a serious sexual assault at least once in their lifetime (including rape) since the age of 16."

7 percent. That's staggering. To put it in perspective - educationnews.org says that dyslexia affects around 2-8% of school-age youngsters. I'm always reading about the latest initiative to teach reading and literacy, but rarely do you hear about victim support. There's some sort of dirty aura around rape that cloaks and taints everything that comes into contact with it. As far as I assumed (because I don't really hear about it) that there was support available but it's not that globally expansive - local support groups and such. Happily, I'm wrong. rape counselling pulls down more results than violent porn.

Statistics? That's one out of every 14.2 women. Now I'm looking around at the lads because I have more than 14 male friends, mathematically one of them is guilty.