Women Who Abuse - File on 4 - 19 January 8pm - BBC Radio 4.

*incompetent journalist with a degree. (Not sure why I put no degree in there the second time). Typing too fast.

I agree completely that you can be a competent journalist with no degree, but it is also true you can be an incompetent journalist with no degree because the journalism degree courses that I’ve seen are terrible. The education/training of journalists is shockingly bad.

They can’t understand basic statistics, so they don’t think to question whether gender is referring to gender id or actual sex. They take numbers of assaults by penetration or attempts from reports and then mis-label them as bona fide rapes. I can’t think of a single time over the past ten years that a news reporter has reported any scientific study correctly and accurately. They simply cannot read a scientific study and understand it much less report on it. Even when it comes to basic reporting of crimes, they don’t know the difference between a crime survey vs police reports vs actual cases of crimes. It is so frustrating!

the main attributes you would need as a journalist would be curiosity and tenacity - a nose for a good story and a refusal to be fobbed off

I believe all those journalists have been fired for their refusal to be fobbed off and are now working from Substack.

they clearly used the ONS statistics and categories

Just to be 100% clear - the ONS themselves produced the overall report that included both their own crime survey data and police data, and some other sources.

So some data in the ONS report was using police categories (grouping penetration with sexual assault). Other data was using ONS crime survey categories (grouping penetration with rape).

The team working on File on Four would have had plenty of time to analyse the figures, it's not a daily news programme. As journalists they must also be well aware of the current controversy around how data is recorded. To not even question whether recording gender identity rather than sex is skewing the figures in an area like this is dreadful journalism. As others have pointed out the numbers of women carrying out sex offences is so small comparatively that any inclusion of self identified females would distort the figures. Why would they not even raise this?

I'm not sure that a lack of formal education is the problem, and I think in reality you'd be unlikely to get into journalism - at least mainstream journalism - now without a degree.
But I agree that something seems to be going very wrong. I'd have thought the main attributes you would need as a journalist would be curiosity and tenacity - a nose for a good story and a refusal to be fobbed off. And then you surely need to be meticulous about your facts, if only to avoid lawsuits. They all seem to be sadly lacking.

Journalism is a shockingly undereducated profession in my opinion. You don’t need a degree to be a journalist, and even if you have a degree in journalism the degree courses are sorely lacking in basic research, statistics, scientific method and language skills.

Agree with all above. It just appeared to me that the journalist had not only used inflammatory language by calling assault by penetration “rape” but also when I read the BBC written report the live 4 broadcast is based on, they clearly used the ONS statistics and categories, not police force statistics. So that is another bit of journalistic mis-reporting as well.

Really helpful posts Necessary thank you

As I clarified on the other thread - the ONS crime survey appears to always group together "rape or assault by penetration".

HOWEVER, police statistics do not. THEY class "assault by penetration" as a subset of "sexual assault".

For the police, it is not clear that they could distinguish "assault by penetration" from other sexual assaults in stats. Whereas rape (with a penis) is a different category inherently recorded separately.

Reference here: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/877790/count-sexual-apr-2020.pdf

Excerpt example:

Where woman believes that they have been penetrated but is unsure with what, there is a presumption that it will be with a penis unless there is clear evidence that this is not the case.

4: A woman makes a complaint that she has been date raped. She believes that her vagina has been penetrated but she can not provide any further details surrounding the assault. / One crime (class 19C). / Following investigation into the offence it is established that a physical object was used and there was no penile penetration. / The FCR can reclassify the recorded rape to one crime (class 20A) (assault by penetration).

5: A woman is accosted at a party and pushed onto a bed by a suspect. Her trousers are removed and she feels her anus being penetrated. She pushes the suspect off her and discovers that the suspect is a female. / One crime (class 20A) (assault by penetration).

The tables in the ONS spreadsheet referring to police data clearly indicate that they're talking about 19A/19B/19C and 20A/20B. They'd have had to do some serious work to extract "assault by penetration" from "sexual assault" and regroup with "rape", but there's no notes suggesting they'd done that.

The "assault by penetration" note is needed for current sentencing guidelines - those have been revised to give that the same sentencing as rape, but the actual underlying laws have not, so the basic classification for the police has not been changed. (Presumably to not disrupt statistical history).

The "true figures" with their 84% rise presented by the programme are not as well researched as you would expect and it doesn't help anyone, least of all the victims.

Should have said of course that the most fundamental error is to not check the definition of rape and therefore make a statement that cannot be true in a piece of journalism for File on Four. This is supposed to be BBC Radio 4's flagship current affairs programme. If they're counting different offences under "rape" they should not be.

I’ve read the BBC report and followed the link to the ONS where they got their figures, and the ONS says that child sex abuse is recorded by police forces in 3 categories:
“Three types of sexual abuse are defined by the CSEW: non-contact sexual abuse, rape or assault by penetration (including attempts), and other contact sexual abuse.”

So that figure of 382 rapes done by female perpetrators (not sure if recorded by sex or gender) most probably represents a name shortening of the category which has a full name of rapes or assaults by penetration including attempts.
www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/childsexualabuseinenglandandwales/

I think it’s more likely that the journalist is using inflammatory language and calling the 382 cases “rape” (even though that is legally not correct, they are assault by penetration) than it is for all of those 382 cases to be pre-op transwomen using their penis.

@CaraDuneRedux
Yes completely agree the statistics should be recorded by sex for perpetrator and victim. Gender is a cluster fuck of a mess and you can’t draw any conclusions using that in data gathering.

Is there a way to search for all of those cases of female rape, so we can find out about the identity of the person who was accused or convicted?

Of course we need to acknowledge that some women abuse. If we can't name it, we can't tackle it.
But it's catastrophic that, just as with so many other aspects of society at the moment, the activities of highly influential, yet unrepresentative lobby groups have been able to corrupt our language, data and reality so that we can no longer be certain of identity, causation and therefore appropriate responses.
The casualties will as usual be children and the vulnerable. It appears that with all our organisations being captured by these groups, there will need to be a mountain of harmed children and adults before any of them notice the damage that these dystopian approaches are causing.

I agree the UK is out of step with the rest of the world on this one. But while we live in a topsy turvy world where male sex offending is being attributed to women, it's useful to have one handle on what the true figures are, split by sex. (There's also an in principle reason for recording penile penetration as a separate offence, as it can result in pregnancy or STD transmission, so has additional traumatic consequences for the victim over and above the horrible trauma suffered by a victim of assault by penetration.)

Female sex offending is a problem - incest, child abuse and adult women molesting teen boys are genuine issues. But the point made upthread that you can't really address the issues without accurate stats is an important one. The stats need to be recorded by sex. By all means record offenders' self professed gender identity as well - that would I think help to answer some important questions about offending patterns.

Then could the 382 “rapes” actually be assault by penetration? Obviously journalists are going to have an agenda and for decades now activists have been trying to get the UK to recognise assault by penetration as a type of rape.

England & Wales

Many countries have rape defined as assault by penetration so it doesn’t have to be a penis doing the penetration. Was this show only about U.K.?