One things I’ve been mulling on with the #metoo movement is reconciling the statistical prevalence of all the people who do depraved shit: Domestic Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Pedophilia, Incest etc
And who the people are who are committing these crimes?
How many of them silently live in the communities and social events we co-mingle with?
As many people who I have intuitively sensed there was something ‘off’ with them, have been outted as Alleged Depraved Abusers, I’m wondering how reliable the intuitive impression of something being off about somebody is a predictor of Depravity?
By my back of the napkin calculations, it seems like it very likely is a very good predictor.
Take a look at the statistics:
Domestic Abuse: 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have been victims of [some form of] physical violence by an intimate partner within their lifetime.
Sexual Assault: One in four women and one in six men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.
Pedophilia: Self-report studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident;
Incest: an overwhelming incidence of sexual abuse happens within the family. These statistics are well known among industry professionals, who are often quick to add, “and this is a notoriously underreported crime.”
So unless all of these crimes are highly clustered amongst a very small subset of people, rather than these types of crimes being more individual distributed
i.e. is it more likely there a few people who commit domestic abuse, sexual abuse, pedophilia and incest, or is more likely there some people who commit domestic abuse and others sexual abuse but not both?
I would lean to the crimes being more evenly distributed.
And if that’s the case then I roughly estimate 15-25% of the population commits these Depravities.
And I would wager that the intuitive sense of something being ‘off’ about someone is picking up on connection to these Depravities… either as a Depraved Perpetrator or a Depraved Victim, or more likely both — as abusers were usually at one point in their life the abused. As abuse is a notoriously hard behavioral, physiological and karmic cycle to break.
What are your thoughts on this?
Does this rough bayesian inference estimation method of Off-ness correlating to Depravity make sense? Can anyone better at Bayesian math tan me put some more rigorous bayesian math behind this?
