Do 27% of Europeans say rape may be acceptable in some circumstances?

The Washington Post says they do, referencing a recently published EU survey ¹This and several related documents can be found here.. Alex Griswold doesn’t agree:

…much about the story doesn’t pass the smell test. I can buy widespread misogyny in Romania, but 40% of liberal Belgians and Luxembourgers are secret rape supporters?

The survey instrument was delivered to subjects in their native language. Griswold doesn’t analyse foreign language version of the question, and I certainly don’t have the linguistic competence to do so. Nevertheless, I agree with him that the relatively high number for Belgium is suspect, given the high rating that country gets in the gynocentric Gender Equality Index ²Somewhat confusingly a number close to zero in the index as a whole or any of its constituent parts indicates a more gender-equal society by the index’s lights. A number close to one indicates … Continue reading. It’s notable that only 15% of Dutch people gave an affirmative answer to this question, despite that country having a very similar GEI rating. It seems reasonable to conjecture that issues with foreign-language versions of the question similar to those discussed below, may have affected the result ³According to Wiki, 55% of Belgians speak Dutch as their first language and 36% speak French. 30% of people in France answered affirmatively suggesting that such issues may not be the entire … Continue reading.

Griswold sees some problems with the English-language version of the question:

First and most importantly, the question wording was downright atrocious:

“Some people believe that having sexual intercourse without consent may be justified in certain situations. Do you think this applies to the following circumstances?”

The “this” in the second sentence is very, very vague. Respondents might have thought that they were being asked to identify the circumstances in which “some people” say non-consensual sex is justified, not the circumstances in which they believe it’s justified.

I agree. The question could reasonably be interpreted as asking “do some people believe that the following circumstance are ones in which non-consensual sex may be justified.” Arguably this is a more natural interpretation than “do you think non-consensual sex may be justified in these circumstance.”

This ambiguity is undoubtedly the worst problem with the question and on its own invalidates the result, at least as far as English speakers are concerned. But there are other issues:

(Also, I suspect that priming the question by saying that “some people” believe that non-consensual sex is okay might induce respondents to agree with statements they ordinarily would not.)

Or at least, may have primed some respondents to agree with statement that they wouldn’t have without the priming. It’s worth pointing out that this was the only question in the survey given a “some people believe” framing.

Griswold continues:

…some of conditions listed […] are so broad or confusing, that they cover circumstances where legally and ethically, it isn’t difficult to think of cases where the initiator’s actions would be “justified” despite the lack of explicit consent.

• “Not clearly saying no or physically fighting back”
• “If the assailant does not realize what they are doing”
• “Being drunk or using drugs” (This was the most popular response)

The first one is baffling. There are cases of non-consensual sex where the victim’s passivity does not absolve the perpetrator: the rape of an unconscious woman, for example. But 99.9% of the time, sex where one’s partner is “not clearly saying no or physically fighting back” actually is consensual.

Of course, consensual sex where ones partner doesn’t say no or physically fight back is excluded by the question. But I agree that that the non-consensual aspect of the hypothetical was insufficiently emphasised in the question, and may not have been salient in the minds of the respondents. As Griswold puts it:

It isn’t difficult to see how participants could be confused and think they were being asked whether or not sex where the other person isn’t actively saying “no” is rape. Most of the time, it isn’t.

The question would have been better if they had added something like “Remember we are only talking about non-consensual sex.”

There’s another problem here that Griswold doesn’t mention: Nowhere is the word “consent” defined. As endless arguments both on this blog and elsewhere in the gendersphere have shown, different people attach different meanings to the word. A similar problem applies to the word “justified”. Does it mean “morally acceptable”? “Excusable”? Or even “legal”? If we don’t know how respondents interpret these words, we don’t know exactly what propositions they are assenting to.

Griswold goes on:

The last bullet point is the thorniest. Again I would peg it as too vague. For one thing, it doesn’t even say who is supposed to be intoxicated in the hypothetical. WaPo states definitively in its lede that the respondents where talking about when the victim is drunk, but the actual question wording doesn’t say. […] I’d imagine nearly all sexually active Europeans (and Americans) have had sex where one or both participants were intoxicated, but would chafe at the notion that they raped their partner.

Or that they were raped by their partner.