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By MannyGoldstein at Sun, 2005-12-04 10:17 On average, blue states have much lower rates of rape - but the issue is not totally clear cut.
The short story is that blue states have a lower rate of rape and are more likely to have a low rate of rape. The average of blue state rape rates is 19.4 per 100,000 residents, compared to 35.63 for red states. The first thing that I noticed is that Alaska, a red state, has the highest rape rate by far. In case that wrecked havoc with the data, I tried reaveraging the data with Alaska removed - the red state mean only dropped to 33.73, still more than 75% higher than the rate in blue states. That being said, there are a few caveats to keep in mind when looking at this data. Rape statistics are "fuzzy" to some extent: the criteria for "counting" a rape is not uniform - it relies on the victim to report it, and the authorities to deem it a rape. Rape is a state issue, not a federal one: each state has different criteria for defining and prosecuting rape. Women living in different parts of the country may have varying statistics with regard to how likely or not they are to report a rape. Also, rape is very much related to the age of the victims and offenders - it is primarily a crime against young women, perpetrated by young men. States that pull a lot of young people from other states may have artificially high rate rapes. For example, this might explain Massachusetts's (surprisingly, to me) poor showing (although still in the top half) - Massachusetts draws a tremendous number of students from other states to its colleges. Based on these mitigating factors, I suspect that while the overall trend of the data is likely to be valid, comparisons between specific states are likely to be flawed. [1] Liberality Score for a state is the ratio of the votes received by Kerry to the votes received by Bush in the 2004 Presidential election. Data from http://uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/data.php?year=2004&datatype=national&def=1&f=1 [2] Per 100,000 residents. From: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004912.html. Source: Crime in the United States, 2003, FBI, Uniform Crime Reports.
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