Playing the Numbers

Junk statistics are cluttering your Letters section. They dilute the writer’s point and lower the level of the debate. Nancy Zala, writing in the inaugural Mad as Hell column (“Violence Against Women,” March 15), is a wonderful example:

“It is estimated (by whom, with what credentials to be called a reasonable observer?) that four of every 10 children in America (do you seriously mean 12 children in every average classroom?) are being sexually molested ( molestation being defined how?). Every five minutes a woman in the United States is raped (as nowhere near that number is reported, who invented this statistic?); 16% of these women are over 60 years old (same question).”

The most frequently quoted figures on rape seem to come from the introduction to the Safe Campuses for Women section of the 1991 Violence Against Women bill in Congress. Those, in turn, seem to have come from a survey conducted under the auspices of Ms. magazine, with a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

As Neil Gilbert, a UC Berkeley professor of social welfare, wrote in a 1991 commentary in the Wall Street Journal: “Aside from the statistics being considerably higher than the average person might ever imagine . . . when asked, 73% of the college students classified as rape victims by the researcher did not think they had been raped. . . . More than 40% of these women reported having sex again with the men who had supposedly raped them.”

No serious person doubts that rape and child abuse are serious problems. Unattributed statistics--worse, junk statistics--have a negative effect. Rather than helping to focus attention on the problems, they create doubt in many readers’ minds.

Please, don’t throw around random numbers, and don’t let your letter writers do so without attribution.

BILL DAUGHERTY

Manhattan Beach