As a credulous sort, I’m prepared to believe anything people tell me: the cheque is in the post, Islam is a religion of peace, Damien Hirst is an artist – you name it.
So much more the reason for me to accept as gospel the results of the latest UN study on sexual violence.
The greatest survey of its kind ever undertaken, it covered 190 countries, which by my calculations means more or less all of them.
This is yet another reason to accept the findings without demurring – if UNICEF, which we know is a force for good, as are all international agencies without exception, goes to such trouble, surely they wouldn’t release any slipshod data to an eagerly awaiting world.
The findings, one must admit, do stretch one’s credulity, but not quite to breaking point. The study says that at least one out of 10 women have been sexually assaulted by the time they turn 20.
That’s quite a lot. I recall all the women I know or have even known, trying to figure out which of them found themselves in the unfortunate percentile. One out of 10?
Hard to believe, that, but then this is just one man’s experience. I’ve never visited more than 20 countries, never mind the 190 scrutinised by UNICEF. They are the experts, and a credulous sort like me must take them at their word.
Unfortunately, not everyone is as easy-going as I am. Some people – including, I’m mortified to admit, my friends – may have doubts. They may ask awkward questions, an annoying tendency that UNICEF dignitaries do little to discourage.
Quite the contrary, those doubting Thomases may regard as positively encouraging the comment proffered by UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake.
Sexual violence, he said, “cuts across boundaries of age, geography, religion, ethnicity and income brackets”.
Presumably this means that the swath thus cut is of equal width and depth everywhere. It has to be, for otherwise such an important man could be accused of uttering meaningless drivel.
For if the swath width varies from, say, one in a 1,000 in one place to 65 in a 100 in another, then Mr Lake’s statement is idiotic or else deliberately deceptive. Naturally, any decent man must reject either possibility indignantly.
So fine. I’m prepared to believe that a middleclass, middle-aged American churchgoer or a demographically similar Israeli Hassid is as likely as a Somali Muslim or a Jamaican pagan to force his attentions on a prepubescent girl.
Even more likely actually: an earlier UNICEF study points an accusing finger at Americans, who seem to be inveterate rapists far in excess of the global average.
It was found out in 2011 that 35 per cent of adolescent American girls and 20 per cent of adolescent boys reported suffering some form of sexual violence during their lives.
Now I’m really worried, especially since one can confidently predict that a future study will show that every woman in the world has been raped at least once. (Does a gang rape count as one or should it be multiplied by the number of assailants? I’ll ask UNICEF and get back to you on that one.)
I have family in America, including grandchildren, both female and male. None of them is anywhere near 20, so they’d better move somewhere safe before they reach that cut-off point. Perhaps Africa or Latin America.
Oops, that may not be such a good idea after all. Reading the report’s small print, one finds a coy admission that sexual violence appears to be particularly prevalent in such countries as the Congo, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Panama, Brazil and Colombia, “though by no means limited to them”.
A doubting Thomas’s antennae would be twitching now, and he would again be forced to play the numbers game. What does this mean? One in 10,000 in Canada versus 99 in a 100 in Columbia? The naysayer is clamouring for a geographic and demographic breakdown, but none is forthcoming.
Moreover, according to the report at least a third of the sex without permission is perpetrated by the victim’s husband or cohabitor.
(The report actually uses the word ‘partner’, but I have problems with it. Partners don’t do sexual assault, in my experience. During my business life I had at least a dozen of them, and not one ever tried to rape me. Either they were undersexed, or I’m singularly unattractive.)
Another close look fails to detect any distinction drawn between various types of sexual violence. The lifelong champion of political correctness in me rejoices: pinching a girl’s bottom on a bus and raping her at knifepoint in a park are equally criminal in today’s ethos.
It’s the naysayers I’m worried about, those reactionaries who insist that the definition of sexual assault in general and rape in particular has become rather loose. It includes, for example, a woman asking her husband to withdraw in mid-stroke and him neglecting to do so.
According to not just the ethos but also the law, the husband is a rapist. As such, he falls into the same rubric as a knife-wielding degenerate assaulting a girl at a bus stop.
As I’ve been saying, I have no problems with any of this. It’s just that I know many people who might.