As I understand it, there are two arguments in this article:
Sexual violence is bad for individuals.
Reducing sexual violence substantially is unlikely to be too difficult/costly.
Conclusion: We should generally look to evaluating/fund/spend time on solutions to sexual violence.
and
Sexual violence reduces EA’s impact
Preventing sexual violence in EA is unlikely to be too difficult/costly
Conclusion: We should spend more effort on reducing sexual violence in EA because it will increase our effectiveness.
###Sexual Violence in the world###
On funding/spending time on sexual violence reduction programs generally. We all agree that sexual violence is bad. The question is whether there are cost-effective ways to tackle it. Your statistics indicate that rape has a 1 in 208 chance of leading to death. Let’s adjust that figure for the suffering rape causes even when non-fatal and say that 100 rapes are as bad as 1 death. We can currently save a life or equivalent for $1700 deworming givewell analysis. Assuming you agree with my rape to death badness ratio, that would imply that a rape prevention program would have to prevent 100 rapes for $1700, or one rape per 17$, with a high degree of certainty to be competitive with our current best option. While I don’t think that is impossible, I also don’t think there’s any strong evidence in the article that this is the case.
As for the more meta level claim that the EA community should devote more resources/time to research in the area. I agree that while there is a lot of attention given to the issue, very little evaluation of program effectiveness is currently being done. I agree that this means there is likely a great deal of low hanging fruit for EA in terms of redirecting funding to more effective interventions. I’m just not sure that sexual violence is a better investment of our time or attention than other problems such as ethnic violence/warfare, drugs, crime, environmental damage, mental health, AI etc..
###Sexual Violence within EA###
On reducing sexual violence in the EA community. I think there are a few major issues with your analysis:
You assume that EA’s are about as likely to experience sexual violence as the population norm. I’m not sure this is justified, but others have already commented on this so I won’t repeat it here.
An extreme focus on sexual violence prevention within EA (sting operations, consent training, profiling etc..) may repel potential members if it creates a perception that sexual violence is a significant problem in the community or that EA is dominated by the far-left.
Your policy recommendations contain a number of suggestions that seem likely to be ineffective, legally dangerous and morally dubious.
3: Sting operations. They expose anyone participating in them to massive liability. By running one, you are at the very least knowingly putting another person in a situation where you suspect sexually assaulted is likely. You are likely recording someone without their consent, a crime in some jurisdictions, or not doing so and hence having no evidence even if the sting is successful. You’re also creating significant reputational damage for the employee/person in question at the point at which you have an operation involving a significant number of other employees and superiors conspire against them around the shared belief that they are a sex offender. At the very least this opens you up for civil liability for libel/defamation/harassment at work. It may well constitute criminal harassment depending on the jurisdiction. On top of the legal risks, these kind of operations in an NGO could have a severely negative reputational effect.
5&7 : robust sex offender detection strategy\minimising bad attitudes. We can take into account behavioural risk factors such as whether the person believes rape myths. We can then tweak a probability further using personality research.Male patriarchal values [66] Men’s acceptance of traditional sex roles This is profiling and, while possibly effective, is morally dubious. If being introverted increases risk of sexual assault, does that mean we should avoid hiring introverts or letting them into EA? What if devout Muslims/Christians/Xs have an increases rate of sexual assault? What about race? What about political opinions, gender, age, sex, IQ, nationality, etc.. A general moral principle I stand by is that we should treat people as individuals and judge them by their own actions rather than by those of others who share traits with them. Discrimination based on group level risks violates this principle and hence is morally unacceptable to me in all except the most extreme situations. Admittedly, whether you feel the same way depends on your moral intuitions, which may well differ from mine.
“Let’s adjust that figure for the suffering rape causes even when non-fatal and say that 100 rapes are as bad as 1 death.”—that seems like an unrealistically low figure given that rape can lead to trauma that takes years to get over or derail someone’s life.
The sexual violence I’ve endured has had disastrous affects on my health and wellbeing. I have treatment resistant disabling PTSD and depression, have not been able to hold a job due to symptoms, have not been able to have anything close to a healthy sex life, and in spite of availing myself of all the help I can afford (and putting myself in debt getting help I could not afford) am still not in any way functional or healthy. Sexual abuse and rape, both that which occurred when I was very young and when I was an adult, have driven me to suicidality many times, and being suicidal for extended periods of time, especially without recourse to fix it (either by dying, which is harder than it looks when you have very little resources, or by getting better), is far worse than an immediate death.
An outrageously crude estimate of life saving potential:
7,600,000,000 (world population)
3,800,000,000 (females, approximately half, because the suicide figure I have is for females)
760,000,000 (females raped, based on figures from just one country because I don’t have all ~200 figures)
36,53,846 (suicide deaths related to rape, phrased in past tense because the research isn’t about the future)
6,211,538,200 (cost of saving 36,53,846 people through deworming)
Point: If 6.2 billion dollars is enough to find a cure for rapists, and rapists pay for their own prescriptions so that nobody has to use charity money for their treatment, then funding research for a cure for rapists would have as much life-saving potential as deworming. Of course, I have no idea how much research funding is needed to cure rapists and it would take a lot of time to investigate that. This is why my global scope section says more research is needed. So basically all you have to do to see why I’m curious about this is to think about it on the right level of scale.
The rest of your comment contains so many egregious straw men of what I actually wrote that I have decided not to address it. There might be some valid concerns in there, but I don’t have the time to tease them apart from the straw men.
There are an estimated 276,000 annual cases of female suicide in the entire world (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3367275/). If, say, half of them are associated with sexual violence (guess), and you throw males in as well, then the eventual lifesaving potential is maybe 150,000 people per year.
Most of these suicides are in SE Asia and the Western Pacific where I believe healthcare and medication provision are not as comprehensive as they are here in the west.
The per year incidence is a totally different type of number from the numbers I used. The numbers I used cover a much longer time span. Comparing 276,000 annual cases to the number 36,53,846 is comparing apples to oranges.
It is not clear that your intent was to disagree with me. If you are throwing in an additional reference, I can’t incorporate that because the other research I referred to wasn’t using annual figures.
I suppose it’s interesting as something to check against. For an outrageously crude way to do that, you can multiply 276,000 by 80, the number of years in the average female lifespan (for one country) and compare a hacked together lifetime rate to my hacked together 36,53,846.
As I understand it, there are two arguments in this article:
Sexual violence is bad for individuals.
Reducing sexual violence substantially is unlikely to be too difficult/costly.
Conclusion: We should generally look to evaluating/fund/spend time on solutions to sexual violence.
and
Sexual violence reduces EA’s impact
Preventing sexual violence in EA is unlikely to be too difficult/costly
Conclusion: We should spend more effort on reducing sexual violence in EA because it will increase our effectiveness.
###Sexual Violence in the world### On funding/spending time on sexual violence reduction programs generally. We all agree that sexual violence is bad. The question is whether there are cost-effective ways to tackle it. Your statistics indicate that rape has a 1 in 208 chance of leading to death. Let’s adjust that figure for the suffering rape causes even when non-fatal and say that 100 rapes are as bad as 1 death. We can currently save a life or equivalent for $1700 deworming givewell analysis. Assuming you agree with my rape to death badness ratio, that would imply that a rape prevention program would have to prevent 100 rapes for $1700, or one rape per 17$, with a high degree of certainty to be competitive with our current best option. While I don’t think that is impossible, I also don’t think there’s any strong evidence in the article that this is the case.
As for the more meta level claim that the EA community should devote more resources/time to research in the area. I agree that while there is a lot of attention given to the issue, very little evaluation of program effectiveness is currently being done. I agree that this means there is likely a great deal of low hanging fruit for EA in terms of redirecting funding to more effective interventions. I’m just not sure that sexual violence is a better investment of our time or attention than other problems such as ethnic violence/warfare, drugs, crime, environmental damage, mental health, AI etc..
###Sexual Violence within EA### On reducing sexual violence in the EA community. I think there are a few major issues with your analysis:
You assume that EA’s are about as likely to experience sexual violence as the population norm. I’m not sure this is justified, but others have already commented on this so I won’t repeat it here.
An extreme focus on sexual violence prevention within EA (sting operations, consent training, profiling etc..) may repel potential members if it creates a perception that sexual violence is a significant problem in the community or that EA is dominated by the far-left.
Your policy recommendations contain a number of suggestions that seem likely to be ineffective, legally dangerous and morally dubious.
3: Sting operations. They expose anyone participating in them to massive liability. By running one, you are at the very least knowingly putting another person in a situation where you suspect sexually assaulted is likely. You are likely recording someone without their consent, a crime in some jurisdictions, or not doing so and hence having no evidence even if the sting is successful. You’re also creating significant reputational damage for the employee/person in question at the point at which you have an operation involving a significant number of other employees and superiors conspire against them around the shared belief that they are a sex offender. At the very least this opens you up for civil liability for libel/defamation/harassment at work. It may well constitute criminal harassment depending on the jurisdiction. On top of the legal risks, these kind of operations in an NGO could have a severely negative reputational effect.
5&7 : robust sex offender detection strategy\minimising bad attitudes. We can take into account behavioural risk factors such as whether the person believes rape myths. We can then tweak a probability further using personality research. Male patriarchal values [66] Men’s acceptance of traditional sex roles This is profiling and, while possibly effective, is morally dubious. If being introverted increases risk of sexual assault, does that mean we should avoid hiring introverts or letting them into EA? What if devout Muslims/Christians/Xs have an increases rate of sexual assault? What about race? What about political opinions, gender, age, sex, IQ, nationality, etc.. A general moral principle I stand by is that we should treat people as individuals and judge them by their own actions rather than by those of others who share traits with them. Discrimination based on group level risks violates this principle and hence is morally unacceptable to me in all except the most extreme situations. Admittedly, whether you feel the same way depends on your moral intuitions, which may well differ from mine.
“Let’s adjust that figure for the suffering rape causes even when non-fatal and say that 100 rapes are as bad as 1 death.”—that seems like an unrealistically low figure given that rape can lead to trauma that takes years to get over or derail someone’s life.
I would far prefer being raped over a 1% chance of dying immediately. I think the tradeoff would be something like 100,000 to 1.
I would far prefer dying immediately to being raped again.
Why?
The sexual violence I’ve endured has had disastrous affects on my health and wellbeing. I have treatment resistant disabling PTSD and depression, have not been able to hold a job due to symptoms, have not been able to have anything close to a healthy sex life, and in spite of availing myself of all the help I can afford (and putting myself in debt getting help I could not afford) am still not in any way functional or healthy. Sexual abuse and rape, both that which occurred when I was very young and when I was an adult, have driven me to suicidality many times, and being suicidal for extended periods of time, especially without recourse to fix it (either by dying, which is harder than it looks when you have very little resources, or by getting better), is far worse than an immediate death.
An outrageously crude estimate of life saving potential:
7,600,000,000 (world population)
3,800,000,000 (females, approximately half, because the suicide figure I have is for females)
760,000,000 (females raped, based on figures from just one country because I don’t have all ~200 figures)
36,53,846 (suicide deaths related to rape, phrased in past tense because the research isn’t about the future)
6,211,538,200 (cost of saving 36,53,846 people through deworming)
Point: If 6.2 billion dollars is enough to find a cure for rapists, and rapists pay for their own prescriptions so that nobody has to use charity money for their treatment, then funding research for a cure for rapists would have as much life-saving potential as deworming. Of course, I have no idea how much research funding is needed to cure rapists and it would take a lot of time to investigate that. This is why my global scope section says more research is needed. So basically all you have to do to see why I’m curious about this is to think about it on the right level of scale.
The rest of your comment contains so many egregious straw men of what I actually wrote that I have decided not to address it. There might be some valid concerns in there, but I don’t have the time to tease them apart from the straw men.
There are an estimated 276,000 annual cases of female suicide in the entire world (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3367275/). If, say, half of them are associated with sexual violence (guess), and you throw males in as well, then the eventual lifesaving potential is maybe 150,000 people per year.
Most of these suicides are in SE Asia and the Western Pacific where I believe healthcare and medication provision are not as comprehensive as they are here in the west.
The per year incidence is a totally different type of number from the numbers I used. The numbers I used cover a much longer time span. Comparing 276,000 annual cases to the number 36,53,846 is comparing apples to oranges.
It is not clear that your intent was to disagree with me. If you are throwing in an additional reference, I can’t incorporate that because the other research I referred to wasn’t using annual figures.
I suppose it’s interesting as something to check against. For an outrageously crude way to do that, you can multiply 276,000 by 80, the number of years in the average female lifespan (for one country) and compare a hacked together lifetime rate to my hacked together 36,53,846.