Duke Lacrosse - Interesting Data at the Service of a Very Minor, Unrelated Point

The premise of at least some of the pontificating on the Duke Lacrosse rape investigation has been that the alleged assault was part of a history of white men in the South sexually abusing black women. The ironically-named Lynne Duke of the Washington Post is explicit:

The mainstream media have largely tiptoed around the brutal truth that has been discussed among black women in private conversations, in the blogosphere and on college campuses. It is that the Duke case is in some ways reminiscent of a black woman's vulnerability to a white man during the days of slavery, reconstruction and Jim Crow, when sex was used as a tool of racial domination..... White men have always been fascinated with black women over the years. That's nothing new," says Peterson, who launched Durham Citizens Against Rape and Sexual Abuse in response to this case. With outlets such as BET and others portraying African American women as highly sexed, "young white boys, they want to touch, they want to see," Peterson says.

Real Clear Politics has taken apart Ms. Duke's "argument" here. The most interesting thing about their evisceration of her reasoning is their citation to Department of Justice statistics on white-on-black and black-on-white sexual assaults.

The statistics are here, and they are, frankly, astonishing. In 2003 there were 131,030 rapes or sexual assaults of white women, of which an estimated 15.5% were perpetrated by assailants identified as black. That's over 20,000 black-on-white assaults. Meanwhile, in 2003, there were 24,010 rapes or sexual assaults of black women, of which 0.0% were perpetrated by assailants identified as white.

Now, 0.0% sounds like not very much, and a footnote says that the estimate is based on a sample size of fewer than 10 incidents. Meanwhile, 87.9% of the sexual assaults on black women were incidents where the perpetrator was identified as black, meaning that there were approximately 21,104 rapes or sexual assults of black women by black men.

(I should note also that white men appear to have committed the largest total number of rapes, since they account for 57.9% of the 131,030 rapes of white women, or around 76,000 rapes. There also could be differentials in reporting crimes between different groups.)

I'm not a statistician or social scientist, and I don't want to make too big a point of this, because the points one might make wouldn't be very attractive. (You could, for instance, argue that white men are racists, but in a different way than Ms. Duke argues... they appear vastly more likely than black men to discriminate in their choice of victims for their sexual assaults.) It does seem to me that it is at least obvious that there is literally no statistical basis for Ms. Duke's argument that white men present some heightened or even very significant threat to the "vulnerability" of black women. But that's not my point.

Rather, my simple point is that... isn't it amazing that average fellows sitting at their computers can access this kind of hard data to refute an unfounded argument made by a writer at the most prestigious newspaper in the most important capital in the world? Whatever your views on the Duke Lacrosse case or on any other political issue we might disagree about, you have to admit that the Internet, used correctly, i.e., for disseminating respectful opinion and, even more importantly, for accessing primary documents and basic factual data, is a great boon to democratic discourse.