White on Black vs. Black on White rape statistics

Media vs. reality

For a number of years, there has been a popular claim in nationalist circles that White on Black rape is basically nonexistent. It's encapsulated in this meme:

If you follow the source, it checks out:

So it looks correct. But wait! Those asterisks, what do they mean?

*Estimate is based on 10 or fewer sample cases

Hm, so is that just a fluke? That's what this sociology professor called "Philip N. Cohen PhD" claimed in 2016:

Now, go back to the structure of the survey. If each respondent in the survey counts for about 1,700 people, then the survey in 2008 would have found 69 White women who were sexually assaulted or threatened, 11 of whom said their assailant was Black (117,640/1,700). Actually, though, we know it was less than 11, because the asterisk on the table takes you to the footnote below which says it was based on 10 or fewer sample cases. In comparison, the survey may have found 27 Black women who said they were sexually assaulted or threatened (46,580/1,700), none of whom said their attacker was White, which is why the second blue box shows 0.0. However, it actually looks like the weights are bigger for Black women, because the figure for the percentage assaulted or threatened by Black attackers, 74.8%, has the asterisk that indicates 10 or fewer cases. If there were 27 Black women in this category, then 74.8% of them would be 20. So this whole Black women victim sample might be as little as 13, with bigger weights applied (because, say, Black women had a lower response rate). If in fact Black women are just as likely to be attacked or assaulted by White men as the reverse, 16%, you might only expect 2 of those 13 to be White, and so finding a sample 0 is not very surprising. The actual weighting scheme is clearly much more complicated, and I don’t know the unweighted counts, as they are not reported here (and I didn’t analyze the individual-level data).

I can’t believe we’re talking about this. The most important bottom line is that the BJS should not report extrapolations to the whole population from samples this small. These population numbers should not be on this table. At best these numbers are estimated with very large standard errors. (Using a standard confident interval calculator, that 16% of White women, based on a sample of 69, yields a confidence interval of +/- 9%.) It’s irresponsible, and it’s inadvertently (I assume) feeding White supremacist propaganda.

OK, so the obvious solution is just to look at data from the other years. For whatever reason, Cohen didn't bother doing that. I couldn't find them in the mess of reports, but Twitter polish account Wolnościowy Populista helped me out. Thank God for Polish intelligence. So what do the other years of the report show? There are reports from 1996 to 2008, and these show just about the same thing:

1996:

1997:

1998:

1999:

2000:

2001:

2002:

2003:

2004:

2005:

2006:

2007:

So putting it all together:

The numbers are scaled to the proportion of offenders for each victim race. Data for non-Black non-White races are not given for victims (sample too small probably). I skipped the data for the offenders for the other races. We see that White on Black rape is indeed very rare, and the results from the year 2008 are not unusual. Across the 13 years of data, the proportion of White on Black rape is a mere 4.25%. However, the Black on White rape is increasing over time with a mean of 13%. Similarly, the White on White rapes are decreasing because the rapes are increasingly done by men from other races. Philip Cohen is thus wrong that 2008 is just an outlier.

The question of what values we should expect is more tricky. There are two extremes we can assume. In the first case, we could assume that everybody has an equal chance of attacking anyone else, as if the country lived in perfect racial diversity. In this scenario, when a would-be rapist walks out the door, he has an equal chance of encountering a woman of any race considering the population fractions of each. Thus, a Black man has about 13% chance of encountering a Black woman and about 60% of encountering a White woman. Similarly for White men. Under this assumption, the results seem odd. Black women are mostly attacked by Blacks despite only 13% of the male population being Black. Thus, it would seem that Blacks men prefer Black women and go out of their way to find them. But then again, we also know this assumption is crazy. Here's how the real racial distribution looks like in New York, for instance:

If we looked at the country as a whole, it is even more stark, as there are large areas where basically only Whites live.

So races clearly cluster among each other. As such, we would have to make assumptions about how far from home a rapist attacks. I seem to recall most criminals 'do their work' around their own homes, so in this situation, most potential victims are from the same race. For Blacks to attack Whites, they would have to go out of their way to some White (or Asian etc.) area. Similarly for Whites. The report The Color of Crime (2016) gives helpful comments on interpretation of interracial crime data:

As noted above, in 2009, the US Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) stopped publishing data on the races of criminals. Recently, however, figures from the 2013 NCVS were released in which blacks, whites, and Hispanics were, for the first time, treated separately.

From these data it can be calculated, first, that a great deal of violent crime — 40 to 60 percent — is committed within the races. However, when violence crosses racial lines it does so in a very unequal manner. In 2012 and 2013, blacks committed an annual average of 560,600 crimes of violence against whites whereas whites committed only about 99,400 such crimes against blacks. This means blacks were the attackers in 84.9 percent of the violent crimes involving blacks and whites.

Some observers argue that the overwhelming preponderance of black-on-white over white-on-black violence suggests that blacks deliberately target whites for violence. Others argue that since there are 4.7 times as many whites as blacks in the population, it is to be expected that black criminals are more likely to encounter white victims than vice versa.

Both positions must be evaluated in light of several considerations. First, blacks who commit assault, robbery, and rape are likely to be members of the underclass, who live in largely black neighborhoods. If they chose victims without regard to race they should be more likely to encounter other blacks rather than whites. Second, black/Hispanic interracial crime fits the same lopsided pattern: Of the 256,074 violent crimes involving those two groups, blacks were perpetrators 82.5 percent of the time. Unlike the nearly five-fold difference in numbers between blacks and whites, there are only about 30 percent more Hispanics than blacks. The high black-aggressor figure suggests that blacks may also deliberately target Hispanics — perhaps even more than they target whites.

The imbalance can be expressed differently: When whites commit violence they target other whites 82.4 percent of the time, blacks 3.6 percent of the time, and Hispanics 7.8 percent of the time. In other words, white violence is directed overwhelmingly at other whites. When blacks commit violence only a minority — 40.9 percent — of their victims are black. Whites are 38.6 percent and Hispanics are 14.5 percent. Hispanic assailants also attack their own group less often than they attack others. Their victims are: Hispanics — 40.1 percent, whites — 50.7 percent, and blacks — 4.7 percent.

Finally, interracial crime can be expressed in terms of the greater or lesser likelihood of a person of one race to commit violence against a member of the other. In 2012/2013, the actual likelihood of attack was extremely low in all cases, but statistically, any given black person was 27 times more likely to attack a white and six times more likely to attack a Hispanic than vice versa. A Hispanic was eight times more likely to attack a white than the reverse.

The Department of Justice keeps national records on murder. In 2013, it reported 5,621 single-offender, single-victim cases in which the race of the murderer was known. Like most federal statistics, there is no clear distinction between whites and Hispanics, so the only meaningful racial categories are black and non-black. Blacks killed 2,698 people — 48 percent of the total — and non-blacks killed 2,923 or 52 percent. Since blacks were just 13.3 percent of the population, it meant a black was six times more likely than a non-black to commit murder. Although most murders are within the same race, blacks were 13.6 times more likely to kill non-blacks than non-blacks were to kill blacks.

And in the 2005 version of the same report, they try to adjust:

These kinds of numbers should not surprise us. When surveys are done and people are asked how they feel about members of their own vs. other race groups, Blacks show the strongest relative dislike for others. Zigerell has the numbers from a recent wave of ANES:

So Whites basically show complete color-blindness, rating other groups the same level of warmth as their own group. The other groups show the strongest warmth for their own groups, and the lowest for Whites. In other words, the pattern is exactly the opposite of the popular narrative. Whites are egalitarian, the other groups are racist and especially against Whites. In fact, one can look into the White group by ideology and see that White leftists also dislike whites, following the media narrative. Data from ANES 2016 analyzed by Zach Goldberg:

In fact, there are stereotypes measured about violence, and White leftists even manage to rate Whites as more violent than Blacks for the first time (again from ANES and Goldberg):

So while Whites are not the least violent group -- Asians are -- White leftists still manage to rate Whites as more violent than Blacks, even though the Black violent crime rate is some large multiple of the White one, and the degree to which Blacks target Whites rather than the reverse. The media-academia system may be "mostly honest and good" as Hanania writes, but their delusion and self-hatred is hard to understate (journalists are mostly White and mostly target other Whites in their narrative).

Attractiveness of women

Finally, we can note that there are data about the attractiveness of women. Since rapists target attractive women, the numbers above are again somewhat off because White women are older than the other groups, especially than Hispanics and Asians (recent immigrants are younger). Still, we would also expect rapists to prefer hotter women. And here's the hotness of women as rated by attention on OKCupid:

So Asian and White women are considered more attractive. This should thus explain some of the pattern, as White men particularly don't find Black women attractive, but Black men don't have strong opinions about the race of women. One could consider that a part of fast-life history/high sociosexuality. Aside from OKCupid ratings, there's also the more informative reply rate to women who send messages:

So basically no one prefers Black women. Facebook has a replication:

And another academic replication (they refuse to say which app it is from):

So again, we get the pattern that Asian women and White men are the most attractive. This is not surprising as that's the most common among upper middle class couples. Black women are the least preferred. These data thus suggest a more benign explanation for the Black targeting of White women: less out of hatred, more that Blacks find White women hotter than their own Black women. But to return to the main topic. The meme is largely true. Of the annual 39k rapes of Black women, about 1650 are done by Whites. Of the annual 181k rapes of White women, about 23.5k are done by Blacks. The ratio of attacks is thus 14.2.

Data in this spreadsheet for those curious. R code for plotting here.