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Science & Technology
Rape Culture or Rape DNA?
2015-04-15
The April edition of International Journal of Epidemiology contains an article called "Sexual offending runs in families: A 37-year nationwide study." A summary of the article runs as follows:

Close relatives of men convicted of sexual offenses commit similar offenses themselves more frequently than comparison subjects. This is due to genetic factors rather than shared family environment....

The study scrutinized the records of all 20,000+ convicted sex offenders in Sweden from 1973-2009. It concluded that compared to males in the general population, brothers of convicted sex offenders are roughly five times more likely to also commit sex crimes. Sons of convicted sex offenders are about four times as likely to follow in daddy's skeevy footsteps. Researchers reportedly teased out variables such as family environment to reach their conclusions. For example, half-brothers raised under the same roof proved far less likely to both be sexual predators than full blood brothers raised under the same roof.

According to co-researcher Niklas Langstrom:

We found that sex crimes mainly depended on genetic factors and environmental factors that family members do not share with one another, corresponding to about 40 percent and 58 percent, respectively.

As study coauthor Seena Fazel tells it:

What we have found is high quality evidence from a large population study that genetic factors have a substantial influence on an increased risk of being convicted of sexual offences.

Researchers were careful to point out that they had not isolated a "rape gene," only that their evidence suggested a strong genetic component behind any given individual's proclivity to commit sexual assault.

And now, the howls
Posted by:g(r)omgoru

#3  test
Posted by: Besoeker   2015-04-15 17:54  

#2  Unless they sort out by religion the results are meaningless. Brothers often share the same religion and some religions are far more tolerant of rape than others (so much so I bet no members of a certain religion are represented in the stats for fear of skewing everything).
Posted by: rjschwarz   2015-04-15 15:42  

#1  For some reason the URL for PDF worked in preview put not in post. Here are urls for (i) abstract, and (ii) PDF

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/04/05/ije.dyv029.full

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/04/05/ije.dyv029.full.pdf+html
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2015-04-15 14:36  

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