What would happen if we turned our thinking upside down and:

• Oprah gave all of her billions to journalist and women’s rights crusader William Kristof to spend on projects to help women?
• Bill Gates announced that the other half of his foundations’ billions not devoted to vaccines henceforth would go to projects to help women and girls?
• Every member of the NBA making over one million dollars a year made a public service spot against domestic violence or rape and paid to air it on TV shows aimed at the young male demographic?
• The U.S. ratified the international treaty banning gender discrimination, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)?
• The Federal government and all companies and organizations receiving federal funds were required to offer flexible workplace policies and reduced schedule options to all employees?
• The U.S. went from seventy-fourth in world rankings of women’s percentages in national legislatures, where it is in the company of Albania and Turkmenistan, to fourth?

U.S. rape and domestic violence rates up.

Another in a series of paradoxes:
U.S. Department of Justice surveys show an increase of 25 percent in rape and sexual assault and 42 percent in violence by intimate partners against women between 2005 and 2007, in part due to a change in research methodology. "Except for simple assault, which increased by 3 percent, the incidence of every other crime surveyed decreased." You would think this would be big news, but it did not get much coverage in the media.

A number of blogs fail to point out that these numbers are based on telephone surveys of crime victims, which is only the start of the confusion. The surveys found that the percentage of rapes and sexual assaults reported to the police increased from 38 percent in 2005 to 42 percent in 2007. Yet at the same time, the number of rapes actually reported to the police decreased more than 4 percent from 2005 to 2007. Based on these numbers, one can only assume that the 25 percent increase in rape and sexual assault is because a lot more women are telling the phone surveyors that they were sexually assaulted, but either they are not reporting these assaults to the police as rape, or the police are not categorizing the reports as rape. Is that what's really going on here?