Statistics for Storytelling

This post is about using statistics to tell a story. It’s a followup in some ways to my previous blog post on ‘Confirmation Bias and Extraordinary Claims’. In the first post I talked about how statistics can be used (intentionally or not) to distort a story and how they can be manipulated in order to prove almost any claim you want to make. This post however has a more positive outlook on using statistics to tell stories that are more powerful and deliver a more persuasive message by the inclusion of statistics.

This post was inspired by a book I am currently reading called, ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ by Rebecca Solnit. The book was recommended by a speaker at the inaugural CUNY Celebrates Women in Computing Conference that took place on May 10th this year. The conference was a truly amazing experience and highlighted both the progress women have made in technical fields and the work that still needs to be done to level the playing field for women. The book includes nine essays with feminist themes that were collected to support and reinforce the main essay that the book is titled after. Often in discussions around feminist ideas with friends I find it hard to prove my points about the unequal ways in which women are still treated because it’s easy to dismiss a woman talking about her own experiences as anecdotal or subjective. So I found the author’s essays incredibly powerful because they prove those same points through the inclusion of statistics that drive home her assertions in a way that is difficult to argue with.

For example, in the second essay, ‘The Longest War’, the author argues that women’s lives are not valued and that there is literally a ‘war on women’ in America that goes almost completely unnoticed and unaddressed. This is a really extraordinary claim that if you read my previous post requires extraordinary evidence, which the author provides in the form of statistics.

So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over 1000 homicides of that kind a year–meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror. (Another way to put it: the more than 11,766 corpses from domestic-violence homicides between 9/11 and 2012 exceed the number of deaths of victims on that day and all American soldiers killed in the “war on terror.”)

By making the comparison with a known tragic event that shook the nation, these statistics highlight the fact that another tragic event is happening right under our noses every day.

I posted that particular quote above on social media a few days ago with the hashtag #menexplainthingstome and was given a movie recommendation by a complete stranger who said I should watch ‘I am Evidence’, an HBO documentary. The film is about the hundreds of thousands of rape kits that are sitting in warehouses untested because in most cases they were considered by policemen to be ‘not real rapes’ because the (disproportionately black and minority) victims were ‘not credible’ or because the crimes were considered ‘low priority’ and the resources to test them were directed elsewhere.

Throughout the documentary statistics about how many kits were tested, how many matched DNA they had in CODIS (COmbined DNA Index System), how many were confirmed as serial rapists, and how many convictions resulted were posted on the screen, either to highlight the success of the testing program in some cities or in the case of LA to highlight the lack of support the program had from the criminal justice system there.

One of the more successful programs is in Detroit where the Wayne County Prosecutor, Kym Worthy, enlisted the help of UPS to track rape kits through the criminal justice system from collection to testing. Her story is truly amazing and her testimony in the movie at 1:18:51 includes another truly shocking statistic:

“We’ve been at this since August of 2009. Our results, from our testing, have linked to crime scenes from 39 other states. So that means there’s only 10 states in the United States that haven’t been affected from our rape kits that were found in one city.”

These stories are powerful in and of themselves, but the inclusion of statistics drives the point home better than any personal story could. If you extrapolate from the known statistics based on the cities that have already started testing, to the literally hundreds of thousands of known untested kits nationwide (200,000 plus at the time of the making of the documentary and 400,000 plus at the time of Kym Worthy’s TedTalk), there are literally thousands of rapists that can potentially be identified, prosecuted and taken off our streets. Those numbers are most useful for telling the ‘big picture’ story but they can easily be ignored when they don’t have names attached. When they are personalized with the stories of individuals who have been directly affected, they make a undeniable, and effective case.

Published on RPubs at: http://rpubs.com/betsyrosalen/DATA621_Blog_Post_2