I saw an article recently (on the BBC website if I remember correctly) that made it clear that comparing figures for any crime between jurisdictions has to be done very carefully. This is because each jurisdiction has it's own reporting/calculating rules and they are often very different. Adding in successful prosecution figures confuses things even more.

To give an example and keep on-topic for the thread it seems that the Swedish rules state that if a complainant states 'my boyfriend has raped me every night for the past year' then that gets recorded as 365 rapes. This is a major part of what makes Sweden seem to be 'the rape capital of the world'.

However what really makes the rules daft is that even if the prosecution is successful and all alleged incidents are covered by the charge it is only recorded as 1 prosecution - thus there is inevitably a vast mismatch between complaints and convictions.

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• Read very carefully - Authored by: JamesK on Tuesday, January 08 2013 @ 10:26 AM EST

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