The lesson in the mystery of the vanishing statistic is obvious.
Women believe the word of other women.
Men do not. Occasionally these groups acknowledge Brownmiller as the source, but for the most part they give no clue of either the origin of the statistic or its scope, usually implying that it stands for the U.S. as a whole, or Canada as a whole, or even all of North America. One would imagine that such an oft-cited statistic would at least have passed peer review in an established social science journal. On the contrary, it is nothing more than a mimeo of some remarks made by a judge to a gathering of lawyers, regarding events in what appears to be a single precinct of New York City sometime in 1974. We have no idea what actually happened, only Brownmiller's personal interpretation.