Geeze, daylia, I'm not arguing with your staistics, but they sure don't match up with my experience. I have been friends with probably hundreds of women in my life, and I can count the number who have been raped on the fingers of one hand, I believe. Do you have any idea how many men and women get through their days in this country with out any rape?

I would suggest that it is possible these crimes should be measured against economic and educational levels around the world, and the general bulge of the bell curve would be hung on the astonishing datum that violence -- rape, brawling, battery and what have you -- are predominantly the resort of the under-educated, the dispossessed, and the oppressed, by a large majority. Slicing the statistics by nationality is a self-fulfilling sort of approach -- it assumes that the nations define the distribution.   Maybe the socialist structures of Canada and the Scandinavian countries do make ordinary life less oppressive, such as by providing national health care, and maybe we do have something to learn. But this out of hand condemnation is not, to my mind, very accurate or contributive to improvement, if I may say so.

A