Comic Strips

No, not generally, no.

It means your immediate and extended family, people you live with, people you've known and interacted regularly with for 2+ years... people who you have had a consistent relationship with for some time.

And also these aren't like... 'polls', in the derogatory sense of a dubious or poor quality one.

They're crime stats, and academic reviews of them.

The public image of rape is of the proverbial stranger attacking a woman in an alleyway. While such rapes do occur, most rapes actually happen between people who know each other. A wide body of research finds that 60–80 percent of all rapes and sexual assaults are committed by someone the woman knows, including husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, and ex-boyfriends, and only 20–35 percent by strangers (Barkan, 2012). A woman is thus two to four times more likely to be raped by someone she knows than by a stranger.

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-socialproblems/chapter/4-4-violence-against-women-rape-and-sexual-assault/

(This is a bit old, but the citation for Barkan 2012 is a literal Criminology textbook, used to teach Criminology... it keeps getting updated and revised, but I am not able to find the entire text of the most up to date version available freely.)

A first date is a stranger, I guess possibly unless this is a first physical date after a prolonged long-distance relationship.

A boyfriend, husband, or ex... is not a stranger, in the sense of a person you have no substantial relational history with.

.........

Also, if we are talking about domestic abuse, violence committed by people in a substantial relationship, toward their partner:

IPV is common. It affects millions of people in the United States each year. Data from CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) indicate:

About 41% of women and 26% of men experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime and reported a related impact.

Over 61 million women and 53 million men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.

https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/index.html

(You may note this page was last updated before DOGE did its DEI purge of online US gov data, looks to me like this survived it unaltered, I've been using this page as a citation every so often for years when discussions like this pop up.)

So yeah, this is obviously a big problem for women... but more than half as many men have been victims of that first, very serious category of IPV as women, and something like 7/8ths as many men have been psychologically abused as women, by a partner.

When you take into account that genrerally heteronormative machismo dissuades men from reporting psych abuse, and that... many places in the US still don't consider a woman forcing a man to have sex with them against their will... to even be rape / SA ...

...yeah, I mean, the proverbial 'win' probably still goes to men for being just overall more likely to do IPV, but the margins of that 'win' are way more narrow than most people seem to think.

.........

Another factor that is very prevalent to IPV that is rarely emphasized by society:

A whole lot of relationships involving IPV have two guilty parties, both are abusive (like, legally, often criminally), the entire relationship, both parties to it, are toxic.

Wouldn't that depend on the quality and source of the poll? Like in academia when there's a publication with a poll (generally called a survey) - they usually publish a methodology section which states how things are being defined/asked.

Methodologies between surveys aren't universal, so I don't think it makes sense to speak of "all polls".

Well yeah, but presumably if you have a partner already, you aren't going on too many dates with strangers.