Does Christianity Cause Rape?

(he’s joking)

The global distribution of “domestic violence/rape against women” looks like this:

Age-standardised prevalence of ever-partnered women aged 15 years and older who experienced physical or sexual violence by a current or former intimate partner in the last 12 months (%) (source: SPI)

It does not correlate with the percentage of the population that is Christian.

It does correlate with national IQs and HDI, though.

When all three predictors are put into a regression, HDI is the strongest predictor (negative), followed by national IQ (negative).

The effect of Christianity is almost statistically significant, but I think it’s racially confounded, so I tried controlling for spatial autocorrelation using a KNN.

no effect of christianity

Of course, this data suffers from multicolinearity, so it’s difficult to tell if differences in intelligence or Socioeconomic Factors are causing differences in rape rates between countries - the answer is probably both.