Some months back there was a great debate coming from a TikTok series of interviews of young women who were asked the question: would you rather be alone in the woods with a bear, or a man? Make it a black bear, which is more likely to engage in predatory attacks. Most of the respondents said the bear, since bears do not rape humans, but at worse, may in rare cases if predatory, tear one apart, and eat one alive, while one slowly dies in agony. All of these Gen z women, had no outback experience, being inner city dwellers. Worse, most were Australian, where there are no bears in the wild, so how would they know much about something directed to a North American and Canadian audience? It would not be an active research topic for them.
In any case, the problem is one about probabilities of some sort of assault. The women think that as bear attacks are rare, and man attacks happen to almost everyone (believing the rape/sexual assault statistics that are pushed, i.e., all men are rapists), the bear is safer. But, as detailed below by a maths guy, these ladies fail on the statistics and mathematical reasoning involved. What is of concern is the level of implicit/unconscious man hatred embodied behind this question.
How about this one for TikTok: alone with a man in a locked lecture theatre with cameras, or alone in the same closed theatre with a tiger snake? Or a condor? Or a huge rat? Or a tiny mouse?
TLDR: in a random encounter between a woman and a stranger in the USA, about 0.00000016% end in murder and around 0.00018% end in rape, based on the simple model presented below. The assumptions behind these numbers are WILDLY naive (since encounters and men are not randomly distributed), but even changing assumptions to make attacks 1000x more likely still suggests a 'random' man is a fairly safe proposition (better than 99.99% change to 'escape' unharmed). It is not possible to accurately compare this to a bear as there is no data on frequency of bear encounters, nor is it possible to analyse the impact of encounter type (i.e. being alone in the woods) on risk level. Nonetheless, available evidence, and my uninformed gut feel about bears, suggests that adult human men remain safer than multi-hundred kilo, razor toothed, carnivorous, wild animals.
Analysis:
Good news: women don't get murdered very often. "In 2020, for example, there were just over 21,000 homicides reported in the U.S. Of these, less than 5% of victims were female. Overall, less than 10% of all homicides were believed to have been committed by a stranger."
That's 105 women murdered by a stranger in a year.
To turn this into a 'rate', you would need to know something like how many interactions women have with strange men per year. That's obviously not something we can have good data on, but let's assume that the average woman in the USA 'encounters' an unknown man once per day on average across a year. (We can make this assumption because even changing it by a few orders of magnitude changes little in the conclusion). That means that the 168m women in the USA collectively have 61,320,000,000 'stranger encounters', of which 105 result in a murder. Therefore, we have one murder per 613,200,000 encounters.
This gives a very naive probability that a woman will be killed by a stranger she encounters of: 0.00000016%.
Running the same numbers again for sexual assault, 26% of rapes or attempted rates are by strangers, and 432,000 took place in 2015, accounting for those NOT reported to police.
So there were something like 112,000 rapes by strangers in the USA. On the same model as above, this means that one rape takes place per 5,475,000 encounters. Meaning that you have around a 0.00018317% change of being raped on any given stranger encounter (again, caveating the naivety of a lot of these assumptions)
So ultimately whether you are safer with a completely random bear than a completely random man, depends on whether you think you have a better than 99.99999984% change of surviving a bear encounter."