When the figures of the UN study are broken down, however, a different picture emerges. For a start, the survey only covers a small, but diverse number of Asian countries: Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea.

Of these, the only territories in which responses to the “rape questions” were 25 percent or higher were Papua New Guinea and part of the western Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea (Papua). In both cases the number of “yes” responses from men were staggering: 43.8 percent for Papua, and an incredible 59.1 percent in Papua New Guinea.

So large were these responses, indeed, that if the two samples had not been included in the survey, the overall figure of “men admitting to rape” would have dropped to 18 percent. In itself that’s still a deeply worrying statistic, but the extent to which a combined population of some 10 million people can swing our perception of an entire continent should be enough to prompt a little caution.

More problematic than this, however, is that simply pushing together a number of independent samples into an aggregate figure is largely meaningless. Even if we were to ignore the fact that China has a completely different culture to Bangladesh, which in turn has a completely different culture from Papua New Guinea (and so on), when you compile independent samples, without weighting, all you generate is statistical noise.

Let’s take two figures from the survey as an example: the number of women in China who state they have been the victims of some form of sexual violence during their lives, and the respective figure in Papua New Guinea. In China’s case, the figure is 14 percent, while in Papua New Guinea the figure is (no surprise) an utterly horrendous 58.1 percent. If you were to push these two statistics together and split the difference, you might be forgiven for thinking that the number of women who experience sexual violence in both China and Papua New Guinea combined is around 36 percent.

However without weighting the size of each population that would be a hopelessly misleading conclusion. China has a population of around 1.35 billion, while Papua New Guinea’s population sits at about 7 million. If you were to actually combine the populations in reality then the fact that Papua New Guinea is dwarfed by the size of China would result in the figure still being roughly 14 percent. Papua New Guinea is so small in comparison that its evidently dreadful prevalence of sexual violence would barely make an imprint on the aggregate figure.

At this point you might be tempted to throw your arms into the air and claim this is irrelevant. Even if the survey’s figures have been misquoted (through no fault of the study itself I might add), arguing about the exact percentages with something as abhorrent as sexual violence is a bit besides the point: 14 percent of women having to live through rape and sexual assault is still 14 percent too many.