There is an unwillingness to articulate what the statistics scream since the data indicts holy cows like family and society, says Devangshu Datta

I n India, the profile of a likely rape victim is supposedly a lone woman, dressed 'immodestly', out at night with strangers

Los Angeles, June 18, 1964. Juanita Brooks' purse was snatched by a white woman with a blonde ponytail, who escaped in a yellow convertible driven by a bearded, black man. Some days later, the police arrested Janet and Malcolm Collins, who fitted the description and had a yellow convertible.

Witnesses couldn't identify them. The jury convicted on a statistical premise. The prosecution said that only one in ten (1/10) cars in Los Angeles was a yellow convertible, only one in three (1/3) women was blonde, only one in ten had ponytails, only one in four men had facial hair, only 1/1,000 Los Angeles couples were interracial, and so on. Compounding, roughly one out of a million couples (0.8/1,000,000) would fit.

California's Supreme Court rightly reversed the verdict. Los Angeles housed several million couples in 1964. Assuming the data were correct, quite a few other pairs fitted.