Can any statistics nerds help me with this… headline reading comprehension quibble that’s been bothering me for years?

(search engines have never seemed to turn up anything for me)

Ok so.

I keep seeing a statistic quoted: some version of “people with (autism)/(neurodivergence)/(mental illness) are more likely to be victims of violence than to be perpetrators of it”

Sometimes a specific number is mentioned, like “(n) times more likely to be victims than perpetrators”…but not always; it’s been around in varying forms for at least a decade or so

And this statistic always seems to be treated as if it is a fact about people with mental disorders, specifically, that is notably different from the average for people in general. And that this proves something about correlation, or lack thereof, between mental illness and violence.

….Even though the person quoting the statistic never even mentions “how much more likely the average person is to be a victim of violence than a perpetrator.”

Now.

Since serial perpetrators of violence tend to be not the majority of people… and tend to have multiple victims… I would guess that “more likely to be a victim than a perpetrator” is, in fact, a common theme throughout pretty much all demographic groups.

And yes, I would also guess that the difference would be greater for people with neurodivergence and mental illnesses… since they tend to be much more vulnerable to abuse for many reasons, and probably not, on average, much more likely to commit it.

But… it really troubles me that I keep seeing that particular factoid about “mentally ill people being more often victims than perpetrators,” repeated over and over– and always interpreted as if it proved those things.

When it actually proves pretty much nothing.

That statement could still be true if 90% of mentally ill people were violent and 90% of violent crimes were committed by mentally ill people. (It would just mean that a somewhat greater percentage of those people, like 99% or 100%, also were victims of violence).

Now, I do not, for a moment, imagine that those hypothetical numbers are accurate.

And I would like to be able to reblog posts debunking the idea that mental illness is equivalent to dangerousness.

…But I can’t, in good faith, go around spreading a statistic that claims to mean that, but doesn’t.

It would make me look like I’m trying to hide the actual numbers behind technically true but misleading ones.

So… what’s the actual statistic that puts that one in context?

How much more skewed towards victims-instead-of-perpetrators are we (the neurodivergent and mentally ill) than the population in general?

And why is it so rare for anyone to consider that relevant?