We know that in small towns there is a tendency to under report crimes with regards to the national average which is why I wrote "With regards to other crime reporting this phenomenon has been documented so I can't imagine why there should be an opposing tendency for one specific class of crime, sexual assault." so why on earth do you imagine that for sexual assault this trend is reversed and such crimes are the only crimes reported at a higher than national average? You offer no data to support the idea that "small town" residents report rape more than large municipalities yet for some reason you just assume it is true in spite of knowing that for all other crimes it is not true. We have no reason to assume, as you evidently do, that the data that shows rape is more prevalent in Alaska than in the lower 48 is due to Alaska being more "small town intimate". If you had read the paper shag forwarded you would have seen that the rape incidence in Anchorage (a large municipality) was also 188 percent higher than in the rest of the US. You want to attribute this to "small town intimacy" making reporting rape more "comfortable" but Anchorage isn't a small town. The paper also reports that "Native victims [are] vastly overrepresented". They're 10% of the pop. but 45% of the rape victims. We have no need to invoke "small town intimacy" making reporting rape more "comfortable" to explain higher reporting of rape in Alaska. We can safely assume rape is more prevalent in Alaska than the lower 48 rather than resort to mental contortions to explain away the reported difference as an artifact of "small town intimacy".
Alaskans can probably survive without vigilante justice as well as any community. Why do you imagine otherwise?
John Thornton