"What's up with Cleveland?"

"Why so many high-profile crimes in such a short span? Why such violence against the metro area's women?"

Cleveland's police department declined a CNN request to talk about the recent crimes. But to those who study the city, some patterns do emerge: crushing poverty, dehumanizing unemployment and thousands of tumbledown vacant homes -- ideal places to rape and kill in the shadows.

"I hate to say this, but in a sense, to a large degree, we have an underclass in the city of Cleveland of those that truly are disconnected from the social fabric, from the mainstream economy and society," said Ronnie Dunn, an urban studies professor at Cleveland State University. "They're left without anything to grasp onto."

Who are "they"? The murder rate in Cleveland is lower than in Baltimore and Detroit, but the rape rate is more than double that of Baltimore or Detroit.

"There are some things in the culture in this area where it appears that the lives of women in particular have been devalued," [Dunn] said.

He said some men seem emasculated by their economic plight, and violence sometimes results. "They manifest their lack of control in a violent manner against women," Dunn said. "It might not always result in murder, but it often does in physical abuse."

How could poverty explain why Cleveland is different from Baltimore and Detroit? Poverty is a cause and an effect, but why would the effect involve so much more violence against women in one place as opposed to another? I take it the murder rate mostly involves male-on-male violence, so we need a theory that explains why, in Cleveland, as opposed to Baltimore and Detroit, the violence channels toward women.

Or fall back to the theory offered by the rape crisis center director quoted at the link: There is no difference in the rape rate, only the rate of reporting rape. Murders are harder to ignore, there being a dead body, so maybe the disparities between rape and murder rates are really evidence of the willingness to report crime, and what Cleveland has is a more positive police-citizen relationship. Or maybe the local cultures differ in how they perceive incidents and what they are willing to say is rape. Maybe a higher incidence of rape reports is a sign of improvement. Note that the rape statistic counts reports of rape, not how the cases are ultimately resolved.

ADDED: This was an interesting article, with a headline that admits it's showing us questions, not answers. ("More questions than answers in Cleveland's run on high-profile crime.") But it's actually appalling that there's so little insight on display. With all the professors like Dunn in all the urban studies departments — including Cleveland State University, right there in Cleveland — why don't we have much more fine-grained information and analysis of the causes? "Poverty" is the go-to root cause of ideologues everywhere, and the causal chain from poverty to emasculation to raping women sounds like what anybody might say off-the-cuff at a cocktail party if the subject turned to the question of rape in Cleveland.

Are there not urban places beset by economic hardship where the people nevertheless preserve their moral standards and maintain community? The mainstream media tell us about the cities in the worst decline and they assume, if people are poor, they can't be moral. That's a distorted, scurrilous, and harmful message. What are people in Cleveland, Detroit, and Baltimore supposed to think when they hear that?