According to new findings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), on average, 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States. Over the course of a year, that equals more than 12 million women and men. Those numbers only tell part of the story – more than 1 million women are raped in a year, and over 6 million women and men are victims of stalking. These findings emphasize that sexual violence, stalking, and intimate partner violence are major public health problems in the United States. In addition, they underscore the heavy toll that violence takes on Americans, particularly women.
· Nearly 1 in 5 women have been raped in their lifetime while 1 in 71 men have been raped in their lifetime.
· Approximately 80% of female victims experienced their first rape before the age of 25 and almost half experienced the first rape before age 18.
· About 35% of women who were raped as minors were also raped as adults compared to 14% of women without an early rape history.
· 28% of male victims of rape were first raped when they were 10 years old or younger.
- Only 30% of sexual assaults are ever reported to the police (Source: RAINN). Even so, that means somebody reports a forcible rape every 6 minutes in this country (Source: FBI).
- The majority (73%) of sexual assaults are perpetrated by someone the victim knows or is acquainted with. 40% of sexual assaults take place in the home. (Source: RAINN)
The “1 in 71″ stat from the CDC survey doesn’t tell the whole story. It defines “rape” as the attacker penetrating the victim, which excludes women who use their vagina to rape a man (rape by envelopment) which is counted as “made to penetrate”. The very same survey says “1 in 21 men (4.8%) reported that they were made to penetrate someone else.” Therefore, if you properly include men who are forced to engage in PIV sex against their will, from 1 in 16 to 1 in 21 men are raped, using the numbers in the CDC study you cited.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, the study says that 79.2% of male victims of “made to penetrate” reported only female perpetrators, meaning they were raped by a woman.
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