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On average, there are 463,634 victims (age 12 or older) of rape and sexual assault each year in the United States.¹

Younger People Are at the Highest Risk of Sexual Violence

Ages 12-34 are the highest risk years for rape and sexual assault.³

Those age 65 and older are 92% less likely than 12-24 year olds to be a victim of rape or sexual assault, and 83% less likely than 25-49 year olds.⁴

Read more statistics about about child sexual abuse.
Women and Girls Experience Sexual Violence at High Rates

Millions of women in the United States have experienced rape.

As of 1998, an estimated 17.7 million American women had been victims of attempted or completed rape.⁵

Young women are especially at risk.

82% of all juvenile victims are female. 90% of adult rape victims are female.⁶

Females ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.³

Women ages 18-24 who are college students are 3 times more likely than women in general to experience sexual violence. Females of the same age who are not enrolled in college are 4 times more likely.⁷

Read more statistics about campus sexual violence.

Men and Boys Are Also Affected by Sexual Violence

Millions of men in the United States have been victims of rape.

As of 1998, 2.78 million men in the U.S. had been victims of attempted or completed rape.⁵

About 3% of American men-or 1 in 33-have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime.⁵

1 out of every 10 rape victims are male.

Transgender Students Are at Higher Risk for Sexual Violence

21% of TGQN (transgender, genderqueer, nonconforming) college students have been sexually assaulted, compared to 18% of non-TGQN females, and 4% of non-TGQN males.

Sexual Violence Can Have Long-Term Effects on Victims

The likelihood that a person suffers suicidal or depressive thoughts increases after sexual violence.

94% of women who are raped experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during the two weeks following the rape.⁹

30% of women report symptoms of PTSD 9 months after the rape.10

33% of women who are raped contemplate suicide.¹¹

13% of women who are raped attempt suicide.¹¹

Approximately 70% of rape or sexual assault victims experience moderate to severe distress, a larger percentage than for any other violent crime.¹²

People who have been sexually assaulted are more likely to use drugs than the general public.

3.4 times more likely to use marijuana

6 times more likely to use cocaine

10 times more likely to use other major drugs

Sexual violence also affects victims' relationships with their family, friends, and co-workers. ¹²

38% of victims of sexual violence experience work or school problems, which can include significant problems with a boss, coworker, or peer.

37% experience family/friend problems, including getting into arguments more frequently than before, not feeling able to trust their family/friends, or not feeling as close to them as before the crime.

84% of survivors who were victimized by an intimate partner experience professional or emotional issues, including moderate to severe distress, or increased problems at work or school.

79% of survivors who were victimized by a family member, close friend or acquaintance experience professional or emotional issues, including moderate to severe distress, or increased problems at work or school.

67% of survivors who were victimized by a stranger experience professional or emotional issues, including moderate to severe distress, or increased problems at work or school.

Victims are at risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

Studies suggest that the chance of getting pregnant from one-time, unprotected intercourse is between 3.1-5%¹³, depending on a multitude of factors, including the time of month intercourse occurs, whether contraceptives are used, and the age of the female. The average number of rapes and sexual assaults against females of childbearing age is approximately 250,000. Thus, the number of children conceived from rape each year in the United States might range from 7,750-12,500.¹² This is a very general estimate, and the actual number may differ. This statistic presents information from a number of different studies. Further, this information may not take into account factors which increase or decrease the likelihood of pregnancy, including, but not limited to: impact of birth control or condom use at the time of attack or infertility. RAINN presents this data for educational purposes only, and strongly recommends using the citations to review sources for more information and detail.

Native Americans Are at the Greatest Risk of Sexual Violence

On average, American Indians ages 12 and older experience 5,900 sexual assaults per year.¹⁴

American Indians are twice as likely to experience a rape/sexual assault compared to all races.

41% of sexual assaults against American Indians are committed by a stranger; 34% by an acquaintance; and 25% by an intimate or family member.

Sexual Violence Affects Thousands of Prisoners Across the Country

An estimated 80,600 inmates each year experience sexual violence while in prison or jail. ¹⁵

60% of all sexual violence against inmates is perpetrated by jail or prison staff.¹⁵

More than 50% of the sexual contact between inmate and staff member-all of which is illegal-is nonconsensual.¹⁵

Sexual Violence in the Military Often Goes Unreported

6,053 military members reported experiencing sexual assault during military service in FY 2018. DoD estimates about 20,500 service members experienced sexual assault that year. ¹⁶

DoD estimates 6.2% of active duty women and 0.7% of active duty men experienced sexual assault in FY 2018.

Understanding RAINN's statistics

Sexual violence is notoriously difficult to measure, and there is no single source of data that provides a complete picture of the crime. On RAINN's website, we have tried to select the most reliable source of statistics for each topic. The primary data source we use is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which is an annual study conducted by the Justice Department. To conduct NCVS, researchers interview tens of thousands of Americans each year to learn about crimes that they've experienced. Based on those interviews, the study provides estimates of the total number of crimes, including those that were not reported to police. While NCVS has a number of limitations (most importantly, children under age 12 are not included), overall, it is the most reliable source of crime statistics in the U.S.

We have also relied on other Justice Department studies, as well as data from the Department of Health and Human Services and other government and academic sources. When assembling these statistics, we have generally retained the wording used by the authors. Statistics are presented for educational purposes only. Each statistic includes a footnote citation for the original source, where you can find information about the methodology and a definition of terms.

Learn more about RAINN's statistics.

Sources:​

1. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, 2019 (2020). Note: RAINN applies a 5-year rolling average to adjust for changes in the year-to-year NCVS survey data.

2. i. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sex Offenses and Offenders (1997); ii. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Crimes Against the Elderly, 2003-2013 (2014).

3. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sex Offenses and Offenders (1997).

4. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Crimes Against the Elderly, 2003-2013 (2014).

5. National Institute of Justice & Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence Against Women Survey (1998). (Statistic presents information on the total number of male and female victims in the United States, using a study from 1998. Because the U.S. population has increased substantially since then, it is probable that the number of victims has, as well. RAINN presents this data for educational purposes only, and strongly recommends using the citations to review any and all sources for more information and detail.)

6. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement (2000).

7. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Rape and Sexual Victimization Among College-Aged Females, 1995-2013 (2014).

8. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Female Victims of Sexual Violence, 1994-2010 (2013).

9. D.S. Riggs, T. Murdock, W. Walsh, A prospective examination of post-traumatic stress disorder in rape victims. Journal of Traumatic Stress 455-475 (1992).

10. J. R. T. Davidson & E. B. Foa (Eds.) Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: DSM-IV and Beyond. American Psychiatric Press: Washington, DC. (pp. 23-36).

11. DG Kilpatrick, CN Edumuds, AK Seymour. Rape in America: A Report to the Nation. Arlington, VA: National Victim Center and Medical University of South Carolina (1992).

12. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Socio-emotional Impact of Violent Crime (2014).

13. Allen J. Wilcox, David B. Dunson, Clarice R. Weinberg, James Trussell, and Donna Day Baird, Likelihood of Contraception with a Single Act of Intercourse: Providing Benchmark Rates for Assessment of Post-Coital Contraceptives, Contraception Journal, (2001).

14. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, American Indians and Crime, 1992-2002 (2004).

15. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2011-2012 (2013).

16. Department of Defense, Fiscal Year 2019 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, (2020).

17. David Cantor, Bonnie Fisher, Susan Chibnall, Reanna Townsend, et. al. Association of American Universities (AAU), Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct (September 21, 2015). (" Victim services agency" is defined in this study as a "public or privately funded organization that provides victims with support and services to aid their recovery, offer protection, guide them through the criminal justice process, and assist with obtaining restitution." RAINN presents this data for educational purposes only, and strongly recommends using the citations to review any and all sources for more information and detail.)

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1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime.

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Disgraced comedian Bill Cosby is reportedly not sorry for what landed him behind bars "because he did nothing wrong," according to his spokesman, Andrew Wyatt.

Wyatt told NBC 10 Philadelphia that "despite the circumstances," Cosby is having an "amazing experience" in prison.

Cosby is serving three to 10 years in prison for aggravated indecent assault for drugging and sexually abusing Andrea Constand, a former Temple University administrator, in his Pennsylvania home in 2004.

His spokesman added the 81-year-old is "n ot sad. He's not remorseful because he did nothing wrong."

Dozens of women have accused the actor of sexual assault, and he was declared a sexually violent predator during his sentencing last year. He has to register as a sex offender, a label that he has to carry for the rest of his life, per HuffPost.

"Women do lie," Wyatt said when asked about the more than 50 women who have accused Cosby of rape and sexual assault.

Last month, Cosby was moved to the general population in the maximum-security State Correctional Institution-Phoenix. His family, including wife Camille, has not visited him in prison because "that's the way he wants it," said Wyatt.

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Bill Cosby Isn't 'Remorseful Because He Did Nothing Wrong,' Says Rep

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Disgraced comedian Bill Cosby is reportedly not sorry for what landed him behind bars "because he did nothing wrong," according to his spokesman, Andrew Wyatt. Wyatt told NBC 10 Philadelphia that "despite the circumstances," Cosby is having an "amazing experience" in prison.

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NORRISTOWN, Pa. - A jury found Bill Cosby guilty Thursday of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his home near here 14 years ago, capping the downfall of one of the world's best-known entertainers, and offering a measure of satisfaction to the dozens of women who for years have accused him of similar assaults against them.

On the second day of its deliberations at the Montgomery County Courthouse in this town northwest of Philadelphia, the jury returned to convict Mr. Cosby of three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand, at the time a Temple University employee he had mentored.

The three counts - penetration with lack of consent, penetration while unconscious, and penetration after administering an intoxicant - are felonies, each punishable by up to 10 years in state prison, though the sentences could be served concurrently.

It was the second time a jury had considered Mr. Cosby's fate. His first trial last summer ended with a deadlocked jury after six days of deliberations.

Mr. Cosby sat back in his chair after the verdict was announced and quietly stared down. Several women who have accused Mr. Cosby of abusing them, and attended the trial each day, briefly cheered, then fell silent. Judge Steven T. O'Neill praised the jurors, calling it "an extraordinarily difficult case" and adding, "You have sacrificed much, but you have sacrificed in the service of justice."

In recent years, Mr. Cosby, 80, had admitted to decades of philandering, and to giving quaaludes to women as part of an effort to have sex, smashing the image he had built as a moralizing public figure and the upstanding paterfamilias in the wildly popular 1980s and '90s sitcom "The Cosby Show." He did not testify in his own defense, avoiding a grilling about those admissions, but he and his lawyers have insisted that his encounter with Ms. Constand was part of a consensual affair, not an assault.

The verdict now marks the bottom of a fall as precipitous as any in show business history and leaves in limbo a large slice of American popular culture from Mr. Cosby's six-decade career as a comedian and actor. For the last few years, his TV shows, films, and recorded stand-up performances, one-time broadcast staples, have largely been shunned and with the conviction, they are likely to remain so.

At his retrial in the same courthouse and before the same judge as last summer, a new defense team argued unsuccessfully that Ms. Constand, now 45, was a desperate "con artist" with financial problems who steadily worked her famous but lonely mark for a lucrative payday.

The prosecution countered that it was Mr. Cosby who had been a deceiver, hiding behind his amiable image as America's Dad to prey on women that he first incapacitated with intoxicants. During closing arguments Tuesday, a special prosecutor, Kristen Gibbons Feden, had told the jury: "She is not the con. He is."

The defense's star witness was a veteran academic adviser at Temple, Mr. Cosby's alma mater, who said Ms. Constand had confided in her in 2004 that she could make money by falsely claiming that she had been molested by a prominent person. Mr. Cosby paid Ms. Constand $3.38 million in 2006 as part of the confidential financial settlement of a lawsuit she had brought against him after prosecutors had originally declined to bring charges.

But Ms. Constand said she had never spoken with the adviser and prosecutors rebutted the characterization of Ms. Constand as a schemer. Perhaps most damaging to Mr. Cosby, they were able to introduce testimony from five other women who told jurors they believed they too had been drugged and sexually assaulted by Mr. Cosby in separate incidents in the 1980s. The powerful drumbeat of accounts allowed prosecutors to argue that Ms. Constand's assault was part of a signature pattern of predatory behavior.

The case was the first high-profile trial of the #MeToo era. Candidates were required during jury selection to provide assurances that the accusations against scores of other famous men would not affect their judgment of Mr. Cosby. Mr. Cosby's lawyers referred to the changed atmosphere in American society, warning it and the introduction of accounts from multiple other accusers risked denying Mr. Cosby a fair trial by distracting jurors' attention. "Mob rule is not due process," Kathleen Bliss, one of Mr. Cosby's lawyers told the jury.

Then she spent much of her closing argument urging the jury to discount the accounts of the five supporting witnesses. One was a failed starlet who slept around, she suggested, another a publicity seeker. "Questioning an accuser is not shaming a victim," she told the jury.

The remarks inflamed Ms. Feden, the prosecutor, who called the attacks on the women the same sort of filthy and shameful criticism that kept some victims of sexual assault from ever coming forward.

When Ms. Constand came forward to testify, she took the stand as something of a proxy for the other women, more than 50, who have accused Mr. Cosby of abuses, often with details remarkably similar to Ms. Constand's account. A few of those women attended the trial.

None of the other accusations had resulted in prosecution. In many of the cases, too much time had passed for criminal charges to be considered, so Ms. Constand's case emerged as the only criminal test of Mr. Cosby's guilt.

But Mr. Cosby is facing civil actions from several accusers, many of whom are suing him for defamation because, they say, he or his staff branded them as liars by dismissing their allegations as fabrications.

The suits have mostly been delayed, pending the outcome of the criminal trial and are likely to draw momentum from the guilty verdict.

The case largely turned on the credibility of Ms. Constand, who testified that in a visit in early 2004 to Mr. Cosby's home near Philadelphia, when she was 30 and he was 66, Mr. Cosby gave her pills that left her immobile and drifting in and out of consciousness. He said he had only given her Benadryl.

"I was kind of jolted awake and felt Mr. Cosby on the couch beside me, behind me, and my vagina was being penetrated quite forcefully, and I felt my breast being touched," Ms. Constand said. "I was limp, and I could not fight him off."

Adding weight to her accusations was the revelation that a decade earlier, in a deposition in Ms. Constand's lawsuit against him, Mr. Cosby had admitted to having given women quaaludes in an effort to have sex with them.

But perhaps most damaging was the testimony by the five additional accusers, which took up several days of testimony. In Mr. Cosby's first trial, last summer, only one other accuser had been allowed to add her voice to that of Ms. Constand's. At the retrial, the accusers included the former model Janice Dickinson, who told jurors Mr. Cosby assaulted her in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 1982, after giving her a pill to help with menstrual cramps. "Here was America's Dad on top of me," she told the courtroom, "a happily married man with five children, on top of me."

The defense suggested in its cross-examination that Ms. Dickinson had made up the account and pointed to the fact that in her memoir she had recounted the meeting without making any mention of an assault. But Ms. Dickinson's publisher testified that she had told her the rape account and it was only kept out of the book for legal reasons.

Another accuser, Chelan Lasha, told how Mr. Cosby invited her to his suite at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1986 when she was 17 to give her help with her modeling career. Mr. Cosby, she said, gave her a pill and liquor, and then assaulted her.

In court, Ms. Lasha, who was often in tears, called across the courtroom to the entertainer, who was sitting at the defense table.

"You remember," she asked, "don't you, Mr. Cosby?"

As in the first trial, Mr. Cosby's legal team insisted Ms. Constand was lying about a consensual, sexual relationship. But while his lawyers last summer had depicted Mr. Cosby as a flawed man, an unfaithful husband who shattered his fans' illusions, but committed no crime, his lawyers this time focused on the financial struggles they said Ms. Constand was experiencing that led her to to extort money from a man who had been trying to help her with a career in broadcasting.

"You are going to be asking yourself during this trial, 'What does she want from Bill Cosby?' And you already know the answer: 'Money, money and lots more money,'" his lead lawyer, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., told the jurors as he opened his defense of Mr. Cosby. "She has a history of financial problems until she hits the jackpot with Bill Cosby."

The defense emphasized inconsistencies in the version of events Ms. Constand had given the police, saying, for example, at one point that the assault had taken place in March, 2004, then later changing that January 2004.

Mr. Cosby's lawyers cited her phone records to show she had stayed in touch with him after the encounter and they produced detailed travel itineraries and flight schedules in an effort to show that Mr. Cosby did not stay at his Philadelphia home during the period she said the assault occurred.

"He was lonely and troubled and he made a terrible mistake confiding in her what was going on in his life," Mr. Mesereau said.

Under cross-examination, Ms. Constand explained the lapses in her accounts as innocent mistakes, and said her contacts with Mr. Cosby after the incident were mostly cursory, the unavoidable result of her job duties.

Mr. Steele told the jury that with the pills he gave her, Mr. Cosby took away Ms. Constand's ability to consent, and that their later contacts were irrelevant.

When Ms. Constand's mother called to confront Mr. Cosby about a year after the incident, the prosecution argued, the defendant's apology, and his offer to pay for her schooling, therapy and a trip to Florida, were evidence he knew he had done something wrong.

Kevin R. Steele, the Montgomery County district attorney, also worked to rebut the defense claims. He said that Mr. Cosby, a member of Temple University's board of directors and the university's most famous alumnus, set his sights on Ms. Constand, an employee in the university's athletic department who considered Mr. Cosby a mentor.

"This case is about trust," Mr. Steele had told the jurors. "This case is about betrayal, and that betrayal leading to a sexual assault of a woman named Andrea Constand."

Richard Pérez-Peña contributed to this report.

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Bill Cosby Found Guilty of Sexual Assault After Years of Accusations

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NORRISTOWN, Pa. - A jury found Bill Cosby guilty Thursday of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his home near here 14 years ago, capping the downfall of one of the world's best-known entertainers, and offering a measure of satisfaction to the dozens of women who for years have accused him of similar assaults against them.

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Men are afraid that women will laugh at them.

Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Margaret Atwood.

Versions of this stark reality have been true since the beginning of time. Living while female has always carried considerable risk. It continues to do so today, even in unexpected places, for example, on college campuses, which advertise themselves as-and often are in many ways-bastions of tolerance, nonviolence, and open communication. Scientific field expeditions are another place we might expect women to be safe, but, as recent research indicates, they are not. Even the armed forces, which have a solid record of success with racial integration, have not managed to solve the problem of sexual violence. A woman's odds of being harmed by a fellow soldier dwarf her odds of being harmed by the enemy.

Considering that sexual violence against women in all these places is by all accounts vastly under-reported, and considering that it is probably even less commonly reported in other arenas (such as in the home), we must face up to the fact that women are under sexual siege in the US. The attackers, almost exclusively, are men.

What accounts for this? Why do men sexually assault women?

First, because they can. By genetic lot, men are on average stronger than women and can overpower them physically. Anatomy is destiny, Freud said. And so it's the destiny of women that if men wish to impose their will, physical force is one available tool. The same is not true in reverse. This biological difference is not fair-but there is no fairness in nature; there is only nature in nature. And the difference is not likely to disappear any time soon.

Another reason sexual violence is so common is that sex and violence are closely linked in our internal architecture. Sex has inherently violent undertones (in the same way that violence has sexual undertones). This is not a new observation. But the sex-violence link has traditionally been discussed in the context of over stimulated male sexuality. In late Victorian times, for example, the male sex drive was considered so explosive and animalistic as to render men unable to control themselves when stimulated (women were not considered to be much interested in sex for any reason other than procreation). This storyline is good for justifying male misbehavior and has also been used far and wide to justify men's effort to control where women go, what they say, and how they dress. However, it falls apart upon close examination. As a student in my sexuality class put it: "If your parents walk in on you having sex with your girlfriend, you stop what you're doing in a second, no matter what ..." Yes, men have ample control of their sexuality.

In truth, the sex-violence connection is not the providence of over-aroused men, but rather an inherent feature of the male-female mating dynamic. This is an uncomfortable realization, yet the evidence appears to support it. First, the sex drive and the propensity to violence (in men and women) are both linked to the same hormone, testosterone. Second, acts of dominance and violence are common ways by which males attract and protect their mates among our primate relatives. In humans, male aggressiveness is often rewarded by greater access to, attention from, and success with women. It is no coincidence that the theme of being taken by force by an attractive lustful man dominates (pun) female erotic literature and features prominently in women's sexual fantasies. Finally, as Freud noted, the act of sexual intercourse itself (the " primal scene ") bears a striking resemblance to violent struggle, marked as it is by raw physicality, sweating, bodily penetration, vigorous thrusting, grunting, etcetera.

The fact that we have a sexual appetite for things we find otherwise abhorrent has to be acknowledged if we are to make progress on controlling and counteracting sexual violence, in the same way that we must acknowledge the thrilling aspects of war if we want to advance peace, or nicotine's powerful medicinal and pleasurable properties if we are to make progress against smoking.

However, our biological constitution, which privileges men physically and rewards male aggression, is only one major determinant of behavior. The other is social influence. For humans, group pressures and social situations often shape behavior more strongly than biological impulses. They also tend to override individual character, values, and inclinations. People have biological tendencies and individual preferences, but whether, when, and how they act on these is often decided by the social context and social identity. Some people are more conscientious than others, by temperament or by conscious choice. But more people will act conscientiously and more of the conscientious people will act on their tendency more often if the values of the culture around them cherish and reward conscientiousness.

Genetic endowment sets the boundaries for what one can do but not for what one should do. In fact, society always can, and does, choose whether to elevate and encourage certain genetic attributes or seek to minimize, conceal and resist their influence on social life. That women are more physically vulnerable by nature need not mean that they should be fair game for attack. The fact that you are stronger than me does not mean you get to shove in front of me in line. Biology says you could. Society says you can't. And generally, you don't.

To deal effectively with sexual aggression we must recognize that we are dealing with one of those issues where social aspirations (that "Right makes right") buck against our evolutionary heritage (where "Might makes right"). This is true in other areas as well. For example, we expect young people to delay child bearing far beyond the biologically selected starting time (the onset of puberty and fertility) because our society needs them to get educated, and that takes time. Most of the time they follow society's rather than biology's dictates.

Once we understand the challenge, we may begin to look for ways to meet it. A good question to start with is: who are the men who attack women? It is convenient to assume that the culprits are violent, sociopathic, sexual deviants, and some definitely are. However, most men who violate women's spaces, rights and bodies sexually would not meet clinical diagnostic criteria as either sociopaths or sexual deviants. Most violence against women is committed by normative people-around campus, at work, or on the base. This raises the possibility that the violence they perpetrate appears, in context, normative to them.

A thought experiment: how many of the offenders are acting against social norms to satisfy sociopathic personal values or urgent individual needs? And how many act chiefly to adhere to group norms or accommodate peer pressure? I would argue that in violating women most attackers are not acting alone, spontaneously, or out of some twisted personal fantasy; rather they are manifesting and adhering to the consciousness of the culture in which they are immersed.

What is this cultural consciousness that permits and pushes men towards sexual assault? On the most general level, it is one characterized by the sanctioning of all kinds of violence. As the psychologist Hans Eysenck observed long ago, what sex was for the Victorians, violence is for us. We officially condemn it but actually reward and revel in it. An American child is rewarded for fighting back, not for turning the other cheek. An undercurrent of violence worship is apparent in American culture, where the symbol of patriotism is the soldier, the symbol of personal freedom is the gun, the most popular sport if football, the most popular entertainment are shoot 'em up video games and vengeful movie super heroes blowing up things, and the most cherished demographic is youth.

Another aspect of this consciousness is that it objectifies people. The objectification of women-turning them into body parts that exist and have value only to the extent they satisfy male desires and move merchandize in the marketplace-has been discussed and acknowledged widely. But men are also objectified. In the unforgivingly competitive market system where most men (and women) spend their days, you are valued for your efficiency, your ability to advance the company's bottom line. (Men are not even given the cultural license, still available to some women, to opt out of this rat race and into full time parenthood). Americaa treats its workers as it does the products they make: like things to use up, throw away and replace.

How many men sense, rightly, that no one cares about their subjective experience or their feelings independent of their economic value? How many believe, rightly, they are interchangeable? How many are true agents in their lives, as opposed to tools of a trade? Americans work very hard, and most of this work is motivated by fear, the terror of being left behind, of falling through the gaping cracks in the tattered so-called safety net, of becoming nonproductive and hence non-entities, useless objects. Objectified people are less able to treat each other humanely.

This is one reason framing the sexual violence problem as a man vs. woman issue is limiting. It may be more useful to frame it as a contest between violent objectification collaborators vs. resistors. Just as specific rights movements tend to benefit from the creation of a more general civil rights conversation and consciousness within the culture, so will an effort to end the objectification of women and violence against them benefit from a more comprehensive social conversation about violence and objectification.

On a more concrete, immediate level, men who attack women are usually following either a well-learned social script or the immediate pressure of group norms. A social script dictates that certain things lead to other things. Those who have internalized the script as normal are loath to violate it. When the script is violated, those who have internalized it will tend to blame the violator, not the script. If the common restaurant script says that you tip no matter how good the service, then most will tip no matter the service, and those who refuse to tip bad waiters will provoke outrage and retaliation. Likewise, if the sexual script dictates that the end point of flirting and foreplay is intercourse, then many will be loath to break it regardless of how they actually feel in the moment, and those who say, "Stop!" mid-script will be seen as offenders, deserving of retaliation or punishment. To change this dynamic, sexual scripts will have to change.

The other force often at play is immediate in-group peer pressure. Young people who gang up on and violate a semi-conscious woman and post pictures on Facebook are not acting on some individually dreamed up sexual fantasy but rather following group norms. We know from psychological research that once a group is established, the immediate pressure to adhere to the in-group code will often override the desire and ability to reach across to a member of the out-group. To deal with the problem of group pressure pushing young men to violate women, some concrete social norms of concrete groups in concrete places will have to change.

How is social change of this kind achieved? Two general approaches are available. The first is a top down strategy, applied through changes in regulation or law, as California had recently done, or through official leaders' declarations and orders, as Obama has recently done. The top down approach has advantages. It can be enacted fast, and it can compel people to change the way they act. This is important because one of the best, quickest ways to change attitudes, norms, and scripts is through changing actions. Start smiling, and you'll feel happier. Be legally required to treat others with kindness and respect and your prejudices about them will diminish over time.

However, the top down approach has limitations. Changing the law can have multiple unintended consequences: Prohibition didn't stop people from drinking, but it did spawn large-scale organized crime. Moreover, law enforcement is usually based on punishment for those who break laws, not reinforcement for those who are following the rules. Psychological research from Skinner on has shown that punishment, while telling you what not to do, is not a good way to learn what to do. In fact, what people who are punished often learn best is how to avoid and resent those who punish them, and how to become good at not being caught.

There are limits to the law's ability to regulate the complexities of human interaction. And sexual interactions are, if nothing else, complex. A case in point is the question of consent. Clearly, consent is a contextual concept. For example, we can easily agree that the inebriated person in a one-night stand is unable to give consent. But what about a long term couple who likes to have drunk sex? And while marriage does not mean you can do whatever you want without asking, a 'yes' response to marital sex initiation is rarely uttered or requested; such marital sex does not commonly constitute assault, but then again, sometimes it does. Moreover, sorting out what happened afterwards is notoriously difficult: 'he said-she said' situations, common in charges over sexual encounters, are inherently difficult to address legally.

A reliance on legislation alone is never optimal for alleviating social ills. A bottom up approach is also needed, where individuals, families, and communities initiate action to create new terms, new scripts and expectations and, ultimately, a new social consciousness. As it happens, bottom up approaches to cultural change have received a boost from social media. Online platforms provide ways for people to coordinate, inform and encourage each other at the grassroots level, often circumventing top down structures and traditional power centers and ideologies.

In the old Zen tale, a master and student are eating on the grass. A fly buzzes overhead. The master reaches with a quick flick of the hand and catches it mid air.

"How can you do that?" asks the awestruck student.

"How can you not?" asks the master.

Not that long ago, it was unimaginable that women could or would engage in advanced intellectual discourse, pursue careers in science, or join the armed forces. Now, it is unimaginable that they wouldn't. A lot of things that are hard to imagine, eventually-with changes in law and cultural consciousness-become taken for granted. Similarly, right now it is difficult for us to imagine how we could have a world in which a woman would feel, and be, as physically safe as a man walking on campus, dusting artifacts at a dig site, or staffing her army post.

Yet how can we justify not having such a world?

Teaser Picture Credit: Max Slevogt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. Margaret Atwood. Versions of this stark reality have been true since the beginning of time. Living while female has always carried considerable risk.

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The way I will organize my information will be by making everything, translate well and be very smooth. The logical order would be by getting the description and then lead inintininto stats, how to solve and conclude very well. Some background would be possibly looking into cases where I would be able to see why the rapists did commit the crime. I will be sure to plan out my essay to keep the information in order and cleanwith very smooth transitions. My creative ideas will be almost getting the reader into knowing what rape is and how wrong this is to do to anyone. I'm not sure how many paragraphs I will need. I honestly will have to start typing to find out.

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I feel very confident about my information and my notes because they will help me so well,and make writing a whole lot easier. I have statistics government websites and definitions of what rape is. I know my topic pretty well but it would help to know how often rape happens and for sure something I will have to find out. There's a lot of conflicting emotions in my research and I get very upsetthat women are raped so often and disgusts me that men are the ones that are doing it more often than not.

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- Many forms of rape include
Campus Sexual Assault,
Child Sexual Abuse and just forced intercourse that is not consented too
- One in five women will be raped at some point in their life time
- one in every seventy-one men will be raped at some point in their life.
- 51.1% of women report rape and 52.4% of men report being raped

-91% of rape victims are female the other 9% are male
-49.5% of women who are raped are multiracial and 45% of American Indian/Alaska Native women are raped
-8/10 rape victims knew who the person was
-8% of rapes happen while the person is at work
-The lifetime cost of rape per victim is $122,461 and Annually, rape costs the U.S. more than any other crime, $127 billion
-96% of people who sexually abuse children are male, and 76.8% of people who sexually abuse children are adults
-The average age at which girls first become victims of prostitution is 12-14 years old, and the average age at which boys first become victims of prostitution is 11-13 years old and sadly only 12% of child sexual abuse is ever reported to the authorities
- SO what is rape? well according to the FBI rape is " Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim".(2013)
-Rape is not talked about enough.

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The reason I chose the topic of rape is because it is something that is very close to me because I have had family members and friends that have been raped and its just so personal. It means so much to me because it is something that needs to be changed and its a topic that is not talked about enough. What intrigues me is that there is so much rape that is unreported. It just makes me want to know why people are not speaking up about it. Something that I learned about rape that i did not know before is that 1/5 women will be raped sometime in there life while 1/71 men will get raped sometime in their life. Some questions that will guide me are, What is rape? Is it reported enough? Are people punished fairly and equally for committing the same crime? How can we bring it to peoples attention that it is wrong to rape someone? and How can we prevent rape?

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FBI'S real definitions and how rape is handled 

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FBI'S real definitions and how rape is handled 

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Download Printable Document
Definition

In 2013, the FBI UCR Program initiated collection of rape data under a revised definition within the Summary Reporting System. Previously, offense data for forcible rape was collected under the legacy UCR definition: the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will. Beginning with the 2013 data year, the term "forcible" was removed from the offense title, and the definition was changed. The revised UCR definition of rape is: Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim. Attempts or assaults to commit rape are also included; however, statutory rape and incest are excluded. See Rape Addendum for details.

All rape data submitted in 2013-whether collected under the revised definition or the legacy definition-are presented in this publication. However, because only one year of rape data has been collected under the revised definition, the overview presented here discusses only legacy definition rape data.

Data collection

The UCR Program counts one offense for each victim of a rape, attempted rape, or assault with intent to rape, regardless of the victim's age. Sexual relations without the victim's consent which involves a familial offender is counted as a rape and not an act of incest. All other crimes of a sexual nature are considered to be Part II offenses; as such, the UCR Program collects only arrest data for those crimes. The offense of statutory rape, in which no force is used but the female victim is under the age of consent, is included in the arrest total for the sex offenses category.

For this overview only, the FBI deviated from standard procedure and manually calculated the 2012 and 2013 rates of females raped based on the national female population provided by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Overview

There were an estimated 79,770 rapes (legacy definition) reported to law enforcement in 2013. This estimate was 6.3 percent lower than the 2012 estimate, and 10.6 percent and 16.1 percent lower than the 2009 and 2004 estimates, respectively. (See Tables 1 and 1A.)

The rate of rapes (legacy definition) in 2013 was estimated at 25.2 per 100,000 females.

Expanded rape data

Expanded offense data are the details of the various offenses that the UCR Program collects beyond the count of how many crimes law enforcement agencies report. These details may include the type of weapon used in a crime, type or value of items stolen, and so forth. In addition, expanded data include trends (for example, 2-year comparisons) and rates per 100,000 inhabitants.

Expanded information regarding rape is available in the following tables:

Rates (per 100,000 inhabitants): Tables 16, 17, 18, and 19

What you won't find on this page

Clearance and arrest data for rape.

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Download Printable Document In 2013, the FBI UCR Program initiated collection of rape data under a revised definition within the Summary Reporting System. Previously, offense data for forcible rape was collected under the legacy UCR definition: the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.

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On This Page

About this Topic

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has initiated two projects to identify, develop and test the best methods for collecting self-report data on rape and sexual assault. In June 2011, BJS charged an expert panel from the National Research Council's Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) to examine conceptual and methodological issues surrounding survey statistics on rape and sexual assault and to recommend to BJS the best methods for obtaining such statistics on an ongoing basis. In September 2011, BJS made a competitive award to Westat, Inc. to develop and test two different survey designs for collecting self-report data on rape and sexual assault. One design is to be an optimal design identified by the CNSTAT panel and the other will be similar to designs used in the public health approach for measuring rape and sexual assault. Estimates from these two designs will be compared to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Please see BJS Activities on Measuring Rape and Sexual Assault for more information on these projects.

Rape - Forced sexual intercourse including both psychological coercion as well as physical force. Forced sexual intercourse means penetration by the offender(s). Includes attempted rapes, male as well as female victims, and both heterosexual and same sex rape. Attempted rape includes verbal threats of rape.

Sexual assault - A wide range of victimizations, separate from rape or attempted rape. These crimes include attacks or attempted attacks generally involving unwanted sexual contact between victim and offender. Sexual assaults may or may not involve force and include such things as grabbing or fondling. It also includes verbal threats.

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Terms & Definitions

Rape
Forced sexual intercourse including both psychological coercion and physical force. Forced sexual intercourse means vaginal, anal, or oral penetration by the offender(s). This category also includes incidents where the penetration is from a foreign object, such as a bottle. Includes attempted rape, male and female victims, and both heterosexual and same sex rape. Attempted rape includes verbal threats of rape.

Sexual assault
A wide range of victimizations, separate from rape or attempted rape. These crimes include attacks or attempted attacks generally involving unwanted sexual contact between victim and offender. Sexual assaults may or may not involve force and include such things as grabbing or fondling. Sexual assault also includes verbal threats.

Violence, crimes of
Rape, sexual assault, personal robbery, or assault. This category includes both attempted and completed crimes. It does not include purse snatching and pocket picking. Murder is not measured by the National Crime Victimization Survey because of an inability to question the victim.

Completed violence - The sum of all completed rapes, sexual assaults, robberies, and assaults. See individual crime types for definitions of completed crimes.

Attempted/threatened violence - The unsuccessful attempt of rape, sexual assault, personal robbery, or assault. Includes attempted attacks or sexual assaults by means of verbal threats. See individual crime types for definitions of attempted crimes.

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On This Page About this Topic The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has initiated two projects to identify, develop and test the best methods for collecting self-report data on rape and sexual assault.

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National Sexual Violence Resource Center

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Learn more on our Questions and Answers page.