Sexual Abuse Reading Centre

Sexual Abuse in the United States

• One in 3 women is raped in her lifetime. (Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, 1985)
• One in 4 girls and 1 in 7 boys will be sexually abused before age 18. ("Preventing Sexual Abuse," 1986)
• A woman is raped once every 46 seconds. (Rape In America: A Report to the Nation, 1992)
• One out of every 4 college women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape. (Koss, 1988)
• A woman's risk of being raped by someone she knows is four times greater than being raped by a stranger. (Koss, 1988)
• Women with developmental disabilities are 10 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than the population as a whole. (Sexual Abuse and Disability Project)
• Forty percent of women with disabilities experience sexual assault or physical violence. (Sexual Abuse and Disability Project)
• Twenty-two percent of women polled say they have been forced to do sexual things against their will, usually by an intimate. (Laumann et al., 1994)
• Fourteen percent of all women are raped by their husbands during their marriages. (Russell, 1983)
• Twenty-six percent of women who are sexually assaulted are assaulted by their husbands, former husbands, boyfriends, and ex-boyfriends. (Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey, 1995)
• Sixteen percent of rapes are ever reported to the police. (Rape In America: A Report to the Nation, 1992)
• Eighty-three percent of raped adolescents, 71.4. percent of raped young adults, and 68.4 percent of raped adults did not report their assault to police. (Kilpatrick, 1990)
• Of the cases of forcible rape reported in 1993, only 53 percent led to the arrest of the alleged perpetrator. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1994)
• Seven out of 10 of women who had sex before the age of 14 and 6 out of 10 who had sex before age 15 were forced to do so. (The Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1994)
• Children with disabilities are sexually abused at nearly twice the rate of other children. (National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect)
• Sixty-six percent of women who became pregnant as adolescents were sexually abused as children. (University of Washington study, 1995)

Article courtesy of Rape Victim Advocacy Program; used with permission.