Sarah Kliff provides a graph with a stark visual representation of new CDC figures on rape:
Jessica Roy expresses alarm:
After polling over 12,000 participants in a randomized, nationally representative telephone survey, the CDC found that an estimated 19.3 percent of women and 1.7 percent of men have been raped during their lifetimes. 19.3 percent — nearly 1 in 5 American women — have been raped. Just let that sink in. The study also yielded some shocking statistics about other forms of sexual violence, defined as “being made to penetrate, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and noncontact unwanted sexual experiences.”
Other surveys have found significantly fewer rape victims. Claire Groden explains the discrepancies:
The CDC … did not mention any legal terms in the survey queries, instead asking questions like, “How many people have ever used physical force or threats to physically harm you to make you have vaginal sex?” Because of this, the CDC included cases in which the victim might not have been aware or willing to identify her experiences as rape.
This difference made the CDC’s survey broader, especially in the case of victims who were under the influence during the attack. The CDC counted alcohol- and drug-facilitated rape, asking if the respondents had ever experienced various sex acts while “drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.” But, as Scott Berkowitz at RAINN, the Rape and Incest Abuse National Network, pointed out, not all of those 1.2 million cases in 2011 would be considered rape by the Department of Justice. A person who was drunk might have still been lucid enough to give consent, but the CDC would have counted that experience as “alcohol-facilitated rape.”
Still, the CDC numbers are a reminder of how many sexual assaults and rapes go unreported. The total number of rapes reported to police in 2011 was 83,425—far lower than either the NCVS or CDC numbers.
