An exhaustive government survey of rape and domestic violence released Wednesday affirmed that sexual violence against women remains endemic in the United States.
Nearly 1 in 5 women surveyed said they had been raped or had experienced an attempted rape at some point, and 1 in 4 reported being beaten by an intimate partner. One in six women have been stalked, according to the report.
“That almost 1 in 5 women have been raped in their lifetime is very striking and, I think, will be surprising to a lot of people,” said Linda Degutis, director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducted the survey.
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey was begun in 2010 by the CDC with the support of the National Institute of Justice and the Department of Defense. It is a continuing telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 16,507 adults.
The researchers defined rape as completed forced penetration, forced penetration facilitated by drugs or alcohol, or attempted forced penetration. By that definition, 1 percent of women surveyed reported being raped in the previous year, a figure that suggests 1.3 million U.S. women annually may be victims of rape or attempted rape.
But men also reported being victimized in surprising numbers. One in seven men have experienced severe violence at the hands of an intimate partner, the survey found, and 1 in 71 men — between 1 and 2 percent — have been raped, many when they were younger than 11.
The New York Times
