See the end of this article for references. The source of each statement is cited.
Rape is frequently described as a crime of violence, not of sex. Yet a woman 16-19 years old, the age of greatest sexual attractiveness, is more than 84 times more likely to be raped than a woman 50 or older.(1)
In a survey of 610 female college students who's average age was 19 years old, 39 percent said they had said no to sex when they meant yes, and 69 percent said they had said no when they meant maybe. Of sexually experienced women, 61 percent had engaged in token resistance.(2)
Of 556 accusations of rape examined in an Air Force study, 27 percent of the accusers admitted, either just before taking a polygraph test or after failing one, that they had lied.(3)
In a nine-year study of all resolved rape cases in a Midwestern U.S. city of 70,000, the accusers recanted their charges 41 percent of the time. The 41 percent figure does not include the other accusations that the police department recorded as unfounded, for which there was insufficient evidence to establish the assault.(4)
A survey of all the forcible rape complaints during a three-year period at two large Midwestern state universities found that 50 percent of the accusations were false. At each university, the complaints and investigations were the responsibility of a ranking female officer, and no complaint was declared false unless there was a recantation by the accuser. Fifty-three percent of the accusations were motivated by a need for an alibi; revenge was the motive for 44 percent.(5)
A third of DNA scans now routinely done in new rape investigations are nonmatches, according to a newsmagazine.(6)
About 9 percent of reported rapes are of males.(7)
There may be more rapes of men in prison than of women outside prison. One limited study found that 14 percent of the prison inmates in one institution said they had been raped or assaulted. If that figure applies to all jails and penal institutions, about one million males are raped behind bars each year.(8)
Of 204 male college students, 20 percent reported they had been the victims of coercive sex by a female since the age of 16; 23 percent said they had been unwillingly touched sexually by a female.(9)
In a survey of 507 male and 486 female college students, 63 percent of the males and 46 percent of the females said they had engaged in unwanted sexual intercourse. Furthermore, 6.5 percent of the males vs only 5.8 percent of the females said physical coercion had been employed to induce them to have unwanted sex. When kissing and petting were included as sexual activity, 98 percent of the women and 94 percent of the men said they had engaged in such activities but were unwilling.(10)
A survey of 930 gay males disclosed that 3.9 percent had been sexually assaulted by females.(11) Among homosexuals, 31 percent of lesbians and only 12 percent of gay males reported they were victims of forced sex by their current or most recent partners.(12)
Estimates on the prevalence of rape vary wildly. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, there were 102,560 reported rapes or attempted rapes in 1990. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that 130,000 women were victims of rape in 1990. A Harris poll sets the figure at 380,000 rapes or sexual assaults for 1993. According to a study by the National Victims Center, there were 683,000 completed forcible rapes in 1990. The Justice Department says that 8 percent of all American women will be victims of rape or attempted rape in their lifetime. The radical feminist legal scholar Catherine McKinnon, however, claims that "by conservative definition [rape] happens to almost half of all women at least once in their lives." Clearly, independent studies on the incidence and prevalence of rape are badly needed.(13)
...The Ms. Magazine Campus Project on Sexual Assault, directed by Mary Koss, [is] the most extensive, most widely disseminated, and most frequently cited....
The Ms. study directed by Koss surveyed 6,159 students at 32 colleges. As Koss operationally defines the problem, 17 percent of the female college students in her study had been victims of rape (15 percent) or attempted rape (12 percent) an average of two times between the ages of 14 and 21....
There are several reasons for serious researchers to question the magnitude of sexual assault conveyed by the Ms. findings....When asked directly, 73 percent of the students whom Koss categorized as victims of rape did not think that they had been raped. This discrepancy is underscored by the subsequent behavior of a high proportion of identified victims, 42 percent of whom had sex again with the man who supposedly raped them. Of those categorized as victims of attempted rape, 35 percent later had sex with their purported offender....
As a guide to trends in sexual assaults...Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that rates of rape and attempted rape declined by about 30 percent between 1978 and 1988. As for recent experience, BJS findings reveal that 1.2 women in 1,000 over 12 years of age were victims of rape or attempted rape. This amounted to approximately 135,000 female victims in 1989. No trivial number, this annual figure translates into a lifetime prevalence rate of roughly 5 to 7 percent, which suggests that one woman out of 14 is likely to experience rape or attempted rape sometime in her life.(14)
REFERENCES
1)- U.S. Bureau of Criminal Justice Statistics. Criminal Victimization in the United State: 1987. Table 5, pp 18-19.
2)- Muehlenhard, Charlene L., and Hollabaugh, Lisa C. "Do Women Sometimes Say No When They Mean Yes? The Prevalence and Correlates of Women's Token Resistance to Sex." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 54, No. 5 (1988), pp 872-879.
3)- McDowell, Charles P., Ph.D. "False Allegations." Forensic Science Digest, (publication of the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations), Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 1985), p. 64.
4)- Kanin, Eugene J., Ph.D. "False Rape Allegations." Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1994), pp 81-92.
5)- Kanin, Eugene J., Ph.D. "False Rape Allegations." Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 23, No.1 (1994), pp 81-92.
6)- Krajick, Kevin. "Genetics in the Courtroom: Controversial DNA testing can clear a suspect." Newsweek, Jan. 11, 1993, p. 64.
7)- U.S. Bureau of Criminal Justice Statistics. Criminal Victimization in the United States: 1973-1978, p. 15.
8)- Wooden, Wayne S., and Parker, Jay. Men Behind Bars. New York: Plenum Press, 1982. The one million figure is based on the fact that about 8.6million males pass through jails and prisons each year, according to the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1990, Tables 6.33, 6.63, 6.89, and 6.90.
9)- Struckman-Johnson, Cindy, Ph.D., and Struckman-Johnson, David, Ph.D. "Men Pressured and Forced Into Sexual Experience." Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1994), pp 93-114.
10)- Muehlenhard, Charlene L., and Cook, Stephen W. "Real Men Don't Say No: Do Men Have Sex When They Don't Want To?" Symposium, Miscommunication and Date Rape: Causes and Consequences, Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, 1986; also, by the same researchers, "Men's Self-Reports of Unwanted Sexual Activity." Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 24 (1988), pp 58-72.
11)- Hickson, Ford C. I.; Davies, Peter M., Ph.D.; Hunt, Andrew J.; Weatherburn, Peter; McManus, Thomas J.; and Coxon, Anthony P.M., Ph.D. "Gay Men as Victims of Nonconsensual Sex." Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1994).
12)- Waterman, Caroline K.; Dawson, Lori J.; and Bologna, Michael J. "Sexual Coercion in Gay Male and Lesbian Relationships: Predictors and Implications for Support Services." The Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 26, No. 1 (February 1989), pp 118-124.
13)- Sommers, Christina Hoff, Ph.D. Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. New York: Simon & Schuster (1994), pp 209-210.
14)- Gilbert, Neil. "Realities and Mythologies of Rape." Society, May/June 1992, pp 4-10.