Estimates of sexual violence
Surveys of victims of crime have been undertaken in many cities and countries, using a common methodology to aid comparability, and have generally included questions on sexual violence. The United Nations has conducted extensive surveys to determine the level of sexual violence in different societies. According to these studies, the percentage of women reporting having been a victim of sexual assault ranges from less than 2% in places such as La Paz, Bolivia (1.4%), Gaborone, Botswana (0.8%), Beijing, China (1.6%), and Manila, Philippines (0.3%), to 5% or more in Istanbul, Turkey (6.0%), Buenos Aires, Argentina (5.8%), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (8.0%), and Bogota, Colombia (5.0%).
| Sexual Violence and Victimization |
|---|
| Specific Offenses |
| Rape · Statutory Rape · Incest |
| Sexual Assault · Domestic violence |
| Sexual Abuse · Child sexual abuse |
| Sexual Harassment · Pimping |
| Attempted rape · Genital mutilation |
| Deviant sexual intercourse |
| Forms of Violence and Victimization |
| Types of rape · War rape · Sexual slavery |
| Spousal Rape · Prison rape |
| Date rape · Date rape drug |
| Human trafficking · Prostitution |
| Victimization of Children |
| Child pornography · Child trafficking |
| Prostitution of children |
| Commercial exploitation |
| Sociological Theories |
| Sociobiological theories of rape |
| Motivation for rape · Victim blaming |
| Misogyny · Misandry · Aggression |
| Pedophilia · Effects and aftermath |
| Rape Trauma Syndrome |
| Social and Cultural Aspects |
| Rape culture · History of rape |
| raptio · Comfort women · |
| Policy |
| Laws about rape · Rape shield law |
| Laws regarding child sexual abuse |
| Rape crisis center · Honor killing |
| Anti-rape female condom · Rape statistics |
| Portals: Law |
The 1998 National Violence Against Women Survey, based on a sample size of 8,000, estimated the incidence of rape to be 1 in 6 for women and 1 in 33 for men, based on reports of attempted or completed rapes over the course of her or his lifetime.
No distinction has been made in these figures between rape by strangers and that by intimate partners. Surveys that fail to make this distinction or those that only examine rape by strangers usually underestimate substantially the prevalence of sexual violence.
In 2011, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that "nearly 20% of all women" in the United States suffered attempted rape or rape sometime in their lives. More than a third of the victims were raped before the age of 18.
Apart from crime surveys, there have been a small number of surveys, with representative samples, that have asked women about sexual violence. For instance, in a national survey conducted in the United States of America, 14.8% of women over 17 years of age reported having been raped in their lifetime (with an additional 2.8% having experienced attempted rape) and 0.3% of the sample reported having been raped in the previous year. A survey of a representative sample of women aged 18– 49 years in three provinces of South Africa found that in the previous year 1.3% of women had been forced, physically or by means of verbal threats, to have non-consensual sex. In a survey of a representative sample of the general population over 15 years of age in the Czech Republic, 11.6% of women reported forced sexual contact in their lifetime, 3.4% reporting that this had occurred more than once. The most common form of contact was forced vaginal intercourse.