Ending Rape Illiteracy & 50 Actual Rape Facts

The following excerpt is taken from an excellent article in The Huffington Post.

Please go there to read the article in its entirety.

50 Facts About Rape

1. Low estimate of the number of women , according to the Department of Justice, raped every year: 300,000
2. High estimate of the number of women raped, according to the CDC: 1.3 million
3. Percentage of rapes not reported: 54 percent
4. A woman’s chance of being raped in the U.S.: 1 in 5
5. Chances that a raped woman conceives compared to one engaging in consensual sex: at least two times as likely
6. Number of women in the US impregnated against their will each year in the U.S. as a result of rape: 32,000
7. Number of states in which rapists can sue for custody and visitation: 31
8. Chances that a woman’s body “shuts that whole thing down“: 0 in 3.2 billion
9. Rank of U.S. in the world for rape: 13th
10. A woman’s chance of being raped in college: 1 in 4 or 5
11. Chances that a Native American woman in the U.S. will be raped: 1 in 3
12. Percentage of women in Alaska who have suffered sexual assault: 37 percent
13. Number of rape kits untested by the Houston police force: 6,000-7,000 (Texas ranked second in nation for “forcible rape”)
14. Number of adult men accused of repeatedly gang raping 11-year-old girl in Texas: 14
15. Quote in the New York Times regarding the rape: “They said she dressed older than her age.”
16. Age of woman raped in Central Park in September, 2012: 73
17. Number of rape kits left untested in Detroit, listed by Forbes as one of two the most dangerous places for woman to live in the US: 11,303
18. U.S. state in which, in September 2012, mentally disabled rape victim was required to provide evidence of her “kicking, biting, scratching” in objection to her rape: Connecticut
19. State seeking to reduce childcare welfare benefits to women cannot provide proof of their pregnancy-causing rapes: Pennsylvannia
20. Percentage of sexual assault and rape victims under the age of 12: 15 percent
21. Percentage of men who have been raped: 3 percent
22. Percentage of rapists who are never incarcerated: 97 perent
23. Percentage of rapes that college students think are false claims: 50 percent
24. Percentage of rapes that studies find are false claims: 2-8 percent
25. Number of rapes reported in the military last year: 16,500
26. Pentagon’s estimated percentage of military assuaults not reported: 80-90 percent
27. Percentage of military rape victims who were gang raped/raped more than once: 14%/20%
28. Percentage of military rape victims that are men: 8-37 percent
29. Percentage of military victims who get an “involuntarily” dischargecompared to percentage of charged and accused who are discharged with honor: 90 percent involuntary to 80 percent with honor
30. Chances an incarcerated person is raped in the U.S.: 1 in 10
31. Increase in chance that LGTB prisoner is raped: 15x greater chance
32. Number of men raped that could be counted as legally raped before the FBI changed its definition in December of 2011: 0
33. Number of rapes noted in commonly used World War II statistics: 0
34. Number of rapes of WWII concentration camp inmates: Untallied millions
35. Number of rapes of German women by Russian soldiers at the end of WWII: between 1m and 2m
36. Number of women raped in 1990s Bosnian conflict: 60,000+
37. Number of women raped per hour in Congo during war: 48
38. Country where 12 year old was forced to participate in the rape of his mother: U.S.
39. Country where women are imprisoned for being raped: Afghanistan
40. Age of Moroccan rape victim who committed suicide after being forced to marry her rapist: 16
41. Worldwide number of “child brides” under the age of 18 forced to marryevery day: 25,000
42. Ages of girls forced to marry a 59-year-old at the Tony Alamo Christian Ministry in Arkansas: 8, 14, 15
43. Estimated number of people, primarily children, sexually abused by priests in the U.S. versus the number of senior Catholic officials found guilty of sexual abuse related crimes in the U.S.: 10,667 to 1
44. Chances that a woman in the U.S. is raped versus gets breast cancer: 2 to 1
45. Chances that a victim is “Emergency Raped” by a stranger versus percentage of victims who consider their rapes emergencies: 7 percent versus 100 percent
46. Percentage of victims of rape who report the use of a weapon: 11 percent
47. Prison sentences for four men found guilty of participating in gang rapes of two teenage girls in France over two years: one year, six months, suspended sentence
48. State where in 2012 a doctor is facing the loss of her medical license for providing an abortion to a pregnant10-year old incest rape victim: Kansas
49. Country where doctors (but not the rapist) were excommunicated for performing a life-saving abortion to nine-year-old incest rape victim: Brazil
50. Country where major party’s vice-presidential candidate wants to criminalize all abortionsincluding rape-related ones, because rape is just “another method of conception“: U.S.

Read the rest of the article at The Huffington Post.

Another excellent article in The Nation: Ending Rape Illiteracy. Yes. This. Now.

Excerpt:

To too many people, “rape” and “rape victim” are not accurate descriptors but political shorthand—the product of an overblown, politically correct interpretation of sex. As Tennessee Senator Douglas Henry said in 2008, “Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse.”

If you’re married, you’ve contractually agreed to be available for sex whether or not you want to. If you’re a woman of color, you must be a liar. If you don’t have as much money as your attacker, you’re just looking for a payday. If you’re in college, you shouldn’t want to ruin your poor young rapist’s life. If you’re a sex worker, it wasn’t rape it was just “theft of services.” If you said yes at first but changed your mind, tough luck. If you’ve had sex before, you must say yes to everyone. If you were drinking you should have known better. If you were wearing a short skirt what did you expect?

The definition of who is a rape victim has been whittled down by racism, misogyny, classism and the pervasive wink-wink-nudge-nudge belief that all women really want to be forced anyway. The assumption is that women are, by default, desirous of sex unless they explicitly state otherwise. And women don’t just have to prove that we said no, but that we screamed it.

Recently the Connecticut State Supreme Court overturned a sexual assault conviction for a man who attacked a woman with severe cerebral palsy. The woman cannot communicate verbally, and according to the court’s documents, has the “intellectual functional equivalent of a 3-year-old.” Still, because of how the state defines rape in cases of physical incapacitation, the court decided that the victim was capable of “biting, kicking, scratching, screeching, groaning or gesturing,” and therefore could have communicated a lack of consent and didn’t. Basically, she didn’t fight back hard enough in order for what happened to her to be considered rape.

This is not just a problem of rhetoric or legalese. The lack of an accepted cultural definition of rape leaves room for mischaracterizations that turn back the clock on progress already made.

Read the rest of the article at The Nation.

~ by omgrey on October 27, 2012.