What Is Sexual Assault?  

Who Is Impacted  

What is most concerning about these trends, and the lack of attention to this crime, is that most rape victims are younger than 18. The typical victim is a teenage girl who has been raped in a home by someone she already knew.¹  

Boys and girls of any age can be victims of sexual abuse. It is estimated that one in three girls and one in six boys are sexually abused². The myth that men and boys cannot be victims of sexual assault is untrue.   

In Dallas, Texas , police received 46 reports of male rape in 1989, 20 times higher than they did in 1984. Rapists who rape men are thought to be homosexual, but this is a myth; most rapists are heterosexual and have a willing sex partner at home.  

• Approximately 683,000 women are forcibly raped each year.³  
• It is estimated that 92,700 males are forcibly raped each year.⁴  
• The most common victims of rape are females under 18 years of age.⁵  
• In the today, 1.8 million teens have already been the victims of serious sexual assault.⁶ 
• Approximately one-third of all juvenile victims of sexual abuse cases are children younger than six years of age.⁷  
• Thirty-nine percent of girls report being sexually harassed at school on a daily basis.⁸ 
• Eighty-two percent of women report that they fear rape and/or death more than anything else.⁹ 

Sources

1. Department of Health and Human Services. (1995). Administration for children and families, Child Maltreatment. Washington, DC . 

2. Department of Health and Human Services. (1993). Child sexual abuse: Intervention and treatment issues. McLean, VA : Faller, K.C.  

3. National Center for Victims of Crime and Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center . (1992) Rape in : A report to the nation. Arlington, VA : Kilpatrick, D.G., Edmunds, C.N. & Seymour A.  

4. Department of Justice. (1998). Prevalence, incident, and consequences of violence against women: Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey. Washington, DC : Tjaden, P. and Thoennes, N.   

5. American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on Adolescence. (1994). Sexual assault and the adolescent. Pediatrics. 94(5), 761-765.   

6. Department of Justice. (1997). The prevalence and consequences of child victimization: Summary of a research study by Dean Kilpatrick, Ph.D. and Benjamin Sauder, Ph.D. Washington, DC: Kilpatrick & Saunders.   

7. Department of Health and Human Services. (1995).  

8. Stein, N., Marshall, N.L.& Tropp, L.R. (1993). Secrets in public: Sexual harassment in our schools. Massachusetts: Wellesley College Center for Research on Women.  

9. Randall, M. and Haskell, L. (1995). Sexual violence in women's lives: Findings from the Women's Safety Project, a community-based survey. Violence Against Women, 1(1), 6-31.