Rape & Sexual Assault Statistics

Rape & Sexual Assault Stats - I needed to wrap my head around the numbers, so I built a spreadsheet and googled up a bunch of data. According to the narrow, pre-2011 definition aka "forcible" - only 80-90k per year are actually reported to law enforcement. However, only 23-28% of incidents are reported making the real numbers somewhere in the 300-400k per year range, again, based on the word "forcible". Under the new, wider definition, could the numbers be more like 600-800k, or higher? Real rape/sexual assault stats are difficult to ascertain - and the professional public health/law enforcement/justice statistics world has been struggling with this for some time.

Another quoted stat is that 17.7 million women "as of 1998" have been raped or sexually assaulted. Extrapolating population growth and using an incident rate of 0.268 per 1,000 I come up with 24-25 million "as of 2018". With roughly 164 million women in the U.S. (today) - let's say 150 million over age 12 - that's about 16-17%. Which seems low. Less than 1 in 5 women? I always thought it was more like 2 in 5. 40%?

Also if we take 600k per year (even though the numbers have been dropping over the years) and multiply that times 50 years, that's 30 million which seems accurate. That's 20% - still only 1 in 5.

Horrific. Even if it's really only half or a quarter of what I've come up with.