The Sexual Violence Epidemic: It's Here and Everywhere

This fall’s spate of sexual assaults in South Brooklyn accomplished one thing: They alerted the neighborhood to how prevalent an occurrence this is. Nonetheless, the findings from the Centers for Disease Control's study on rape and domestic violence probably stunned everyone. A piece in the New York Times examines the statistics:

“Nearly one in five women surveyed said they had been raped or had experienced an attempted rape at some point, and one in four reported having been beaten by an intimate partner. One in six women have been stalked….

Linda C. Degutis, director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducted the study, said “I don’t think we’ve really known that it was this prevalent in the population.”

The data collected covered “sexual violence other than rape, psychological aggression, coercion and control of reproductive and sexual health…types of aggression not previously studied in national surveys." The study says 40% had been raped by an acquaintance, 50% by an intimate partner. In a Jane Brody column in the NY Times last week, she notes, "Among female victims, nearly three-quarters are assaulted by men they know—friends, acquaintances or intimate partners, according to federal statistics."

This is an epidemic in which women are the main victims. We lack an avenging feminist angel: a Lisbeth Salander, or a Dr. Erin Mears, the Centers for Disease Control scientist, played by Kate Winslet in Contagion, to give her life to protect them.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Brody, the NY Times Health columnist, says there are long-lasting health consequences from sexual assaults: among them depression, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders.


She says many incidents of “improper touching” are not reported because "not only do [the victims] suffer from the effects of the attack, but they are fearful—often with cause—of reporting it to the police," where they face a double jeopardy:

Women who bring charges of sexual assault are victims twice over, treated by the legal system and sometimes by the news media as lying until proved truthful.....

"There is no other crime I can think of where the victim is more victimized,” said Rebecca Campbell, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University who for 20 years has been studying what happens legally and medically to women who are raped. “The victim is always on trial. Rape is treated very differently than other felonies.”

These findings also came as a surprise to the 66th Precinct’s Captain Mathew Harrington. In questioning him at the precinct community council meeting last Thursday, he described two misdemeanor sex crimes listed on the precinct’s 12/4 comp stat figures above (#48).

Captain Harrington said on December 3 a man was arrested for groping a woman at New Utrecht and 55th Ave. The other incident happened between acquaintances, the “improper touch” of a child by an adult.

Then on Sunday, December 11 at 2am, there was a rape, this time of a 15-year old girl on East 2nd Street. Whether she knew her attacker or not, the NYPD spokeswoman at its Office of Public Information, is not allowed to say to protect the victim’s privacy (see CompStat #49, covering 12/5–12/11 above).

This week in her follow-up column for the NY Times, Jane Brody recommends what someone should do to preserve the evidence and be able to report the sex crime to the police later, should the victim opt to do so.