Rapes Vastly Undercounted, Study Concludes

Far more women--an estimated 1,871 each day--are raped in the United States than official crime statistics indicate, according to a report released Thursday by a rape victims rights group.

Nevertheless, only about 16% of victims report the crime, although half of all the victims surveyed said they would be more likely to go to police if the news media were prohibited by law from using their names.

The report, by the National Victim Center, also estimated that 1.3 women become rape victims every minute, a total of 683,000 victims each year--more than three times the 207,610 rapes reported this week by the Justice Department for 1991.

One in eight adult women now living in the United States has been raped at least once during her lifetime, bringing the number of current victims to about 12.1 million, the center projected.

“I don’t think this is a high number,” said Cassandra Thomas, president of the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault, a coordinating center for rape crisis programs. “It falls in line with what we see in crisis centers across the country.”

Justice Department officials, while questioning some of the study’s methodology, acknowledged that rape is a dramatically underreported crime.

“We’ve always admitted that our estimates of rape are undercounted,” said Mike Rand, a survey statistician with the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. “Measuring rape is problematic and (the study) uses some questions that in a general crime survey we cannot ask. They were a lot more specific than we could ever be.”

The report, billed as the most comprehensive report on rape of its kind, is the result of two studies. The first was a three-year survey that began in 1990 in which female researchers interviewed more than 4,008 women by telephone nationwide, including 507 rape victims in the initial phase of the survey. The subjects were tracked throughout the study to record the physical and psychological effects of rape.

The second survey, conducted in 1992 by the Crime Victims Research Center at the Medical University of South Carolina, evaluated the findings of 370 rape crisis centers.

The surveys defined forcible rape as the lack of consent, a threat or use of force and sexual penetration. In trying to determine whether a woman had been a victim, interviewers told her that a rapist or “person making the advances isn’t always a stranger, but can be a friend, boyfriend or even a family member.”

Women also were given graphic descriptions of sexual assault and the types of coercion used to intimidate victims. A woman being interviewed had only to answer yes or no in the event the rapist was a family member who was present during the interview and might inhibit more detailed responses.

Victim Center co-founder Anne Seymour--who is being honored by President Bush today for her work on behalf of victims--said it is highly unlikely that a rape victim will volunteer such detailed information in a face-to-face interview with a government worker.

Although the Justice Department bases its findings on interviews with 95,000 people each year--a much larger sampling than the National Victim Center--it uses on-site interviews that require a woman to describe the physical details of a violent crime in which she was a victim.

In the wake of two highly public rape trials--in which William Kennedy Smith, the nephew of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), was acquitted, and professional boxer Mike Tyson was convicted--crisis centers reported a renewed reluctance on the part of victims to report rape to police and to endure the public exposure of a trial and news coverage, according to the study.

The Victim Center, which since 1985 has promoted the rights of victims of violent crimes, advocates changing state laws to remove victims’ names from public records and to penalize the media for publishing them.

More than 91% of rape victims favored such a “privacy law,” the report said.

Times policy is not to use the names of rape victims. “The Los Angeles Times will continue its regular policy of keeping a rape victim’s name private unless the victim chooses to go public,” Times Editor Shelby Coffey III said Thursday.

Among other significant findings of the report:

--29% of victims identified a friend or neighbor as the rapist, and 22% said the assailant was a stranger. The remainder were identified as boyfriends, former boyfriends or relatives. Only one-third of the victims said they suffered physical injuries, although the threat of violence was used.

--Compared to women who have never been assaulted, rape victims are 13 times more likely to have alcohol problems and 26 times more likely to have major drug abuse problems.

--29% of all forcible rapes occurred when the victim was under 11 years old. This finding was gleaned from in-depth interviews with adult women who acknowledged that they had been raped as children.

Rape Victim Disclosure Law

The study asked rape victims about the impact of disclosure laws: The question: If there were a law prohibiting the news media from disclosing your name and address, would you be: A lot more likely to report: 50% Somewhat more likely to report: 16% Makes no difference: 28% Less likely to report: 6% Source: Crime Victims Research and Victims Center, National Victim Center. Margin of error is plus or minus 5.1 points.