Because of this ambivalence over reporting rape, authorities may never know the exact number of rapes in the United States. One study estimates that between 15 and 25 percent of women in the United States have been or will be victims of rape during their lifetimes. These figures may or may not represent the actual number of rapes taking place in this country, but they are nonetheless alarming.
Six basic types of rape exist: outsider rape, gang rape, acquaintance rape, date rape, marital rape, and statutory rape. Many people mistakenly believe outsider rape (or stranger rape), which is an attack from someone entirely unknown to the victim, is the most common type of rape, probably because it is the one victims usually bring to the attention of authorities. Outsider rape is frequently the most violent rape of all. Victims frequently suffer severe and even fatal injury, often through the use of knives, guns, and other weapons. In many cases, perpetrators of outsider rape pick their victims carefully, and plan the best times and places for the assault. Gang rape occurs when two or more perpetrators—either strangers or acquaintances—commit rape on the same individual.
The perpetrator of acquaintance rape is someone the victim knows. Studies have found acquaintance rape to occur more frequently than any other kind. As many as 95 percent of college female victims may know their attackers. A specific type of acquaintance rape is date rape, in which the perpetrator is a dating partner. Date rape can occur at any time during courtship, from the first date to long after a stable relationship has formed. It often happens when one or both individuals have been drinking alcohol or taking drugs, and when one individual takes “no” to sexual pressure from the other to mean “yes” or “maybe.”
Some states still do not recognize marital rape unless it occurs between separated marital partners or results in serious injury. One research study found that as many as 14 percent of married women report having been raped by their husbands. Although abuse and cruelty are frequent during marital rape, prosecutions are rare.
Marital rape is one aspect of a larger problem— spouse abuse. One estimate claims that nearly one million women in the United States each year seek medical treatment for injuries sustained during beatings by their husbands.
Rape is not exclusively a crime committed against women. Men, too, are raped, generally by heterosexual men, but also occasionally by women. Extremely common in prison settings, male rape by other males is rarely reported or prosecuted in regular society. Male rape is usually a display of power and dominance over others, such as occurs among prison inmates.
Child abuse
Child abuse is the intentional inflicting of pain, injury, and harm onto a child. Child abuse also includes emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse, including humiliation, embarrassment, rejection, coldness, lack of attention, neglect, isolation, and terrorization.
Adults who were physically and emotionally abused as children frequently suffer from deep feelings of anxiety, shame, guilt, and betrayal. If the experience was especially traumatic and emotionally painful (as it often is), victims may repress memories of the abuse and suffer deep, unexplainable depression as adults. Child abuse almost always interferes with later relationships. Researchers have also noted a wide range of emotional dysfunction both during, soon after, and long after physical abuse, including anxiety attacks, suicidal tendencies, angry outbursts, withdrawal, fear, and depression. Another decidedly negative effect of child abuse, a strong intergenerational pattern, is also worth noting. In other words, many abusers were themselves victims of abuse as children.
In spite of the range and intensity of the after‐effects of child abuse, many victims manage to accept the abuse as a regrettable event, but one that they can also leave behind.
One emotionally damaging form of child abuse is child sexual abuse. Also known as child molestation, child sexual abuse occurs when a teenager or adult entices or forces a child to participate in sexual activity. This activity constitutes perhaps the worst means of exploiting children imaginable. Ranging from simple touching to bodily penetration, child sexual abuse is culturally forbidden in most parts of the world, and is illegal everywhere in the United States. Experts estimate that as many as 25 percent of children in the United States undergo sexual abuse each year. Adults who are sexually attracted to children are known as pedophiles.
Every state in the country also has laws against a specific type of child abuse known as incest, which is sexual activity between closely related persons of any age. Child sexual abuse is incest when the abuser is a relative, whether or not the relative is blood‐related, which explains why stepparents can be arrested for incest when molesting their stepchildren. Not all states have laws forbidding sexual activity among first cousins.
Contrary to popular misconception, incest occurs less frequently than abuse from a person outside the family, such as a family friend, teacher, minister, youth director, or scoutmaster. The perpetrators of incest are typically men; their victims, typically girls in their middle childhood years.
Sexual harassment
Reported more frequently today than ever before, sexual harassment is legally defined as unwanted sexual advances, suggestions, comments, or gestures—usually ongoing in nature and involving a supervisor‐supervisee relationship (that is, a situation involving unequal power). Sexual harassment takes many forms, such as:
- Verbal harassment or abuse.
- Sexist remarks about a person's body, clothing, or sexual activities.
- Unwanted touching, pinching, or patting.
- Leering or ogling at a person's body.
- Subtle or overt pressure for sexual activity.
- Demanding sexual favors accompanied by implied or overt threats concerning one's job or student status.
- Constant brushing against a person's body.
- Physical assault.
Women are most often the objects of sexual harassment, especially in the workplace. One review of the literature found that 42 percent of women reported having experienced some form of sexual harassment at work, compared to 15 percent of men. The practice is so pervasive in work sites throughout the United States that many women have come to expect it, and the vast majority (over 95 percent) never file a formal complaint. Others simply find another job.
Sexual harassment is not confined to the workplace. For example:
- College students may come under sexual pressure from their instructors, with grades, graduation, and letters of recommendation used as threats or bribes. One survey of university undergraduates found that 29 percent of women and 20 percent of men reported having experienced some form of sexual harassment from instructors.
- Patients of physicians and psychologists may also become the object of unwanted sexual attention from their providers.
- Lawyers may coerce clients into sex in exchange for legal services.
- Even pastors may convince parishioners that sex with the clergy is a viable road to finding spirituality and true peace of mind.
Apparently, no profession, institution, or individual is immune from sexual harassment, as situations of unequal power can exist anywhere. Fortunately, most companies and universities now have policies and reporting structures in place to deal with complaints of sexual harassment, and some states have passed laws prohibiting sexual activity, for example, between therapists and their clients.
The effects of sexual harassment can be numerous and long‐lasting. With good jobs at a premium, the possible financial effects of resisting sexual harassment on the job—demotions, pay reductions, and even termination—can be devastating. The psychological effects of sexual pressure on the job, at school, in the doctor's office, or wherever—anxiety, fear, depression, repressed anger, and humiliation—can be equally devastating. Guilt and shame are also common because victims of sexual harassment, similar to victims of rape, may somehow feel responsible. They fear that their dress and/or mannerisms may be bringing on the unwelcome sexual attention.