One of the problems with the debate over sexual assault and violence against women in the US is that there isn’t reliable data on exactly how often it happens — because many sexual assault victims don’t go to the police. In fact, the federal government estimates that almost two thirds of rape and sexual assault victims don’t report it to law enforcement.
Two-thirds of sexual assault victims don’t go to the police
Hover over the chart to zoom:
How does the government figure out how many crimes aren’t reported?
The federal government has two major ways of measuring crime. One is via the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, which comes from the perspective of police. The report collects data from local law enforcement agencies about how many crimes were reported to them each year — then extrapolates from there to estimate how many crimes happened in total. (To learn more about how the Uniform Crime Report works, check out Vox’s article on police killing statistics.)
The other method is the National Crime Victimization Survey, which comes from the perspective of victims. Federal researchers call about 90,000 households each year and ask if anyone in the household has been the victim of a crime. Then, when they ask follow-up questions of the victims, researchers ask the victim if he or she reported the crime to the police.
The chart above is based on the victim-based method. So, for example, among everyone who told the BJS researchers that their car was stolen in a given year, roughly 80 percent of them said they went to the police about it. But on average, from 1994 to 2013, of everyone who told the BJS researchers they’d been raped or sexually assaulted, only about 35 percent said that they had reported it to police.
In other words, it’s not just that only a fraction of sexual-assault victims go to the police. It’s that sexual-assault victims are much less likely to go to the police than victims of other serious crimes — particularly other serious violent crimes, like robbery and aggravated assault.
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