On the flip side of my last article, Melanie Philllips of England's Daily Mail comments:

According to [recent UK reports], no fewer than one in every 20 women aged between 16 and 59 in England and Wales has been raped, and one in ten has experienced some form of 'sexual victimisation'...

The devil here is in the definition. To most people, rape means sexual penetration against the victim's consent, which implies of necessity an act of violence or the threat of violence... the definition of "forced against your will" is highly subjective. It can so easily translate into "if you didn't want to", which can become meaningless. Although the study claims the word 'forced' implies an assault, it does nothing of the kind... A woman might feel forced to have sex against her will, for example, if her lover tells her that otherwise he will leave here for another woman. Or she might be an unwilling participant because he is drunk, or hasn't had a bath for a week, or she doesn't love him.

The crucial point is that in such circumstances she is participating in sex even though she could choose not to do so. She is therefore not the victim of violence. By any fair-minded or common-sense definition, this is not rape...

[B]elieve it or not, the 'raped' women in the survey themselves don't think what has happened to them is rape. The study actually admits that, of the women who the researchers said had been raped, fewer than two thirds themselves described what had happened to them as rape. And fewer than three quarters of those who the researchers said had experienced sexual victimisation thought of this as a crime...

The ideological bias that is clearly driving this research is underlined by a crucial omission. The study says that most sexual violence is committed by partners. But -- highly significantly -- it omits to make a distinction between partners and spouses. It therefore does not tell us whether women suffer as much sexual assault from husbands as from boyfriends or cohabitants.

Yet all the available research suggests that the risk of sexual violence is negligible within marriage, and is hugely increased among cohabitants or more casual sexual partners. Marriage is actually the best physical protection against sexual violence.

I suspect we do things a bit more accurately here in the U.S. At least I hope so.

UPDATE: This post attracts a lot of people looking for rape statistics. Folks, I'm just another semi-pundit with a web page: I have no special statistical powers: you can use the search engines just like I can. That said, (a) check with your local library, and (b) I've heard that Interpol can be useful for that kind of information. However, keep in mind that policing methods vary from country to country: there are different criteria for reporting crimes, so you can't always make a country-to-country comparison. For example, consider the distortions in the method used above! A survey taken a different way would yield very different results. In South Africa, you have to ask to have your 'crime' included in the stats for it to show up. In the UK, for quite a while, they only reported stats for solved crimes. You might consider switching your report topic. (Oh, it's due tomorrow and you've waited too long? Esh, I used to do the same thing. Procrastination doesn't pay.) Regardless, good luck!