Read Handbook on Sexual Violence Online

Authors: Jennifer Sandra.,Brown Walklate

Handbook on Sexual Violence (6 page)

Walby, Armstrong and Strid discuss at length in Chapter
4 the meaning and implications of measuring sexual violence. In England and Wales the British Crime Survey measures self-reported victimisation across a range of different crime types on an annual basis. Rape is part of a special self-completion module on intimate violence. Myhill and Allen (2002) calculated prevalence for sexual victimisation and estimated 0.4 per cent for rape and 0.9 per cent for sexual assault, i.e. one in 250 for rape. More recent data from the 2007/08 British Crime Survey (Povey
et al
. 2009) showed that nearly one in four women (23.3 per cent) and one in 33 men (3 per cent) had experienced some form of sexual assault (including attempts) since the age of 16. For rape (including attempts) the prevalence was nearly one in 20 women (4.6 per cent) and one in 200 men (0.5 per cent) since the age of 16. Rand (2007) calculated a sexual victimisation rate for rape and sexual assault in the United States as one per 1,000 persons in the United States. Worldwide estimates suggest one in three women have experienced rape or sexual assault, and in some countries up to a third of adolescent girls reported forced sexual initiation (George Mason University Sexual Assault Services 2005).

Notwithstanding the scale of sexual violence, there is still evidence of the public holding victim-blaming attitudes. For example, a Home Office survey reported that a large proportion of respondents thought a woman was at least partially responsible for being raped or sexually assaulted, especially if alcohol or drugs were implicated (Home Office 2009). All the evidence points to the continued presence of sexual violence within a society which retains beliefs in victims’ culpability in their own victimisation. These issues are looked at in some detail in the first
section of the Handbook.

Policy changes

Despite the many enquiries and recommendations (the latest in the UK is Baroness Stern’s report) there has been a failure of implementation and a preservation of what has been termed ‘the justice gap’ (Temkin and Krahe´ 2008) whereby many complaints of sexual violence are dropped out of the criminal justice process.

In an overview of the impact of legislative and policy changes within England and Wales, Brown
et al
. (2010) concluded:

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