What We Know About Sexual Assault Victims in America

In 2017, dozens of women, as well as several men, made claims of sexual misconduct against powerful men in Hollywood, the media, the tech industry, and government. But sexual assault is a pervasive phenomenon, and these high-profile revelations barely scratched the surface. The National Crime Victimization Survey, released last month, estimates that people in the U.S. experienced over 320,000 incidents of rape and sexual assault in 2016.1 That works out to 1.2 such assaults per 1,000 people age 12 or older.