Rapes, Sexual Assaults Decline But One Professor Suggests Statistics Have Little Meaning

The number of rapes and sexual assaults reported in 1995 fell to the lowest level since 1989, the Justice Department reported Sunday.

In 1995, law enforcement agencies recorded 97,000 rapes, the lowest number since 1989, and the lowest rate per capita since 1985, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in a study titled “Sexual Offenses and Offenders.”

The data also reveals that residents 12 years and older reported one rape or violent sexual assault for every 624 men and women during 1995. This reflects a drop from 1993, when one person was a victim of sexual violence for every 435 residents.

Law enforcement agents made arrests in 34,650 reported cases of forcible rape, or about half of all cases reported.

The study found some common characteristics in offenders, according to Jan M. Chaiken, the director of the bureau.

“The data all point to a sex offender who is older than other violent offenders, generally in his early 30s, and more likely to be white than other violent offenders,” Chaiken wrote in the study’s foreword.

The study also provided a profile of victims. Per-capita rates of rape and sexual assault are the highest against young men and women 16- to 19-years-old, urban residents, and low-income residents.

Forty-four percent of rape victims were younger than 18 years old, and two-thirds of violent sex offenders serving time in state prisons said their victims were younger than 18 years old.

In the cases of victims under 12, 90 percent knew the rapist. Family members were responsible for 43 percent of these assaults.

However, Mary Koss, a professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, said “it may well be true that some types of rape are decreasing” - those in which the victims are in the 16- to 24-year-old age bracket.

“But that would not be a genuine decrease,” she said, because with the aging of the baby boom population, there are fewer people age 16 to 24.

“That doesn’t mean rape is happening less,” Koss said, “just that there are fewer people for it to happen to.”

The study’s data reflected only reported sexual offenses. The study’s authors estimate that two-thirds of victims did not report the crime.