From all appearances, it’s been a grisly week to be a woman.

After the Santa Barbara shootings by yet another homegrown terrorist, we were able to contemplate the misogynistic thinking of the 22-year-old killer. A young man described his outrage that women did not find him attractive and devised a mass shooting to exact his revenge.

As a baby boomer, I tend to view the millennial generation as a fascinating, but perplexing foreign culture, and so I found it easy to see in this crime a confirmation of the coarseness and violence of the popular American society that surrounds that generation. Song lyrics, the sadistic sexism of Internet trolls, and the veiled hostility of rape-related humor all seem to contribute to a more dangerous reality for contemporary young women.

Then I noticed an intriguing shift. Last week, these women responded with outrage. Twitter exploded with 140-character descriptions of the sexist stereotypes and threats of violence they endure. By Thursday evening, they’d posted more than 2 million tweets.

“ ‘I have a boyfriend’ is the easiest way to get a man to leave you alone,” one woman tweeted. “Because he respects another man more than you.”

“I shouldn’t have to hold my car keys in hand like a weapon & check over my shoulder every few seconds when I walk at night,” tweeted another.

“The cops who asked me ‘Well, what were you wearing?’ when I reported an attack and attempted rape,” tweeted a third.

Author Joyce Carol Oates alluded to male backlash against the hashtag: “Why does the suggestion that half the human race be treated with respect by the other half arouse such fury in the latter half?”

The energy, I gathered, rivaled that of the 1960s-era feminist consciousness-raising sessions I was too young to attend.

The tales were chillingly familiar, yet startlingly normal: If you’re ever attacked, yell “fire,” not “rape,” because people will actually pay attention, several tweeters noted. We wring our hands more over the future of a convicted campus rapist than we do the fate of his victim. When women go off to college, they buy pepper spray; men buy condoms, wrote others.

I thought back to my young adulthood, to the stories women my age have told me about the sexual assaults they endured. How is it that I’ve heard, both socially and in interviews as a journalist, of so many women of my generation who were traumatized by rape? Why did that crime seem more prevalent somehow for my generation than for this latest, and seemingly more vulnerable, one?

My generation grew up listening to the Beatles sing “I want to hold your hand.” We weren’t assaulted by Eminem’s lyrics: “Snatch the bitch out her car through the window, she screamin’ …” We lived in a time that polished a veneer of civility over life’s darker realities.

And yet.

Everyone from the U.S. Justice Bureau to leading advocates against rape and sexual assault agree: The incidence of this crime has been declining for at least the last 20 years.

Rapes and sexual assaults are a maddeningly difficult set of statistics to pin down. Women and men both are hesitant to report this most intimate of crimes, points out Erin Williams Hueter, director of victim advocacy and prevention for the Sexual Assault and Family Trauma Response Center at Lutheran Community Services Northwest. Juries hate to convict anyone of it, and criminal justice experts haven’t even been able, until recently, to fully define it.

The estimated annual rate of rape or sexual assault against females in the United States declined by 64 percent between 1995 and 2010, according numbers compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. The rate dropped from 5 to 1.8 per 1,000 females ages 12 or older.

A preliminary FBI study for the first six months of 2013 showed violent crime numbers dropping compared to the same period a year before, with the exception of rape. The increase in that category simply appears to be linked to a broadened definition of rape and sexual assault. That’s a good thing.

With overall rates of violent crime continuing a long decline, a U.S. president who tells college-aged victims “I’ve got your back,” and millions of young women willing to speak out, or at least tweet, I see hope.