Combat is not the only way in which post traumatic stress disorder can be contracted. Witnessing a natural disaster, being raped, and seeing family or friends murdered or severely harmed are just some of the other emotional disasters that some people must live through.

Rape

Statistics

In 2003, there were 198,850 people who were rape victims or victims of attempted rape or sexual assault. During these crimes, 81,000 of the victims were actually raped while 61,060 were victims of attempted rape. Sixty percent of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported to police. Increased awareness and tougher law enforcement has led to a decline of rape and sexual assault by approximately sixty-five percent since 1993. In America, a person is raped every two and a half minutes. Due to rape, approximately 4,065 unplanned pregnancies occurred in 2003.

Rape vs. Sexual Assault

Rape involves the use of physical or emotional force in order to produce unwanted sexual intercourse. Sexual assault is very similar to rape, but generally is limited to using force in order to produce unwanted sexual contact but not necessarily intercourse.

The Victims

According to the National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control, one in every six American women are victims of a rape or attempted rape. Men are not immune to rape as 2.78 million men have been victims of rape while in the year 2003, one in every ten rape victims was male. Race seems to play a role in rape as eighty percent of all rape victims are white, while minorities are at higher risk of being assaulted. Younger people are oftentimes at greater risk of being raped. Fifteen percent of rape victims are under age twelve, twenty-nine percent are between the ages of twelve and seventeen, forty-four percent are under eighteen, and eighty percent of victims are under thirty. Ninety-three percent of sexual assault victims who were minors knew their attacker. In 1995, approximately 126,000 children were victimized sexually. Of these 126,000 children, seventy-five percent were female and almost thirty percent of the children victimized were between four and seven years old. It is clear that no one is completely safe from rape and the victims of these horrible crimes are very susceptible to the effects of post traumatic stress disorder.

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