© FBI
Systematic undercounting of sexual assaults in the US disguises a hidden rape crisis.Earlier this month, a 911 dispatcher in Ohio was
recorded telling a 20-year-old woman who had just been raped to "quit crying." After she provided a description of her assailant, the caller went on to say, "They're not going to be able to find him with the information that you've given." This incident had its viral moment, sparking outrage at the dispatcher's lack of empathy. But it also speaks to the larger issue of how we are counting rapes in the United States. Sixty-nine percent of police departments
surveyed in 2012 said that dispatchers like this one, often with little training, are authorized to do the initial coding of sexual assault crimes.
That's important, because miscoding of such crimes is masking the high incidence of rape in the United States. We don't have an overestimation of rape; we have a gross underestimation. A thorough analysis of federal data
published earlier this year by Corey Rayburn Yung, associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, concludes that between 1995 and 2012, police departments across the country systematically undercounted and underreported sexual assaults.
Yung used murder rates - the statistic with the most reliable measure of accuracy and one that is historically highly correlated with the incidence of rape - as a baseline for his analysis. After nearly two years of work, he estimates conservatively that between 796,213 and 1,145,309 sexual assault cases never made it into national FBI counts during the studied period.
That's more than 1 million rapes.The estimates are conservative for two reasons. First, in order to consistently analyze the data over time, Yung looked only at cases defined by the FBI's
pre-2012 definition of rape (one established in 1927): "carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will." This definition did not include anal or oral rape, cases involving drugging or alcohol, or the rape of boys and men. The Federal Criminal Code was recently
broadened to include these categories. Second, the FBI and crime experts estimate that anywhere from
60 percent to
80 percent of rapes are never reported to the police.
Yung's analysis, which focused on cities with populations of more than 100,000, found that 22 percent of the 210 studied police departments demonstrated "substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data."
"It's probably true that in all cities there is undercounting," explains Yung. "However, forty-six outlier cities appear to be undercounting on a consistent, high level, which makes sense because you have to show [improved crime statistics] results year over year, and you get into a trap where you have to improve upon already low numbers." Even worse, the number of jurisdictions that appear to be undercounting has
increased by 61 percent during the period studied.
How are police departments undercounting sexual assault?
Comment: Once again a cop violently beats what appears to be a defenseless woman and yes it's a white male cop that's beating a black woman!