How many rapes in the USA? Safety-from-Violence™ Lecture Series

• 1.5M rapes of adult women every year

• 710,000 attempted or completed rapes of college students every year

While we support and admire organizations such as the FBI, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and RAIN, they have been publishing the wrong numbers for decades.  And this has led everyone of us, every politician, and every police chief to underestimate the amount of violence, especially against women and college students.

For example, the FBI tells us there are about 115,000 rapes per year.  Their information is based on nationwide police department reports of reported crimes.  So, in a way, their number is accurate, it is a summary of all reported rapes.  The problem is this, everyone who studies this and including just about every FBI agent and police officer, knows that 90-95% of rape victims do not report.  So if they have 115,000 reported rapes, then the real number is closer to 1.15M or 2.3M depending on whether you think it's 90% or 95% underreported.  

In 2010 Strider SFV Lab did a preliminary study in search of the real number.  We estimated 1.5M rapes of women on an annual basis.  But we lacked the PhD.'s, the resources and frankly the money to do a large study.  However, the CDC, and some true hero PhD's, did a major study that included interviewing 5,758 women and they asked the most important question, "Were you raped in the last 12 months?"  Based on this, they estimated 1.5M women are raped on an annual basis.  Read their reports here: 2010, 2010-2012, 2015.

Both the Bureau of Justice Statistics and RAIN publish similarly incorrect numbers.  We talked to both of them and tried to point this out.  The typical answer, including from PhD's, was, "we realize this could be better..." or "we're working on it". 

Strider believes that the next 1.5M victim-heroes do not have time for our nation's experts to get this right.  Over the next 10 years, we're talking about 15M women.  This is a national crisis and yet it's rarely written about or discussed. Why?  Because our experts have convinced everyone it's a much smaller problem.  Our subsequent research into solutions showed it's even worse; there is no national plan to address this, not in Congress, not at the White House, not at the FBI. 

We invite anyone in a position to make local or national policy to sit down and discuss this with us. We have solutions, but first, we need to get the numbers right so everyone sees how bad this problem is.  

In the meantime, learn how to keep yourself and those you love safe, because the bad guys are winning this one.