Controversial same-sex case

[Valmy]

Does sexual assault include grabbing a girl's ass?

I think grabbing somebody is technically assault, so I think so.  But this is one of those gray areas.

How is that a "gray area"?

Because generally when people talk about locking people up for life for being a perverse monster, they generally think of a more serious offense than a groping.  Not that groping shouldn't be a crime mind you.

[derspiess]

Does sexual assault include grabbing a girl's ass?

I think grabbing somebody is technically assault, so I think so.  But this is one of those gray areas.

How is that a "gray area"?

Because it could inflate the statistics and make them sound a lot worse than they are.

[11B4V]

Does sexual assault include grabbing a girl's ass?

I think grabbing somebody is technically assault, so I think so.  But this is one of those gray areas.

How is that a "gray area"?

Because it could inflate the statistics and make them sound a lot worse than they are.

Depends on whether they liked it.

[11B4V]

[OttoVonBismarck]

Maybe but that would be pretty mind blowing to me and I spent years working with sexual abuse victims.

That would mean that reported rates of rape/sexual assault/abuse are being under-reported (not arrested or convicted or anything just reported) by at least a factor of 5. Am I to accept that instead of 1 in 6 women being raped or sexually assaulted during her lifetime the actual number is well over 70%?  Or that, for some reason, these women are reporting they are being raped or sexually assaulted but under-reporting the number of occurances?  That a significant percentage of American men are committing rape on at least an annual basis?

Well, the number Meri threw out in the 30%-35% range is what I've heard from survey based examinations of the issue, if the official percentage is 1 in 6 that shows a substantial underreporting.

Plus, a lot of the under reported rapes will by their nature be part of a long series. How many close male relatives that rape children do it once? I'd wager very few, most groom the kid and rape them for years and years and years, that's hundreds and hundreds of unreported rapes, but also barely moves the needle if you're talking "percentage of people raped" since it is one victim being raped continuously and not multiple victims being raped.

Our rape occurrence isn't particularly super high, it's higher than some Western countries but lower than others. Only about 35 countries have even remotely reliable rape statistics. Countries like Sudan and South Africa there aren't really any solid statistics like there are here but the incidence is presumed to be "very, very high." This gives an idea, yes of the reported countries the U.S. is in the top 10, but a lot of countries have very low incidence where we can pretty much assume that is false (basically any African hell hole country), and then some countries have no statistics at all, note Venezuela which regularly leads the world in murder rate isn't represented on those tables but most likely would land high on the chart.