“You can imagine that if we asked this of women of all ages, the absolute number would be many millions higher'
Photo: gaiamoments/Getty Images An estimated 6.5 percent of American women’s first sexual experience was rape, according to a nationally representative study published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
However, the study’s author, Laura Hawks, a research fellow at Cambridge Health Alliance, told NPR that the number — one in 16 women, or an estimated 3.3 million women nationwide — is likely “just the tip of the iceberg.” The study, which included 13,310 American women ages 18 to 44, looked at data from the National Survey of Family Growth, an annual survey conducted by the CDC, which asks women about their first sexual experience, among other questions.
The study is full of distressing details, including the finding that the average age of the women at the time of their assault was reported as 15. The average age of their partner or assailant was reported as 27 — which, Hawks noted, suggests a “major power discrepancy.” More than 26 percent of women said they were physically threatened during the encounter, and 46 percent said they were physically held down.
The study, one of the first to look on a national level at the prevalence of rape as a woman’s first sexual experience, found that many of the women whose first sexual encounter had been rape later reported painful gynecological or pelvic conditions. These women were also more likely to report a range of health issues, including unwanted first pregnancies, endometriosis, pelvic inflammatory disease, and poor overall health.
“It’s an important wake-up call that this [kind of experience] can be associated with adverse health outcomes relatively early in life,” Alison Huang, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, told NPR. “It poses a lot of questions about what happens to women later in life. It’s very possible that the negative effects of forced sexual initiations may persist or show more in time.
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