Mental health articles

Bureau of Justice Statistics on Child Rape
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) uses two sources to report annual rape data. The Uniform Crimes Report (UCR) includes incidents of sexual assault reported to law enforcement agencies, whereas the National Crime Victimization Survey
(NCVS) includes incidents gathered in interviews of randomly selected individuals
aged 12 and older. The latter survey contains both reported and unreported cases.
Neither the UCR nor the NCVS consistently provides comprehensive data on all cases of child rape or sexual assault.
Because reporting techniques among states have recently become more
sophisticated, some UCR statistics concerning the proportion of child rape to adult rape are now available. In the 1992 UCR (Bureau of Justice, 1994), 12 states, representing approximately 20% of the national total of rapes for that year, reported age breakdowns for rape victims. Of all rapes reported to law enforcement agencies
for these 12 states, 16% of the victims were under the age of 12, at least 24% were under the age of 15, and 51% were under the age of 18.2 In 1992, the incidence of
committed rapes was .84/1,000 females. If 51% of all reported rapes occur to victims under the age of 18, the estimated rape incidence rate of child rape in 1992 was .43/1,000. These rates, however, are considered extreme underestimates of the actual number of rape incidents (Russell & Bolen, 2000).