Think for a moment what you've been told or what you understand as to what the chance is of a woman in Los Angeles getting raped some time in her lifetime. Same thing I've heard. The usual claim is that one out of every four American women will be raped during her lifetime. This statement is regularly delivered as a fact in every form of news. Yet these numbers are disputed by most authorities.
Rape statistics vary widely depending on who is doing the research.
We've got a report here by the Bureau of Justice with statistics from the 1989 National Crime Survey. This includes crimes not reported to the police as well as those that are reported. So in other words, this kind of sharpens the point even more and focuses more accurately on how many crimes are actually taking place. This report says when you actually look at all of the cases, even the ones that weren't reported to crime authorities and including attempted rape, the facts are 1 in 12. That's not great.