"More than 3 million women experienced rape as their first sexual encounter, according to a new study, which surveyed women ages 18 to 44 in the U.S. The study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that most respondents were adolescents when they were raped. It also found that these women were more likely to suffer worse long-term health outcomes than women who had sex voluntarily the first time.
'It's quite alarming, and that's just the tip of the iceberg because this study is only including women aged 18 to 44,' says Dr. Laura Hawks, the main author of the new study and a research fellow at the Cambridge Health Alliance, a health care provider in Cambridge, Mass. 'You can imagine that if we asked this of women of all ages, the absolutely number would be many millions higher.'
Another reason this might be an underestimate, she adds, is that the data used in the study was collected before the #MeToo movement, which has led to more open conversations around sexual violence. 'More women may feel more comfortable identifying their experiences of sexual violence today than they did just a few years ago,' she says.
Hawks and her team looked at data from an annual survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called the National Survey of Family Growth, that asks women ages 18 to 44 about their first sexual experience, whether it was voluntary and their age when they first had sex, among other questions. This is one of the few studies to look at the prevalence of rape as one's first sexual experience at the national level in the United States."
