more horrific things

It is estimated - and quite well, really; I've examined the methodology - that less than 15% of sexual assault cases are even reported to police. Of those, more than two thirds are not recorded by police as sexual crimes - they are either dismissed, reclassified as common assault or the like.

The person I'm talking to at the moment has said that she wouldn't report a rape. She's evidently with about 85% of the population. If we be generous and say she's with only 10% of the population, let's look at how this pans out. That puts her as part of one million women and girls in Australia. The victimisation rate for sexual assault crimes is conservatively 2%. Which means that twenty thousand - 20,000 - sexual assaults go unreported each year. If we say that 1% of sexual assault crimes are rapes - again, a very conservative estimate (when talking about reported crimes; this is where we get fuzzy) - that means that at least 200 women are raped each year in Australia and don't say anything.

You have no idea how much that horrifies me. To give you a clue, I put it up there with the stories my uncle tells about paracetamol overdoses. Specifically, about young mothers who want to stop their babies from crying so give them children's panadol. But it doesn't work, so they give them more. They come to the emergency room eventually, but the baby is now going into multiple organ failure and will die in two days, at best.

See, I can cry any time I want, even without The Notebook.