According to a study cited by Gary F. Kelly (2011), 9% of female<unk>  victims were<unk> d by their spouse. The prevalence of<unk>  is difficult to assess, especially outside the Western World. Discussing sexual matters in many cultures is taboo. One problem with studies on<unk>  is that the Western concept of consent is not understood in many parts of the world. Because many societies operate on social norms which create a dual system of sexual morality—one for sexual intercourse that is<unk>  which is seen as an obligation that cannot be refused, and extra-marital, which is seen as wrong (or illicit/illegal). Issues of consent are poorly understood, especially by young wives (which are often young girls who do not have a proper understanding of sexual rights). For instance in an interview in a study for the World Health Organization, a woman from Bangladesh who described being hit by her husband and forced to have sex said that: "I thought this is only natural. This is the way a husband behaves." Research has, nevertheless, associated specific regions with a very high level of violence, including sexual violence, against women by husbands/partners. An example of such a place is Ethiopia. The prevalence of<unk>  depends on the particularly legal, national, and cultural context. In 1999, the World Health Organization conducted a study on violence against women in Tajikistan, surveying 900 women above the age of 14 in three districts of the country and found that 47% of married women reported having been forced to have sex by their husband. In Turkey 35.6% of women have experienced<unk>  sometimes and 16.3% often. The earliest study in the Western World attempting to survey<unk>  was an unpublished study by Joan Seites in the spring of 1975. Seites sent questionnaires to 40<unk> -crisis centers from a list compiled by the Center for Women Policy Studies (Washington, DC). 16 Centers completed questionnaire for a response rate of 40%. Of the 3,709 reported calls dealing with<unk>  and attempted<unk>  received by the 16 centers, 12 calls dealt with<unk>  (0.3%). Because<unk> -crisis centers did not always record the relationships of the callers, whether the 12 reported calls fully represent the number of married relationships cannot be certainly known. In 1982 Diana E. H. Russell, a feminist writer and activist, conducted the seminal study on<unk> . Her study surveyed a total of 930 women from San Francisco, California (50% non-response rate, non-English speaking Asian women were specifically excluded as non-reliable respondents), of whom 644 were married, divorced, or who self-identified as having a husband although not married. Six of these women (1%) self-assessed that they had been<unk> d by their husbands, ex-husband, or de facto husbands. The survey interviewers, however, classified 74 (12%) of these women as having been<unk> d. Of the 286 non-married women in the sample, 228 (80%) were classified by the survey interviewers as having been<unk> d. Russell found that when repeated instances of<unk>  as classified by the survey interviewers, by husbands or ex-husbands, over the entire course of the marriage are included, these account for 38% of all<unk>  instances, in comparison to the remaining 62% occurring in non-marital instances. David Finkelhor and Kersti Yllo published a study in 1985 on<unk>  that drew on a scientifically-selected area probability sample from the metropolitan Boston area of 323 women who were either married or previously married who had a child living with them between the ages of six and fourteen. The study found that of the women who were married the instance of sexual relations through physical force or the threat thereof was 3%. In 1994, Patricia Easteal, then Senior Criminologist at the Australian Institute of Criminology, published the results of survey on sexual assault in many settings. The respondents had all been victims of numerous forms of sexual assault. Of the victim sub-sample, 10.4% had been<unk> d by husbands or de facto husbands, with a further 2.3%<unk> d by estranged husbands/de factos. In 2002 Basile published research intended to address the lack of a nationally probability sample to-date that measured intimate sexual coercion faced by married women. Data were collected in a 1997 national poll by a random telephone survey of 1,108 residents in the continental U.S. of persons 18 years old or older. The survey had a 50% response rate. Of the 1,108 respondents, the 506 men were excluded from any inquiry into unwanted sexual experiences, leaving 602 (54%) women respondents for the study. 398 (66%) women indicated no unwanted sexual relations (their<unk>  status is not given), and 204 (34%) women responded as having engaged in unwanted sex after being subject to some level of sexual coercion; types of sexual coercion included receiving ‘a gift’, ‘ a nice dinner’, ‘a back rub’, ‘kissing’, etc. through threatened harm and physical coercion. Of this group, a sub-sample of 120 (59%) were married, of which 9% responded as having been subject to physical force.
Marital rape
Genocidal rape
Pregnancy from rape
Gang rape
Female infanticide
Sexual assault
Anti-abortion violence
False accusation of rape