Abstract
Previous research has repeatedly shown that gender-based violence affects a considerable proportion of women in any given population. Apart from providing current estimates of the prevalence of sexual violence against women in Germany, we identified specific risk markers applying an advanced statistical method. We analyzed data from a survey of N = 4450 women representative of the German population, conducted by the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony in 2011. Lifetime prevalence for experiencing sexual violence was 5.4% for women aged 21–40 years (five-year prevalence: 2.5%). Non-parametric conditional inference tree (C-Tree) analyses revealed that physical and sexual abuse during childhood as well as being divorced, separated, or widowed was the most informative constellation of risk markers, increasing the five-year prevalence rate of experienced sexual violence victimizations up to 17.0%. Furthermore, knowing about the official penalization of marital rape was related to a lower victimization risk for women without a history of parental violence. Possible explanations for these findings as well as implications for future research are critically discussed.
Highlights
Experiencing gender-based violence can have tremendous consequences for the survivor’s mental and physical functioning, increasing the risks of poor health in general and of certain conditions, such as depression, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, anxiety, and chronic pain in particular [1,2,3].Research has consistently demonstrated that sexual violence victimizations are not an exception, but do affect a considerable proportion of women in any given population [4,5]
The present paper focusses on victimization instead of perpetration, we explore whether knowledge about the penalization of marital rape in Germany might, as a protective factor, be associated with a decreased victimization risk
We ensured that cases of sexual violence victimizations before the age of 16 years were not taken into account in reports of the presently referred to five-year prevalence rates
Summary
Experiencing gender-based violence can have tremendous consequences for the survivor’s mental and physical functioning, increasing the risks of poor health in general and of certain conditions, such as depression, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, anxiety, and chronic pain in particular [1,2,3].Research has consistently demonstrated that sexual violence victimizations are not an exception, but do affect a considerable proportion of women in any given population [4,5]. According to the results of the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey 2010, 9.4% (i.e., approximately 11.2 million) of women in the U.S have at least once in their lifetime been raped by an intimate partner [6]. Another 15.9% of the surveyed women (i.e., approximately 19 million) reported that they had been sexually victimized in some other form
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