[keernan]

By way of editing my comment above, put another way: One third of your mothers are secretly hiding their experience suffering serious sexual abuse. And one third of your wives. And hopefully you will do something to prevent it from happening to one third of your daughters.

And a point about the shame I mentioned. The abuse we are talking about is overwhelmingly not committed by a stranger. Rather we are talking about long term ongoing abuse by a father, grandfather, uncle, or close family friend. Males who are trusted by the entire family.

And the shame that arises later in life comes from the realization that a trusted loved one (father grandfather uncle) thought so little of you to do such things.

[asmith76]

Thankfully 1/3 women is misleading. They find this statistic by dividing the population of women by the number of incidents of abuse. The problem with the stat is that one person is often abused multiple times.