So says a headline on ITV.com today (also covered in various newspapers).
It goes on to say that: "The study, of more than 20,000 females, found that 99.7% had been repeatedly subjected to violence including assaults, harassment and rape in their lifetime."
This startled me, to say the least. 26 sexual crimes?! 97% of women?!
I did a bit of digging. The report was sponsored by an organisation called VictimFocus (I know nothing about them).
If anyone is interested, here is the link to the report: irp.cdn-website.com/f9ec73a4/files/uploaded/Key-Facts-Document-VAWG-VictimFocus-2021a.pdf
The survey was carried out on the internet and 22,419 women responded. It doesn't actually give the definition of a sexual crime, but it does say that "Broad terms such as ‘abuse’, ‘rape’, ‘sexual violence’, ‘sexual abuse’, ‘domestic violence’, ‘domestic abuse’, ‘honour-based violence’ were avoided
in all items to reduce the impact of social constructs of these terms".
It then goes on to give examples of the questions that were asked. Women were asked whether anyone had ever shoved, kicked, hit, spat at, choked, thrown down the stairs, threatened to kill them, either when they were a child or adult. (There were 13 examples given in the survey, but these are the only ones repeated in the report).
Now, please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying for one second that any of the above are pleasant or acceptable, but neither are they 'sexual crimes'. I just feel that things like this diminish the suffering of women who really have suffered horrendous abuse.
Is it just me?