From 2020 Statistics Canada study of university students:
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2020001/article...
>> One in ten (11%) women students experienced a sexual assault in a postsecondary setting during the previous year. About one in five (19%) women who were sexually assaulted said that the assault took the form of a sexual activity to which they did not consent after they had agreed to another form of sexual activity—for example, agreeing to have protected sex and then learning it had been unprotected sex.
>> Less than one in ten women (8%) and men (6%) who experienced sexual assault, and less than one in ten women (9%) and men (4%) who had experienced unwanted sexualized behaviours spoke about what happened
Given that last stat, we should take whatever number we have for reported assaults' and multiply it by at least ten to cover all the unreported events.
Here is from that report, things that constitute "sexual assault":
"Sexual attack: Forcing or attempted forcing into any unwanted sexual activity, by threatening, holding down, or hurting in some way;
Unwanted sexual touching: Touching against a person’s will in any sexual way, including unwanted touching or grabbing, kissing, or fondling;
Sexual activity where unable to consent: Subjecting to a sexual activity to which a person was not able to consent, including being intoxicated, drugged, manipulated, or forced in ways other than physically;
Sexual activity to which a person did not consent, after they consented to another form of sexual activity (for example, agreeing to protected sex and then learning it had been unprotected sex)."
Don't take this to trivialize bad experiences people have had, take it as an attack on shoddy methods that are clearly designed to stoke fires of indignation rather than shed light on a prickly topic.
>Given that last stat... I don't think you're interpreting this correctly.
Is there a baseline for what constitutes sexual assault? Or is it entirely subjective?
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/cj-jp/victim/rr14_01/p10...
They say in that report you linked in the OP that they include "behaviours such as unwelcome sexual comments, actions or advances" which are entirely subjective.
If you want more information on this, Besser van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, considered to be one of the definitive books on the study of psychological trauma, discusses this in Chapter 10, "Developmental Trauma: The Hidden Epidemic".
While I don't have the book in front of me to quote explicit statistics, the chapter references a number of research studies backing up the conclusion of the doctor in sandworm101's comment.
Typically (though you can probably find exceptions to either or both), modern low or no limits for child marriage systems feature:
1. Parental consent laws for marriage below a certain age, and
2. Marital exceptions to age of consent laws for sex.
"In a few cases (N < 5) families were dropped from the comparison group because some history of sexual abuse was ascertained."
I think you are misinterpreting. First, they say:
"...information was obtained about any possible unwanted sexual experiences of the comparison females or other family members"
So interpreting it as 5 of 84 women is incorrect. It's min 5 people of 84 families. Given a mean family size of perhaps 3.5 (if by "family" they mean "nuclear family", though I bet they include anyone you know about really--Uncle Bob would count, and one report per family with reports) it's more like 5 out of 294 people, or 1.7%. And I don't think they share their exclusion criteria, which isn't a good sign. And there's a significant selection bias given how they recruited (in a newspaper, for people who have the free time and/or low wealth enough to want to do a study, and in particular on female growth and development).
I hope this is accidental bias, or a statistical anomaly. It could be for example that this is overrepresented from the pooled community. I think it would also be important to somehow scale/categorize the level of abuse (physical vs non-physical, penetrative vs non-penetrative, etc).
If it really is 5% (1 in 20 girls) then this would outrank something like COVID in terms of importance.
> The comparison sample (n = 82) was recruited via advertisements in community newspapers and posters in welfare, daycare, and community facilities in the same neighborhoods in which the abused participants lived. Comparison families contacted study personnel and were screened for eligibility, which included having no prior contact with protective service agencies and being demographically similar to a same-aged abused participant. At the time of study entry, comparison families were not informed that the study involved sexually abused females; rather, they were told that the study was of “female growth and development.”
I wonder whether this still ended up being a self-selecting group. I can imagine a scenario where a young girl has an awful experience growing up, wants to see change in the upbringing of females and becomes somewhat engaged in related activities.
> He actually said: You better build some more prisons before you start testing babies for this.
I don't think a lack of facilities to deal with a problem is a good reason for not addressing it. At the very least we need to understand the scale of the problem, even if the problem remains unaddressed for the time being.