Until I had worked with men who batter for three to five years, I had no idea that the level of sexual assault within domestic violence relationships was so high. I had to hear these stories from the facilitators of the women's partner group before I realized that most of the women partners are also being sexually assaulted. It seems that lots of women hide the sexual abuse even when they tell about the beatings. In our program for men who batter, some men tell horrific stories of sexual abuse, but their women partners are not sharing this unless the setting is right. There is a very high percentage of women disclosing this to us in our women's groups, mostly because we create a trusting environment where they feel safe to talk about it. Our women's group facilitators are good at asking about it in ways that don't make the women feel bad. That seems very important.

—Graham Barnes, Trainer on Batterer Intervention Programs at The Battered Women's Justice Project in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Intimate partner sexual abuse is mistakenly perceived as a rarity because it is little studied and almost never reported. Victim advocates, police and prosecutors are not trained to ask the questions that would elicit this information. Victims are extremely reluctant to disclose this most personal form of violence and humiliation. Many do not even realize that the sexual violence to which they are being subjected to is against the law.

In recent years carefully structured interviews and surveys with abusive men and abused women have documented a stark and unacknowledged reality: The rate of overlap between sexual violence and physical violence is so high that sexual abuse and sexual assault must be considered integral to domestic violence.

• “Nearly 1 in 10 women in the United States has been raped by an intimate partner in her lifetime.”  
  National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 Summary Report. Center for Disease Control (2011).

• 16.9% of women and 8.0% of men have been subjected to sexual violence other than rape by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime.
  National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 Summary Report. Center for Disease Control (2011).

However, the NISVS statistics do not fully capture the full extent of intimate partner sexual abuse because they do not reflect mechanisms of coercion such as economic extortion, threatening harm to children, and technologically enabled non-contact sexual abuse.

Furthermore, a subsequent report on the NISVS data finds that intimate partner sexual abuse is perpetrated against those who identify as Gay, Lesbian, and Bi-sexual at equal or higher rates as those who identify as heterosexual. See National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 Findings on Victimization by Sexual Orientation. Center for Disease Control (2013). For a discussion on this topic, refer to Module II.

Additionally, roughly 1 in 5 girls aged 15 to 18 reported being subjected to sexual abuse by an intimate partner in a dating relationship. See Taylor, B. et al., The National Survey of Teen Relationships and Intimate Violence (STRiV), 2016.