[citation needed] The United Nations has conducted extensive surveys to determine the level of sexual violence in different societies.

According to these studies, the percentage of women reporting having been a victim of sexual assault ranges from less than 2% in places such as La Paz, Bolivia (1.4%), Gaborone, Botswana (0.8%), Beijing, China (1.6%), and Manila, Philippines (0.3%), to 5% or more in Istanbul, Turkey (6.0%), Buenos Aires, Argentina (5.8%), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (8.0%), and Bogota, Colombia (5.0%).

Surveys that fail to make this distinction or those that only examine rape by strangers usually underestimate substantially the prevalence of sexual violence.

In a case control study, for example, of 191 adolescent girls (mean age 16.3 years) attending an antenatal clinic in Cape Town, South Africa, and 353 non pregnant adolescents matched for age and neighborhood or school, 31.9% of the study cases and 18.1% of the controls reported that force was used during their sexual initiation.

[17] In the 1992 US National Health and Social Life Survey of over 3,400 adults, more than 4% of women reported coerced sexual initiation.

Each year hundreds of thousands of women and girls throughout the world are bought and sold into prostitution or sexual slavery.

[25] Research in Kyrgyzstan has estimated that around 4,000 people were trafficked from the country in 1999, with the principal destinations being China, Germany, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

Most police investigations relate to legal sex businesses, with all sectors of prostitution being well represented, but with window brothels being particularly overrepresented.

[34][35] In 2020, investigative journalists from Argos and Lost in Europe, found that the Dutch government had known for over five years that Vietnamese children go missing from protected shelters in The Netherlands, sparking fears of trafficking.

In 2015, Argos stated, four Vietnamese girls went missing from a shelter, carrying brown suitcases of the same brand, 'a lot of cash and phones without sim cards.'

The German Federal Police Office (BKA) reported in 2006 a total of 357 completed investigations of human trafficking, with 775 victims.

A survey of sex workers in Bangladesh revealed that 49% of the women had been raped and 59% beaten by police in the previous year; the men reported much lower levels of violence.

[45] According to the CDC's The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey from 2015, 1 in 6 women in the U.S. were a victim of stalking at one point in her lifetime.

In an extreme case of violence in 1991, 71 teenage girls were raped by their classmates and 19 others were killed at a boarding school in Meru, Kenya.

This documented prejudice leads to reduced investigation and criminal justice outcomes that are faulty compared to other crimes.

Tuerkheimer says that women face "credibility discounts" at all stages of the justice system, including from police, jurors, judges, and prosecutors.

[53] In a national survey conducted for the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation in 2000, it was found that roughly 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a public school employee between 1991 and 2000.

[61][62][63][64][65][66] A study of physicians disciplined for sexual offences in the United States, for instance, found that the number of cases had increased from 42 in 1989 to 147 in 1996, with the proportion of all disciplinary action that was sex-related rising from 2.1% to 4.4% over the same period.

[81] In some armed conflicts, for example, the ones in Rwanda and the states of the former Yugoslavia rape has been used as a deliberate strategy to subvert community bonds and thus the perceived enemy, and furthermore as a tool of ethnic cleansing.

Another inevitable consequence of armed conflicts is the ensuing economic and social disruption which can force large numbers of people into prostitution,[82] an observation that applies equally to the situation of refugees, whether they are fleeing armed conflicts or natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes or powerful storms.

Data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, for instance, indicated that among the boat people who fled Vietnam in the late 1970s and early 1980s, 39% of the women were abducted or raped by pirates while at sea, a figure that is likely to be an underestimate.

[84][85] According to Lara Stemple, Andrew Flores, and Ilan H Meyer, when, in the United States, counting cases where the victim is made to penetrate the perpetrator against their will, women and men suffer from non-consensual sex at similar rates.

This practice is legal in many countries and is a form of sexual violence, since the children involved are unable to give or withhold their consent.

[88] Early marriage is most common in Africa and South Asia, though it also occurs in the Middle East and parts of Latin America and Eastern Europe.

[90] High rates of child marriage have also been reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Niger and Uganda.

[90] Elsewhere, in Latin America for instance, early age at first marriage has been reported in Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Paraguay.

On reaching puberty the girl is expected to have sexual intercourse with the brother or father of the deceased person, so as to produce a son to replace the one who died.

Another custom is chimutsa mapfiwa, according to which, when a married woman dies, her sister is obliged to replace her in the matrimonial home.

Annual recorded statistics of victims of sexual violence per 100,000 population is shown below for available countries for the last available year as reported by law enforcement.