
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, June 23, 1994                   TAG: 9406280014
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON NOTE: ABOVE                                 LENGTH: Medium

YOUNG SUFFER MOST RAPE

Girls younger than 18 are victims of more than half the rapes reported to police; and the younger the victim, the more likely the attacker is a relative or acquaintance, the Justice Department reported Wednesday.

Girls younger than 12 are the victims in 16 percent of rapes reported to police, according to the grim estimates from the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. One in five rape victims younger than 12 is raped by her father.

Both the statistics bureau and private experts said the actual percentages of underage girls raped are undoubtedly higher than these numbers gathered from police reports, because the younger the rape victim, the less likely the crime is to be reported to police.

In separate data from 1991, the statistics bureau said family members or acquaintances accounted for 96 percent of rapes of girls younger than 12 in a three-state survey and for 94 percent in a survey of state inmates convicted of rape. The percentage of rapes by strangers increases as the age of the victims increases, which experts said reflects the more sheltered lives of younger females.

``People tend to think rape happens to adults,'' said Professor Dean Kirkpatrick, director of the Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center at the Medical University of South Carolina. ``A good thing about this study is that it will help educate people that rape happens to children, and probably more often than to adults.''

Young people are so frequently rape victims because ``the youngest are the least likely to fight back and often don't realize they are victimized,'' said Karen Hanna of the National Victims Center, a private Arlington, Va., group that co-sponsored a landmark ``Rape in America'' study in 1992. ``And they have the most to lose, in parental care, if they report an incident.''

``Some children who try to report a rape are not believed,'' added Patricia Toth, a former prosecutor who directs the private National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse in Alexandria, Va.

The statistics bureau, using police reports from 11 states and the District of Columbia, said girls younger than 18 were the victims in 51 percent of rapes in 1992 even though girls of that age made up only 25 percent of the U.S. female population.

The 1992 ``Rape in America'' study found that 61.6 percent of all rapes victimized girls younger than 18. But that study, adopted by the Senate Judiciary Committee in drafting rape prevention programs now in the Senate's version of the crime bill, included rapes acknowledged by victims in interviews but not reported to police.

``Child and adolescent cases are the most likely to go unreported,'' said Kirkpatrick, co-author of the ``Rape in America'' study. Thus, ``the government estimate is a severe underestimate, because they are only dealing with reported cases.''

by CNB