April 1 marked the beginning of Sexual Assault Awareness Month (#SAAM for our Twitter followers). You can read a message from Joyful Heart’s Executive Director, Maile Zambuto, on the Joyful Heart Blog here and read more about it it on our website.

We are going to be sharing with you some statistics about the nature of sexual violence and the response to sexual violence every week. We start today with some commonly cited numbers many of you might already have seen.

• Every 2 minutes, someone is sexually assaulted in the United States. That’s 248,700 victims in a year. (Source: RAINN)
• Only 30% of sexual assaults are ever reported to the police (Source: RAINN). Even so, that means somebody reports a forcible rape every 6 minutes in this country (Source: FBI).
• The majority (73%) of sexual assaults are perpetrated by someone the victims knows or is acquainted with. 40% of sexual assaults take place in the home. (Source: RAINN)

Please share with your community and loved ones and check back here next week for more numbers and some indicators of the response to sexual violence.