Rape

Rape is the offense of non-consensual sexual penetration accomplished through force, threat, incapacitation, or other circumstances that vitiate the victim's consent, historically defined in narrower terms in many common-law systems and substantially broadened over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to remove requirements such as physical resistance, to recognize marital rape, and to apply regardless of the victim's or offender's sex. Many jurisdictions have replaced or supplemented the historical term rape with a broader statutory category of sexual assault, graded by the degree of force used and the type of act committed, while others retain rape as a specific, typically most serious, offense within that broader category; the exact statutory boundary between the two varies considerably across jurisdictions and legal traditions. Reporting, investigation and prosecution of rape present well-documented and extensively studied challenges, including historically low reporting rates, the evidentiary reliance on forensic sexual-assault examination, and the significant reforms many jurisdictions have made to victim interview practice, corroboration requirements and rape-shield rules governing what evidence about a victim's past may be introduced at trial. Criminologists and public-health researchers treat rape as both a criminal-justice and a public-health concern, studying its prevalence, underreporting, and the effectiveness of prevention and victim-support interventions.