ABSTRACT
Sexual intimate partner violence (sexual IPV) is a significant social problem that affects millions of adolescent and adult women across the globe. Though sexual IPV is experienced by women as particularly humiliating, degrading, and shameful, it has been under-researched in comparison to physical and psychological IPV. Sexual victimization within intimate relationships takes many forms, including unwanted but consensual sex, coerced sex, and rape or attempted rape as a result of force, threat of force, or inability to give consent; for the current review, we include quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods studies that examine partner rape or attempted rape across women’s life course. Nearly one in ten women (9%) in the United States has experienced sexual IPV in their lifetime; global lifetime estimates range from 3% in Azerbaijan and Ukraine, to 50% in rural Ethiopia. Sexual IPV is likely to co-occur with other forms of IPV, including physical and psychological IPV, coercive control, and stalking. Predictors of sexual IPV include lower socioeconomic status, her low age, his drinking, physical IPV, or coercive control. Associated outcomes among girls and women include lack of acknowledgment or labeling of the experience as rape; shame, self-blame, and anticipatory stigma; and mental and physical health problems such as depression and posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, suicidality, unintended pregnancy and birth, and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. Disclosing sexual IPV and seeking and attaining help appears to be less common, in comparison to other forms of IPV.
