Young form bulk of sex victims - Canada

[dArKeR]

Well over half of sex assault victims who report their attacks to police are youths under the age of 18, a report released Friday by Statistics Canada shows.

The study found that 61 per cent of reported sexual assaults in Canada involved young people, and that 85 per cent of such attacks were perpetrated on young women. These women were targeted at an older age than the boys who had been attacked. The majority of attacks on girls happened between the ages of 11 and 19, while attacks on boys were most prevalent while they were between three and 14.

The report is based on a study of Uniform Crime Reporting numbers from 2002, which relies on information from 123 police departments in nine provinces. The authors used four categories of sexual assault: level one, involving little or no injury; level two, including the use of a weapon, threats or causing bodily harm; level three, which results in wounding, maiming, disfiguring or the endangerment of the victim's life; and "other."

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