Two Million Rape Victims Living in California

Buried beneath the stunning announcement this week by the Centers for Disease Control that nearly one in five American women has been raped in her lifetime is the data that California, by far the national leader in such sex crime when you look at total numbers, has 2,024,000 women who say they've been raped.

That's enough victims to fill the city of San Diego ... and Long Beach -- with overflow.

But ... given that California is also by far the nation's largest state ...

... our per-capita rape prevalence is actually below the national average.

Across American 18.3 percent of women say they've been raped at least one in their lives. For California's that number is 14.6 percent. " ... More than 1 million women are raped in a year" in the United States, the CDC states.

The state with the next-highest total number of lifetime prevalence reports is Texas, with 1,963,000. Its rape rate is 21.7 percent.

Oregon topped the per-capital rape reporting with a whopping 27.2, or nearly one out of three women saying they've been raped.

The CDC's "National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) is one of CDC's newest public health surveillance systems," so it's not measuring an increase here.

And to be fair rape numbers have gone way down in recent decades because, as our own Patrick Range McDonald put it "DNA technology ... has put the fear of God into would-be rapists."

But more than 2 million victims in California? That's abhorrent.

[@dennisjromero / djromero@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]