>I know these numbers are much bandied about, and sometimes controversial,
>but my reading is that sexual abuse of children by anyone is still a
>pretty rare event (although the other statistic that most abuse that does
>take place is from family members is sometimes misunderstood to mean the
>opposite).
This is from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
More info and breakdowns here: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/saycrle.htm
To law enforcement and the public, sexual assaults, and especially the sexual assaults of young children, are a major social concern.... However, while a few highly publicized incidents are engraved in the public's consciousness, there is little empirically-based information on these crimes. Until recently, law enforcement and policymakers had few hard facts on which to base their response to these crimes, their victims, and their offenders.
The only existing national data collection effort that explored the incidence of sexual assault ignored crimes against young victims. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimated there were 197,000 incidents of forcible rape and 110,000 incidents of other sexual assault in the United States in 1996 involving victims ages 12 or above (Ringel, 1997). Victims reported that a third (31%) of these sexual assaults (or 94,000 victimizations) were reported to law enforcement agencies. However, for 1996, the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) estimated that there were 96,000 forcible rapes alone reported to law enforcement agencies (FBI, 1997). The UCR does not capture reported crime information on other sexual assaults such as forcible sodomy, sexual assault with an object, and forcible fondling. However, it can be assumed from their relative volume in the NCVS that tens of thousands of sexual assaults other than forcible rape came to the attention of law enforcement in 1996. The large difference between the NCVS and the UCR estimates may reflect differences in the two data collection methods; or, if both estimates are valid, they indicate that many victims of sexual assault are youth under age 12.