Etiology of the High Dark Figure of Sexual Assault Crimes against Women

Violence against women has existed continuously throughout history and across geography, but in recent decades, especially after modernity, there has been a profound conceptual change, and perhaps the behavior that was considered acceptable and conventional in the past, today is called violence against women. be condemned Sexual violence, as a subset of this general concept, has a special place among the types of violence against women in two ways: the first feature is its prevalence and high rate of occurrence; So that there are always many victims in different geographical areas, different classes and ages, and many women at every level of education and social status have experienced this type of violence. Second, this type of violence is often accompanied by concealment, and it is simply not possible to investigate, investigate, and prove it, and in most parts of the world, especially in societies that are under authoritarian, patriarchal, and misogynistic military rule, there are cultural taboos and obstacles. Various legal and judicial aspects are aligned so that any kind of issue related to 
sexual relations remains behind the curtain. Among the types of sexual violence, rape is due to the fact that it is associated with irreparable physical, mental and emotional losses against the female victims and their relatives, and may cause the loss of the former social, occupational, family, etc. position of the victim. It is more important. For this reason, societies try to fight this crime with customary, moral and religious prohibitions and passing laws; But the fact is that, despite the condemnation of this reprehensible phenomenon, women's human rights are trampled under the feet of cultural norms and false beliefs about the supremacy of men and the inferiority of women, and sexual violence takes on a sexual nature.
After the crime of rape, protecting the victim and preventing the perpetrator from repeating the crime depends on breaking the victim's silence and disclosing the crime; Because in Iranian society, support for women victims of rape is limited to criminal protection and is limited to punishing the aggressors, and it will not be possible to heal the pain of women victims except by filing a criminal complaint in the courts. Nevertheless, no independent reparative institution has been provided to remove the obstacles and hardships of filing a complaint and during the process of proceedings, to support women who are victims of the crime of sexual rape, and this is considered a sufficient reason for not reporting this crime to the criminal justice authorities.
The issue of not reporting sexual assault, in addition to reassuring the aggressor, without the risk of arrest, he can commit sexual assault and repeat it many times, especially in societies like Iran, is important because under the influence of traditional norms, The prevailing belief is that if public discourse is not formed about an issue, that issue has not occurred in general; In this way, the widespread denial of the occurrence of sexual assault can cause this crime to be neglected in government policies and reduce the possibility of drawing an accurate image of the state of sexual assault in the society (Shiri, 2017: 122) and as a result, sexual assault as a hard core. Sexual violence against women will continue.
The transition from the social and cultural sphere that has been dominated by patriarchal and anti-feminist systems for many years and has normalized sexual violence against women is undoubtedly a process that first of all requires a correct understanding of the status of women in a is society; With this definition, the problem starts from the point where, due to several reasons, accurate statistics on the occurrence of sexual rape crimes are not available to the policy makers of criminal law.
Culture and its official manifestation, the law, in many ways force women victims of rape to remain silent.
From a cultural perspective, the silence of women victims of sexual assault is the result of several factors; Among other things, depending on the age range and his understanding of the concept of sexual assault, the victim may "find the related events hurtful and not important enough" or "do not want the family and other people to know about the case". In addition to these cases, in our culture, under the influence of existing gender stereotypes, "shame of the stigma of corruption from society", "fear of being fingered" and "society's contemptuous look at women victims of sexual violence" have also resulted in a sharp decrease in cases. Crime reports play a major role.
On the other hand, the combination of Iranian culture's understanding of women and the various flaws in the laws of sexual assault makes it difficult to report the crime to the police. A woman who takes a criminal action against the perpetrator by crossing the cultural barriers of breaking the silence, faces other difficulties on the way to the trial that can discourage her from continuing. A lot of mental obstacles facing victimized women such as "lack of evidence to prove", "fear of revenge by the aggressor" or "fear of hostile encounters from the police and male judicial authorities" and finally "false prejudice against the victim and criminal response against him". and the like are surrounded, which will prevent them from reporting the incident.
In the upcoming research, which has been carried out using an analytical method, the mentioned cultural and legal factors have been discussed in detail and suggestions have been made to remove these obstacles.