The consequences haunt survivors for decades.
“His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20-plus years of life.” — Dan Turner on his son, Brock Turner, who was convicted of rape and sentenced to six months in jail (emphasis added)
The criminal justice system naturally directs our attention toward offenders. Trials determine guilt. Sentences assign punishment. These moments are public and easy to narrate. By contrast, the experience of victims is usually invisible and can be marked by years of private struggle.
This imbalance is particularly striking in cases of campus rape. High-profile incidents spark fierce debates about due process, proportionality and the future prospects of young men whose careers may be derailed by a conviction. With these narratives often dominating the conversation, a more fundamental question can be shifted to the sidelines: How does rape alter the life trajectories of survivors?
Using comprehensive Finnish data on every rape that was reported to the police or treated in hospitals in the country, my co-authors and I provide clear evidence that rape inflicts profound and lasting damage on young women’s lives. These harms do not fade with time, and they affect many dimensions of survivors’ lives. As a result, the full impact of rape is rarely reflected in public discussions of cost. We currently tend to treat rape as a devastating but temporary short-term shock rather than as a turning point with lifelong economic and mental health consequences. That errant perception must change.
Why public health estimates fall short
What are the standard estimates of the “cost” of rape? The figure favored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts the lifetime cost of rape at about $122,000 per survivor. At first glance, that figure sounds large. But a closer look reveals what it leaves out. The calculation is dominated by direct costs: medical care, mental health treatment, policing, court proceedings and incarceration of offenders.
What’s largely missing are the consequences that shape the rest of a survivor’s life: whether she completes college, whether PTSD makes it difficult to hold a steady job, whether she switches careers to avoid male-dominated environments or whether the trauma becomes so overwhelming that she takes her own life.
As an economist, I have been especially interested in how these estimates fail to capture the broader economic consequences of rape. For example, most studies measure lost productivity by asking survivors how many days of work they missed immediately after an assault and then assigning a dollar value to those days. The estimate used by the CDC, for example, assumes that the average survivor misses 3.6 workdays following a rape.
Even when researchers allow for additional productivity losses linked to later health problems, the framework remains fundamentally shortsighted. It treats rape as a temporary interruption that knocks a person off course briefly but leaves their long-run trajectory intact.
That assumption does not fit with what we know about trauma.
Rape is not an event that causes someone to miss a few days of work. It is a deeply traumatic experience that can reshape education, employment, career choices and earnings for decades. Conditions such as PTSD, depression and anxiety are not temporary for many survivors but rather persistent and disabling. They affect how much people work, what kinds of jobs they can hold and whether they are able to advance in their careers. Estimates based only on short-term work absences cannot capture these long-run effects.
The problem can be particularly severe when the assault occurs during college. Many students are not yet working full time, so a method that counts missed workdays will record little or no economic loss at all. Yet rape during these years can derail education itself, reducing the likelihood of completing a degree. These disruptions translate into lower lifetime earnings even if no paycheck was missed at the time of the assault.
Doing better
So how can we better measure the true costs of rape?
Kristiina Huttunen, Emily Nix, Ning Zhang and I tackle this question using unusually rich administrative data from Finland, a country with a comparatively strong social safety net that might be expected to cushion some of the economic and social consequences of violence. These data link anonymized police reports, hospital admissions, prescription records, education histories and labor market outcomes. They allow us to identify rape survivors and to follow them over time.
Crucially, these data also let us observe survivors’ economic and mental health trajectories in the years before and after an assault.
To isolate the causal impact of rape, we compare survivors to their statistical “doppelgangers”: women who look virtually identical before the assault but who are either never assaulted or only experience an assault many years later. These comparison women match survivors closely on pre-assault mental health, substance use, education, employment and earnings. This richness allows us to rule out the criticism that our effects simply reflect that survivors were already on troubled paths before an assault.
Our findings are stark. In the five years before an assault, survivors and their doppelgangers are indistinguishable. Employment rates, earnings and mental health treatment look the same. Immediately after an assault, however, the trajectories diverge sharply. Employment and earnings fall by 16% and prescriptions for antidepressants spike. We find that survivors are still on significantly worse economic and mental health paths a decade later.
The consequences are severe for women assaulted while still in school or university. Among young women assaulted between the ages of 14 and 21, we find large reductions in the likelihood of completing college, even compared to girls with the same high school grades, family backgrounds and prior mental health histories. These losses are not driven by students already struggling academically. The biggest declines occur among the most academically talented young women.
The damage does not stop there. Five years after an assault, suicide rates among young survivors are five times higher than among their otherwise identical peers, rising to approximately eight deaths per 1,000 victims.
This represents a staggering loss of talent and potential for society, layered on top of immense personal suffering. And these effects cannot be explained away by preexisting differences. The divergence in life outcomes happens at the moment of victimization and endures long afterward. Rape is not merely associated with worse outcomes; it causes them.
Spillovers beyond the victim
The harm does not stop with survivors.
Rape reverberates through families, friendships and entire student communities. When an assault occurs, classmates may also avoid certain spaces and change how they engage with school altogether. The ripple effects can be enormous.
Our data allow us to measure some of these spillovers among high school students in Finland. We find that 28% of adolescent girls are in a school cohort where a peer is raped before age 18. For many young women, rape is not something distant but something that happens to someone they know.
Female peers of survivors show significant increases in antidepressant use in the years following an assault within their cohort. By the second and third year, about one in five affected school cohorts sees an additional girl begin antidepressant treatment compared to cohorts with a similar size and pre-assault mental health outcomes where no rapes are reported. We do not observe similar effects among male peers. The burden of secondary trauma appears to fall disproportionately on girls, likely reflecting closer social ties and heightened fear of victimization.
Spillovers extend beyond mental health. The threat of sexual assault can shape women’s behavior in ways that impose real economic costs. Women routinely adjust where they go, when they travel, what jobs they take and which opportunities they pursue to reduce risk. Individually, these choices may seem small. Together, they can severely constrain economic mobility.
Survey evidence illustrates the scale of these constraints. Nearly half of women report avoiding activities they need to do, and more than two-thirds avoid activities they want to do, because of fear of sexual assault. Economic research shows that women are willing to forgo better schools and higher-paying jobs and accept longer commutes to feel safer. Measures such as women-only transit spaces reduce harassment and assault, underscoring how deeply safety concerns shape daily economic decisions.
The shadow of sexual violence thus extends far beyond direct victimization. It shapes education, mobility and work in ways that are economically meaningful and largely invisible in official cost estimates.
Where does this leave us?
Campus rape is not a marginal problem with fleeting consequences. It is common, deeply damaging and life-altering. Narratives that focus on perpetrators miss the larger and more enduring costs borne by victims and their communities. Existing cost estimates have been constrained by short time horizons and incomplete data, and dramatically understate the true burden. Given the prevalence of campus rape, our findings suggest that sexual violence can contribute meaningfully to persistent gender gaps in economic and mental health outcomes.
A full accounting of the costs of campus rape must reckon with long-run psychological and economic scarring. When we do, a far more consequential picture emerges that demands a commensurately serious policy response. Until our measurements and narratives catch up to this reality, our efforts to address campus rape will remain dangerously inadequate.
