Last May, with considerable trepidation, I wrote an article about what seemed to be extraordinarily high rates of rape in Africa. The original data came from a study by South Africa's Medical Research Council in 2009 which found that more than a quarter of South African men — 27.6 percent — admitted that they had committed rape. Almost half of those men had raped two or three women or girls. One in 13 had raped at least 10 victims.
Over the next couple of years, I ran across a couple of other less detailed studies suggesting that the problem was not just South African. A report from the eastern Congo in 2012 said that over a third of the men interviewed — 34 percent — had committed rape, and an older report from Tanzania found that 20 percent of the women interviewed said they had been raped (although only one-tenth as many rapes were reported to the police).
So I wrote a piece called "An African Iceberg" in which I said that this was a phenomenon that needed urgent investigation continent-wide — but it did occur to me to wonder if there were similar icebergs in other developing countries. The only figures that were available for developing countries elsewhere were official ones, and those normally only record the number of women who tell the police they have been raped. Most don't.