“The abuse started with a few insults. When Wendy, a deaf woman, met her college boyfriend, he was popular and attractive, so she put up with the harsh way he spoke to her. Then he gave her a black eye.

’I thought it was normal, and that that was love; that it was just a part of when you care about somebody,’ Wendy, 38, who didn’t want to be identified by her real name because she has yet to go public with her story, said through a sign language interpreter. ‘Then the insults became a little bit physical, and then a cycle began.’”

“Do teenagers understand sex and consent? To find out, a group of 16-18-year-olds were shown a specially written drama about an incident to see if they could work out if it was consensual sex or whether a crime had been committed.

Sex and consent is a much discussed issue at the moment and secondary schools are introducing sexual consent lessons.

The world of sex and relationships is a difficult one for teenagers to navigate. To hear in their own words where the challenges lie, the BBC brought together 24 teenagers, 12 of each sex, to watch a drama set at a house party and debate whether rape had been committed.

Their responses are revealing.”

“To be a woman is to know fear. Walking alone at night, even in a ‘good’ neighborhood, on high alert, perceiving your own shadow or the echo of your chunky boots on the pavement as threats. The spike of adrenaline when a big guy with a wide gait walks your way, followed by the dip of relief (and then guilt) when you realize he’s just a tired citizen trying to make his way home like you are. The sense that if, no, when someone decides to invade your space, you won’t have recourse, skills, any power but your own yell.”

“I was talking with a friend of mine (a 20-something male, college educated, very kind boy). We were discussing the movie Divergent and the attempted rape scene that takes place. I had commented to him about how awesome it was to watch a woman say no to sexual advances and then, when the boy continues to push her, she fights back and is able to get away. It was honestly empowering. When the scene ended I actually cheered out loud! Thinking back to that victorious moment in the movie, I don’t know that I could have prepared myself for the next words that came out of my friend’s mouth. He simply said, ‘Yeah, but it was her boyfriend, that’s not rape.’ I was completely stunned. Ignorance, concerning women’s rights and rape, is, in a word, ubiquitous.”

“Karla Jacinto is sitting in a serene garden. She looks at the ordinary sights of flowers and can hear people beyond the garden walls, walking and talking in Mexico City.

She looks straight into my eyes, her voice cracking slightly, as she tells me the number she wants me to remember — 43,200.”

“Last year (2013) the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men. The number seemed so high that it prompted researcher Lara Stemple to call the Bureau of Justice Statistics to see if it maybe it had made a mistake, or changed its terminology. After all, in years past men had accounted for somewhere between 5 and 14 percent of rape and sexual violence victims. But no, it wasn’t a mistake, officials told her, although they couldn’t explain the rise beyond guessing that maybe it had something to do with the publicity surrounding former football coach Jerry Sandusky and the Penn State sex abuse scandal.”

“Same girl in all of these photos (me). I’ve had an amazing year and you’ve seen the highlights here, so these photos are an uncommon thing to share but not an uncommon issue. You may be weirded out but do read on. I have a point.”

“When you go through a trauma like that, it doesn’t just have the immediate physical ramifications on you,” Gaga said. “When you re-experience it through the years, it can trigger patterns in your body of physical distress. A lot of people suffer from not only mental and emotional pain, but also physical pain of being abused, raped, or traumatized in some type of way.”

”We don’t want you to keep your pain inside and let it rot like an old apple on your counter, you know?” she said. “It’s like, just get rid of all that trash. Let’s get rid of it together.”

“There’s no question in my mind that law enforcement in Kern County have a problem with gender,” said Penny Harrington, a California-based co-founder of the National Center for Women and Policing (NCWP) and the former chief of the Portland, Oregon police bureau.

“They have this outlaw mentality: ‘We can do whatever we want to do, we’re the police.’ And they don’t feel accountable,” Harrington added, after learning of the findings of this investigation, which includes interviews with women, including Frye, who have never spoken in public about their experiences before.

In 2009, Frye, 51, was facing a charge of driving away after injuring someone in a car accident. She had been receiving medical treatment in the jail’s infirmary for a series of cancers found on her uterus and gall bladder. Despite being prescribed a course of powerful painkillers, she was left in excruciating pain. It was at this time, at her most vulnerable, she said that deputy Lavis preyed on her: he watched her shower, he bullied and humiliated her, and he sexually assaulted her multiple times.”

“The victims’ accounts were also borne out. Most had described a white man with green or hazel eyes, about 6 feet tall, weighing about 200 pounds. They talked about being tied up. They mentioned that he had stolen their underwear. In O’Leary’s house, investigators turned up a black Ruger .380-caliber pistol, a pink Sony Cyber-shot camera and a large backpack, along with wet wipes and lubrication. Hidden inside a piece of stereo equipment in his closet, detectives found a collection of women’s underwear. Trophies.

That night, Hendershot drove to break the news to her victim, the 59-year-old widow in Westminster. The woman had lost her husband to cancer the previous year. She had no family nearby. She was still emerging from the mental and physical suffering she endured during the attack. Hendershot met her at a Denny’s restaurant. She found her in a back corner, eating dinner alone.

’I walked in, and she was super happy to see me, and I told her. I mean, I get shiver bumps thinking about it, just even now,’ Hendershot said. ‘I told her, I said, “It’s over. It’s over. We have him.”‘ By early March, a forensic computer specialist cracked into files that O’Leary had stored on his hard drive. He found a folder called ‘girls’ — and pictures that O’Leary had taken of his victims in Golden and Westminster. Galbraith recognized them by sight. But then Galbraith stumbled across an image of a woman she didn’t recognize. It was a young woman — far younger than the Colorado victims, perhaps a teenager. The pictures showed her looking terrified, bound and gagged on a bed. Galbraith felt sick. How would she identify her? How would she find justice for her?

After looking through the images, she found an answer. It was a picture of the woman’s learner’s permit, placed on her chest. It had her name. And it had her address.”