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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Utah spent more than $92 million on prosecuting and punishing people for sexual assaults during 2011 and just a fraction of that amount — $570,000 — on preventing such crimes, according to a Utah Department of Health report released Wednesday.
The paper on the economic costs of sexual assault was designed to highlight the emotional and financial impacts of the crime.
"We just wanted to highlight the discrepancy," said Teresa Brechlin, violence and injury prevention program manager with the Department of Health. "Just preventing a few of those will save hundreds of thousands of dollars."
Utah's homicide rate ranks among the lowest in the country, but the state has the country's ninth-highest number of rapes per capita, she said.
The report from the Department of Health and the Utah Coalition Against Sexual Assault also estimates that sexual assaults cost victims in Utah a total of $4 billion in potential pain, suffering and other damages.
Analysts arrived at the figure using a National Institute of Justice formula based on average damage awards in civil lawsuits filed by sexual assault victims. The figure includes lost wages and other long-range effects.
After an assault, some people struggle to complete degrees in school, hold down jobs or interact with other people, said Megan Waters, prevention coordinator with the health department.
"Once a person has been victimized, their feeling of security and safety in their own communities, in their own bodies, has been compromised. How can we really qualify that?" Waters said.
Determining the dollar figure helps illustrate the scope of the problem, she said.
DeAnn Tilton, 47, says she dealt with bulimia after she was sexually abused as a child and later assaulted twice while she was a college student.
She was accepted to a social psychology master's program at Ball State University in Indiana after graduation, but her experiences had left her too traumatized to leave the state, she said during an interview with The Associated Press.
"I was experiencing intense feelings of unsafety and terror," she said. "I desperately wanted to go and I had to call them at the last minute and say, 'I can't go.' It would require me to leave the state and I was unable to feel that I was safe."
She was eventually able to go back to school and earned a master's degree from the University of Utah this summer but missed out on decades of higher pay she could have earned if she'd had the degree sooner.
The Associated Press doesn't typically name victims of sexual assault, but Tilton has told her story publicly and started the group Talk to a Survivor that encourages people to speak about their experiences involving sexual assault.
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