Twelve percent of the 2,167 women polled by the Fondation Jean Jaures thinktank said they had suffered “sexual penetration with violence, constraint or surprise”, the legal definition of rape in France.
Five percent said it had happened more than once.
Of these, 31% said they were raped by their partner, 19% by someone else they know and 17% by a stranger.
Half of the victims were children or teens at the time of the attack, which took place at home in 42% of cases.
Only 15% had filed an official complaint but many remained traumatised by the incident, as evidenced by the fact that a fifth of them had attempted suicide - four times the general rate among French women.
The online poll was carried out by Ifop between 6-16 February and questioned women aged 18 and over.
The Fondation Jean Jaures said some of the respondents may have been encouraged to break their silence by the tide of accounts of sexual violence shared on social media following the sexual assault scandal sparked by revelations about Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Last month, France’s interior ministry said the reporting of sexual assault and rape had risen 31.5% in the last quarter of 2017 compared with the same period in 2016.
“One can see the effect of reporting of possibly older incidents in the context of women speaking out following the revelations of the ‘Weinstein’ affair,” it said.
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