Just one per cent of rapes are committed by strangers so why are we still so afraid of the streets at night?

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, please seek help with a qualified counsellor or by calling 1800 RESPECT.

18 months after his wife was brutally murdered by an opportunistic stranger, Tom Meagher wrote about the trauma of his wife’s death for White Ribbon.

Meagher knew about loss and grief and heartbreak, but more than that, Meagher knew about violence. The most extreme kind killed his wife, Jill.

But instead of channelling his anger into a piece about stranger danger, Meagher did the opposite. A stranger, Adrian Bayley, may have raped and killed his wife, but Meagher knew this was the exception. Violence, particularly of the sexual kind, is far more likely to be perpetrated by people we know.

This reality was challenged over the course of Bayley's trial for the rape and murder of Jill Meagher. Bayley became the "archetypal monster" who women should fear.

"Bayley feeds into a commonly held social myth that most men who commit rape are like him, violent strangers who stalk their victims and strike at the opportune moment. It gives a disproportionate focus to the rarest of rapes, ignoring the catalogue of non-consensual sex happening on a daily basis everywhere on the planet," Meagher wrote at the time.

The monster myth, he called it. The assumption that the men who commit acts of sexual violence are two things: strangers and monsters. More often, they're neither.

According to NSW Rape Crisis Centre executive officer Karen Willis, more than 70 per cent of sexual assaults are carried out by family members, friends, work or school colleagues. A further 29 per cent of rapes are perpetrated by someone the woman meets socially.

In other words, just one per cent of rapes are committed by strangers.

Just one per cent.

So why are we so fixated on the idea that if we're assaulted, it'll be by a man in a dark alleyway?

According to Carolyn Worth of the Centre Against Sexual Assault, it's an assumption that starts young.

"Since they can talk, we warn children about stranger danger, that it's strangers they need to be looking out for. Part of the reason for this, I think, is because it's too difficult to say, 'watch out for Grandad' or 'watch out for Uncle Harry'. It's a difficult conversation to have and it's much easier to be worried about strangers than the people we know," she tells Mamamia.

The episode of Girls that's about powerful men and the women they lure.

Despite this, women take precautions when they're out alone, day and night. Don't park in empty, dimly-lit streets, have your keys nestled between your fingers and your phone on you at all times.

"Random assaults by strangers are the things you begin to get scared of," Worth says. "Every time there's a big media story about an assault on the streets (like Jill Meagher, Masa Vukotic) and I'm asked by the media to comment if the streets are safe, I feel silly saying the streets aren't dangerous. But it's true, the dangers are acquaintances, the people you know from your friends."

This misconception about the assault that's more likely to occur hinders report rates. After all, if we think we're assaulted, but it doesn't fit our initial assumptions about what assault looks like, then it's not surprising that so many women don't report.

According to figures issued by the Australian Institute of Criminology, an estimated 70 per cent of sexual assault incidents are not reported to police.

But the more alarming stats are to come.

In 2013 and NSW, there were 3,951 separate sexual offence incidents reported to police. In that year 715 people were charged and 374 were found guilty, a conviction rate of 52 per cent for the state.

Of those 374 found guilty, a total of 168 people received a full time prison sentence, representing approximately four per cent of the incidents originally reported to police.

They're dense numbers - but they tell a harrowing tale. Of course our perception of sexual assault is skewed when it's too hard to prove the ones that weren't committed by strangers.

For Worth, we don't look for the warning signs; the offer to walk us home or run us home because we don't consider these as acts we should be wary of.

It's not cause for total despair, though. It doesn't mean we need to eye every person that enters our orbit and be wary of who they are and what their intentions may be.

It just means we need to consider re-jigging our definition of sexual assault. Because in doing that we expand our understanding in the process.

Mamamia’s Survivors of Sexual Assault Week is about providing support for the one in five women Australian women who will experience sexual assault in their lifetime. To read more from Survivors of Sexual Assault Week, click here. If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, don't suffer in silence, contact 1800 RESPECT or visit www.1800respect.org.au