Thanks to a post in Fast Company’s Design blog, the Google Ngram Viewer came to my attention today. In brief, it’s an online phrase-usage graphing tool which chards yearly count of letter combos, words, or phrases across a database of more than 5 million books published between 1500 and 2008 which Google has digitized.

Out of curiosity, and since it’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM), I ran the terms “rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, and violence prevention” through it; the results are interesting:

snapshot of usage of violence terms via Google’s Ngram Viewer

A sobering reminder of the road ahead of us; we’ve been talking about rape for a long time, but sexual assault and domestic violence have really only been part of the conversation since the second wave of the feminist movement, and “prevention” — clearly there’s a lot of catching up to do!