Donald Trump addressed his comments about grabbing women ‘by the pussy’ during the second presidential debate, saying ‘Yes, I am embarrassed and I hate it, but it is locker room talk and it is one of those things.’ Picture: Paul J. Richards/AFP

One in five women will be a victim of sexual violence.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve fallen back on those statistics. Sometimes it’s on radio, sometimes a TV panel show and sometimes it’s a simply a dinner party disagreement in my own home. I’ll be arguing with someone — usually a man — who refuses to acknowledge how pervasive violence against women really is.

On one such occasion, I was at a bar with friends, when I reeled off the numbers. An acquaintance took issue with the statistics I’d quoted.

“So you’re saying,” he said, gesturing around the booth at the two men and three other women sitting with us. “That at least one of you girls and what, a dozen of the women in this bar have been assaulted? Seems like a stretch to me”.

I exchanged a furtive glance with my female friends and said nothing …

The political world has been rattled this week by reports of US Presidential candidate Donald Trump boasting about molesting women. “Grab ‘em by the pussy” was the delightful way Trump phrased it.

Many Trump supporters have turned their backs on him, apparently shocked.

But you know who isn’t shocked? Women.

Because women know that this kind of language, this “locker room talk” as Trump calls it, is actually pretty common. Even more alarmingly, the physical manifestation of this sort of language is pretty common too.

Don’t believe me? Open Twitter right now.

Yesterday, New York Times best selling author Kelly Oxford tweeted in response to Trump’s “pussy” comments. She shared her first (note the language, her first, not only) experience of sexual assault with her twitter followers: “Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I’m 12”. Then she asked them to do the same.

The response has been enormous. Thousands of women have been tweeting their earliest encounters with sexual assault. At one point, Oxford was receiving tweets detailing horrific experiences of girls as young as seven, at a rate of more than one per second.

Later that night at the bar, I was walking home with two girlfriends. Heels in hands after a long evening of dancing and too many vodka, lime and sodas, one of them asked casually: “So, which of us is the one in three?”

“Me,” replies the other, before telling the story of a rape I’d previously known nothing about. We listened silently as she spoke about going to university to live on campus and building her first home away from home. Then at age 19 losing all the safety and security of the place she’d learned to love when a fellow student pushed his way into her tiny single-bed-and-a-desk room late one Tuesday night.

“How about you?” she asked, without looking up at us.

Our other girlfriend talked about being 14 and at a party where older kids were present. Year 12 boys had offered her alcohol in exchange for sex. When she refused they began touching her hair and face before she ran away, catching the first bus she saw without even checking where it was going.

As for me? A mate and I were 17, travelling on a near-empty train carriage when a man pulled out his penis and started masturbating while staring straight at us. We got off at the next stop giggling and giggling before suddenly the giggles turned into tears. We were terrified. Later on, my friend was sick in a rubbish bin on the street.

At least one of us? Try all of us.

Three out of three.

Story, after story, after story that have been kept quiet for years, sometimes even decades. The silence is often because women don’t know how to talk about it. We don’t know what to call it, we question whether it’s “serious enough” to name. We don’t know where the line is between a come-on and a crime. As girls, we aren’t sure when boys are just being boys and when it’s something you should speak up about.

We’re embarrassed and we’re ashamed. We can’t find the words … or the permission.

Jamila Rizvi is a writer, presenter and news.com.au columnist. You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter.