Rape happens when someone takes sex from you without your permission. It is a shocking thing, to realize that someone thinks that your body is theirs to do what they want with. It is dehumanizing. It makes you realize that your feelings, your thoughts, your autonomy, don't matter to your rapist-- a person who is often someone you know: your boss, significant other, a date, a family member... It's a terrible shock to feel so dehumanized. The violation makes you lose trust in people (I used to assume that I could trust everyone not to rape me: friends, family, strangers-- well, I it's not true).

I've never considered the difference between "rape" and "sexual assault" until noticing the fact that there are two different questions on this forum; therefore, asked to define them separately, I'll say that "rape" applies to any situation that involves a negative confirmation (e.g., "no," "stop," "I don't want to," etc.) on the part of one of the participants, or in which a participant says "I do not want to do [xyz]" and their partner does [xyz] anyway. Boundaries are clearly defined in some way and are clearly violated or broken.

Any unwanted sexual contact that involves penetrating the surface plane of the body. Unwanted or forced sexual use of any orifice or any interior portion of the body.

Forced sex.

The English word "rape" is derived from "seize" -- that is, after the invaders killed the men, they would seize the women and children for sex and slavery.

So, rape, in our common parlance, involves some kind of physical force.

However, that definition has been shown inadequate for legal purposes -- in that proof of physical force requires physical resistance, thus requiring victims to prove that they resisted. That's why the term "sexual assault" was adopted -- because it does not carry the implied requirement for victims to prove that they resisted. See my other entry in the sexual assault topic.

Check out the definition of "assault and battery."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_and_battery

For a long time, Illinois was one of the states that defined "battery" as a crime that involves contact, but "assault" did not involve contact. Assault was anything that put you "in reasonable apprehension of a battery" -- essentially a threat.

I'm not objecting to changes in terminology -- clearly a lot of people thought that "assault" was a more serious word than "battery," so it's OK to use "assault" to talk about a more serious crime. But I think it's useful to ponder the flow between contact and non-contact, verbal and non-verbal.