ELWIN GREEN

Men, this is a quiz. To take it, you will need a pen, some paper and 10 minutes. Question No. 1: Would you please name the women you know?

By “women,” I simply mean females 18 years old and up. Make a list.

Start with family — wife, daughters, Mom, sisters, aunts, cousins. Add friends — coworkers, fellow church/mosque/synagogue/temple members, neighbors, relatives of your male friends. Throw in the woman you’re dating, if you are, and ones you have dated before. Add casual acquaintances — professional colleagues, classmates — women you don’t know well, but you know their names. We just need names.

Give yourself five minutes for this.

Question No. 2: How many women do you know?

Count the names. If the total is less than 30, you probably need to think some more, because women are half the adult population, and you know more than 60 adults, right?

Take your time. Consult the contact list on your phone or your Rolodex if you need to.

When you feel like you have a good, honest list — and therefore, a good, honest number — go to the next question.

Question No. 3: When I divide the answer to Question No. 2 by six, what number do I get?

Integers only, so round up or down. If your answer to No. 2 is 47, don’t say 7.83, say 8.

Now, use that number to fill in the blank for the next question.

Question No. 4: Which ____ women who you know by name are rape victims?

Not expecting that one? Sorry. But here’s the deal, as reported by RAINN — the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network — one of every six American women has been the victim of a rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.

Let this sink in: One of six of the women on your list, women you know by name, are likely to be rape victims. So look at that list again and ask yourself: Which acquaintances? Which co-workers? Which family members?

Ah — you don’t know? You don’t know which women in your family have been raped, or nearly so?

Question No. 5: Why don’t you know that?

Because they don’t talk about it, that’s why.

The obvious, rational and legally justifiable thing to do is to report a rape or near-rape immediately, right?

Now let this sink in: More than two-thirds — 68 percent — of sexual assaults are not reported to police. Ever.

Why is that? Well, at a basic level human behavior is motivated by fear and desire, by pain

and pleasure. If women do not report sexual assaults, the most basic explanation is that they fear that the pain of telling the truth would be worse than the pain of keeping the secret.

Victims’ lack of reporting strengthens and expands the wall of silence that we have built around the subject of sexual assault: Mum’s the word, ma’am, and when you come out of shock, pretend it didn’t happen.

If that means you have to self-medicate with alcohol (victims are 13 times more likely to abuse alcohol) or drugs (victims are 26 times more likely to abuse drugs), then go right ahead. But what you must not do is talk about it. It is more important for the rest of us to maintain our comfort than for you to be healed of your pain.

There’s a name for the whole set of beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that make it easier to commit rape and harder to report rape. It’s called “rape culture.”

Rape culture produces these results: Only 32 of every 100 rapes are reported to police. Of those 32 reports, seven lead to an arrest. Of those seven arrests, three are referred to prosecutors. Of those three prosecutions, two lead to felony convictions.

In short, only two of 100 rapists spend even a single day in prison. The other 98 continue to walk free, to rape more women, including ones you know.

The reality of rape culture explains the question, “Why didn’t all those women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Cosby come forward sooner?”

But this is the wrong question, because it is based on a false assumption. It assumes that women who have been sexually assaulted usually do come forward to say so, that reporting sexual assault before the statute of limitations runs out is the norm. It’s not. It’s just not. So, for those who have been asking that question, I’d like to suggest this one: “How can we men make it less difficult for women to report rape or sexual assault?”

That’s not for us to answer on our own, of course, that’s for us also to ask the women we care about. But here are a few questions that we can, and need to, answer for ourselves:

“What would we do if one of our buddies, one of our bros, was accused of rape?”

“What would we do if we learned that a woman in our familywassexuallyassaulted?”

“You know that ‘no’ means ‘no,’ right?”

A sexual assault happens every 107 seconds in America. If you’ve spent 10 minutes doing this quiz and reading this piece, it’s likely that five women in America were assaulted while you were doing so.

Let that sink in.