WASHINGTON — The federal government is changing its longstanding definition of “forcible rape” in compiling national crime statistics — expanding both the definition of victims, to include males, and the types of sexual assault that will be counted in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report.
The new definition, which has been in the works for several months and was formally announced by the Obama administration on Friday, will replace a narrower definition of “forcible rape” with one that includes, among other things, forcible oral or anal penetration. The narrower definition, which is limited to vaginal penetration, has been used since the 1920s in tracking how often such crimes are reported around the country.
Victim advocacy groups have long criticized the old definition as outdated, saying it left out many crimes that were prosecuted as rape under state laws but that were not reflected in national statistics. Last year, an F.B.I. advisory committee of law enforcement agencies agreed to a Justice Department request to update the definition.
“It’s about more than a definition,” Lynn Rosenthal, the White House adviser on violence against women, said in a conference call with reporters to discuss the change. “It’s a change of our understanding of rape and how seriously we take it as a country.”
The old definition — “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will” — covered only forcible penetration of a woman’s vagina by a penis, and excluded many other kinds of sexual assaults that count as rape under more modern definitions.
For example, the outdated definition did not count forcible anal or oral penetration, the penetration of the vagina or anus with an object or other body part, the rape of a man, or the rape of a woman by another woman.
It also did not cover nonconsensual sex that does not involve physical force — like the rape of people who are unable to grant consent because they are drugged, very drunk or younger than the age of statutory consent in their state, a number that varies across the country.
The new definition, which was drafted with input from local and state law enforcement agencies based on more modernized rape laws, encompasses a broader range of such circumstances. Specifically, it covers the “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”
Many states have long since adopted a more expansive definition of rapes in their criminal laws, and officials said that local police departments had been breaking down their numbers and sending only a fraction of the reported rapes to the F.B.I. to comply with outdated federal standards.
For example, the New York Police Department reported 1,369 rapes in 2010, but only 1,036 were entered in the federal figures. However, the police department in Chicago, which had nearly 1,400 reported sexual assaults in 2010, refused to discard cases that did not fit the narrower federal definition when reporting its crime statistics; as a result, the F.B.I.’s uniform crime report — which reported 84,767 forcible rapes that year — did not include any rapes from that city.
The question of what kinds of sexual assault are properly categorized as “rape” recently received greater scrutiny after the high-profile arrest in November of Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Pennsylvania State University who was charged with sexually abusing several boys across a 15-year period.
Reported acts like some that Mr. Sandusky has been accused of — including allegedlysubjecting a 10-year-old boy to anal penetration — would not be counted in national rape statistics under the old definition, but will be counted in them under the new one. The change to the “rape” definition was already in process before the Sandusky case came to light, however.
Victim advocacy groups have called for years for the old definition to be revised, and in more recent years several prominent leaders of law enforcement agencies had joined that chorus. The movement gained force last summer when elements of the Obama administration — including the office of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who as a senator had been a chief sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act — proposed making a formal request to broaden the definition. The change was approved by Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and announced by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
The revision to the definition of rape is only for the purposes of deciding what kinds of incidents will be included in the “rape” category of the F.B.I.’s compilation of national crime statistics. It does not change the underlying criminal codes governing the prosecution of sexual assaults.
The F.B.I. said it expected that it would take several years for all of the 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies around the country that voluntarily contribute data to its Uniform Crime Report to adjust their reporting to include the wider definition of rape, and that as they do so, the number of reported rapes is likely to rise significantly for several years running.
In the meantime, the bureau said it would ask local police departments to continue to break out their statistics for the number of rapes under the old definition so that it can still make a meaningful comparison in the trend of such crime rates when compared with previous years.
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