It's only natural that people are livid about the false claims made by the former Hofstra University student, 18-year-old Danmell Ndonye. They should be. But it's a mistake to assume that more women are lying than really are.

I'm having Duke deja vu right now.

Because for every African-American woman who is courageous enough to report a rape, there are 15 other African-American women who choose to keep their assaults quiet.

How many of us can honestly know for certain that our own mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, or girlfriends haven't been raped at some point in their lives?

The problem is that cases like what happened at Hofstra and at Duke somehow end up canceling out in people's minds, the real violence that takes place against women every day. It's more convenient for us. It feels better to say, "See, she lied." It excuses the rest of us from having to face, in any real way, the violence that surrounds and impacts each and every one of us in our own lives, and in the lives of the women we love.

In Harlem, the man who raped at least four women over a period of five weeks and terrorized the Hamilton Heights community where I used to live has now been arrested. But what somehow escapes from popular consciousness is the fact that these women ranged in ages from 20's to 60's.

This should remind us of what the experts have been saying all along: Rape is really not about sex or sexual attraction. It's about a need to do violence to women. This need goes deep. And I mean very deep.

I hope that during his year of mandatory domestic violence therapy, Chris Brown is now starting to understanding that he is what is known as a "child witness." This means that when a boy child watches his mother being beaten, the chances of him escaping a similar fate are few and far between. Child witnesses have to be extra conscientious; hyper vigilant. They have to understand that they are almost destined to mimic exactly what they saw. A lack of conscious reprogramming on their part means they will be almost guaranteed to repeat the pattern.

When one in every three women in this country will experience some form of sexual violence or attempted violence (many as children and young girls), we still have an incredibly long way to go in understanding how our culture became so twisted.

I understand why so many of my students are angry with Danmell Ndonye, who seems to be as young and mentally unstable as Crystal Mangum was in the Duke case.

But as I learned from Ms. Mangum's family while covering the Duke story in North Carolina, Crystal had a past that was, until then, conveniently overlooked by other members of the media.

According to police reports, we found that she may have been a victim of previous acts of rape as a young girl, by a former boyfriend and his friends.

Rape experts say that victims often suffer from anxiety, phobias, substance abuse, depression and aggression, to name just a few symptoms. In many cases, they experience the same trauma as victims of war and natural disasters. They are also at increased risk for future victimization - another seldom-discussed little fact.

As often as we think we hear false cries of rape, it's important to remember that only 26 percent of all rapes or attempted rapes are even reported, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

Those that are, do not come out of thin air. More often than not, they come from the truth-telling mouths of our own mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends.

Kristal Brent Zook, Ph.D., is associate professor of journalism at Hofstra University and author of "Black Women's Lives: Stories of Power and Pain." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Kristal Brent Zook.