The pattern of sexual assaults on women around Toronto looks like coffee spills on a map — the Christie Pits area, Ryerson University, the York University campus. I don’t know what this means. One man? Two or three? What does he — or they — do to women in this city?

The police say the Christie Pits cases refer to a man coming up behind women and sexually assaulting them. “Sexual assault” covers many acts, including various gropings in the shadowy evening and the dark night.

VIDEO: Sex assaults have residents on edge

I have come to the conclusion that Canada as a society is generally closed to free information, and these “sexual assaults” are a case study in the endless official concealment of facts that citizens should know.

Since I am generally a catastrophizer — women have good reason to be — I assumed a serial rapist had appeared in Toronto, gearing up for murder. I feared for friends and family, and indeed any woman.

But I didn’t know what I was dreading because the police wouldn’t tell me, as is their wont.

• Hundreds march to protest sex assaults in Christie Pits area

It is Toronto police information policy to lump all attacks under the “sexual assault” label. Although Ryerson and York provide more details of the attacks on their turf — which is helpful and praiseworthy — the Toronto police won’t budge. They have justification. In 1983, as the Toronto Star’s Jayme Poisson has reported, “rape” as a specific crime was deleted from the Criminal Code and replaced with a more generic term covering a variety of acts.

The law refers to sexual assault, sexual assault causing bodily harm, and the strangely phrased “aggravated sexual assault.” And we’re as confused as ever because all sexual assault sounds “aggravated” to me.

And it doesn’t have to be internal. There are plenty of things you can do to people from outside their flesh that will score their souls. I’ve been groped. I’ve been attacked on the street from behind. I shall never forget it.

All women secretly wonder if they could survive being raped: the terror, pain, shock, blood, the frantic tactics women devise to live through it, the fear of death, the desire to die, the humiliations inflicted by cops and doctors if you call for help.

So I understand the legal change. The word “rape” was so draped with horror. It made women hesitate to report it, not that they didn’t have other good reasons, as the brave and wonderful activist Jane Doe made sickeningly clear in her excoriation of the police after her 1986 rape, her case the centrepiece of how rape victims are treated with contempt.

There were good reasons to legally delete the “rape” word, feminist Michele Landsberg explained at the time in her classic 1985 book, Women & Children First. “The new ‘sexual assault’ laws will closely parallel the already existent non-sexual assault laws,” she wrote. It was often impossible to prove vaginal penetration, which was to the rapist’s benefit. So the awfulness became layered by degree, which helped prosecutors.

We’re better off in some ways, worse in others.

If the police were to announce that women in the Bloor-Christie area were groped, the story might be dismissed by some. Oh, it’s nothing compared to rape, people might say. Or not. Does it matter what people say?

Toronto police spokeswoman Meaghan Gray told Poisson, “Every woman responds in a different way to the sexual assault, and it’s important for us to send the message that they are all serious, that they are all investigated seriously, and to get into the specifics of what happened doesn’t contribute to that.”

I think Gray means that the victims all respond differently. Or does she mean that all women reading the news of “sexual assault” respond differently?

The journalist Martha Gellhorn was raped by a stranger at her Kenyan home when she was 80 years old. She wrote to a friend determinedly, “I remember reading about two old sisters, much older than I am, and two little girls, aged eight and nine, being raped and murdered . . . I got off lightly. Fear is only damaging if you let it change your attitudes and actions, which certainly I shall not.”

Alice Sebold, 18, was raped in a tunnel on the Syracuse University campus. Her rapist urinated on her, among other tortures. When she told the police about her ordeal, they told her she was “lucky.” The last girl attacked in that tunnel had been murdered and dismembered, they said.

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Fifteen years later, Sebold felt finally able to write about her rape. She called her memoir Lucky, the one word that did not describe her at all.

Women react differently to rape, and to groping, with whatever strength they can summon. Their fears when they hear the news about other attacks are not uniform. If there’s no group response to a varied crime, why is there a jargon-ish group name?

The police should tell women what has happened thus far, so they know what to fear. Women are given very little. Can’t we at least be given a right to honest, informed fear?