LONDON — It took one man 32 years to speak out about the time he was raped by a group of older boys at his high school in Britain, and three more years before he reported the attack to the police.

“I was 14 years old and didn’t even know what rape was,” Noah, a private tutor, recalled in a phone interview on Friday. “I felt ashamed and was worried that if I told any of my friends what happened, they would think I was gay or weak.”

Noah’s story illustrates how the culture of fear that has long kept survivors of sexual assault silent has been breaking down in recent years. His case was among 12,130 reports of sexual offenses against men and boys in England and Wales in a one-year period between 2016 and 2017, according to figures released to The New York Times and other news agencies on Friday.

That number is more than triple the figure reported between 2006 and 2007, when 3,819 were noted by the police, according to the Office for National Statistics.