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Are levels of sexual violence in a country prior to the onset of conflict predictive of levels of sexual violence in that country during conflict? Most of the scholarship on sexual violence focuses on the phenomenon during armed conflict, and in general the assumption made by these scholars is that conflict exacerbates the sexual violence problem. Cross-sectional analysis appears to support this assertion; however, we argue that the comparison group used by cross-sectional analyses is inappropriate for answering the question of whether conflict impacts the amount of sexual violence in a country. Instead, we propose that the appropriate comparison is between peactime levels of sexual violence and conflict levels of sexual violence for the same country. To test this relationship, we first construct a dataset measuring the level of sexual violence in a sample of 170 countries for the time period 1999-2011, using a …