Of course rape becomes confused with sexual assault. But sexual assault includes a much larger number of actions of lesser severity than rape.  Activists like to talk about rape until the emotional loading is accomplished then they start throwing in the numbers for sexual assault hoping that whoever is reading mistakenly thinks that those numbers represent the number of rapes.
The same thing occurs with "domestic violence" and assault/battery. The activists paint the picture with tales of women being battered and then once the emotional loading has occurred they switch to talking about rates of domestic violence, which include things like slamming a door, in the hope that the reader will react as if they are all cases of battery.
Want to solve the sexual assault crisis? Stop calling anything things "sexual assault" unless they are actually rape. Give all the lesser offences a different name.