Rape Gender, In Relative Terms.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I remember a sensitivity training session my college resident adviser team did a few years back, and at one point (I have no idea how) the question about the relative trauma in terms of the gender of the victim was brought up, then quickly dismissed.

I fully realize that this kind of talk can belittle specific victims of a horrific act, and I do not seek to rank rape in terms of severity - it’s bad all the time, in every case, never excusable.

However, for the sake of discussion, has there ever been a study categorizing what types of emotional and/or physical trauma a victim endures in terms of whether they are male or female (strictly adult victims)?

My first thought was that a male victim of rape has the potential to be more traumatized seeing as he would be less likely to have experienced penetrative sex before, and perhaps a man may endure more physical trauma in being forced into a vulnerable position.

But then my second thought was that a women may have the potential to be more traumatized as she would likely have feared the possibility of rape before such an event, and afterword there are more stigmas attached to being a sexually abused woman. I mean to say that if I were to imagine being a man who’d survived rape I don’t know if anyone I’d tell would know how to act, or imagine how it occurred. However if I am told by a woman that she has been raped I (wrongly) assume I have some idea what the circumstances were surrounding it.

In the above situations we would assume a male perpetrator, however I would not define a specific sexual orientation, although if you see it to be relevant by all means include it in your comment.

Any thoughts?

2

The question is life and death for a potential child and where each person is.

If the female is at the point were she desires to give life to a child rape could be blessing, if she has not yet reached that point then rape, or even a just a lie lie about using a condom when he didn’t can cause very much distress.

For the male, the willingness to share his being to procreate should not cause distress, unless the woman would cause the death of the child, which he would also suffer. If the male does not desire children, and the woman has used him to conceive, that too could cause much distress, but only because the male is not at the point were he accepts his ultimate role.

3

Stop the insanity.

4

And not only is kanicbird, er, the usual, but he completely missed the part where most rapes of men are by other men.

5

Not sure if this sort of study exists, though it might be worth just comparing reactions from rape victims of either gender. I imagine there is just too much variance within either group, plus you’ve got to add different reactions from male homosexuals. My WAG about the biggest difference between both groups would be that straight *adult *male rape victims are less likely to be raped by a male they know and trust, whereas women are much more likely to be raped by a boyfriend or spouse. There’s a case to be made for either being more traumatic – having a stranger force something painful on you that you’d never do willingly, or having them taint what is potentially the most pleasurable, intimate act possible – but as I said I’m not sure two groups could be compared in any meaningful way.

6

MOD NOTE

kanicbird. Perhaps you misunderstood the OP. Otherwise, you just hijacked this one. Don’t do this again.

samclem Moderator, General Questions.

No warning issued.

7

I’ve always wondered if the aftermath is worse for male victims. Society has slots for a woman who’s been attacked- support groups, advocacy, and so forth. A man- really doesn’t have a place in all those girl-oriented interventions. Men aren’t as into sharing their feelings as women, so a man who has been traumatized might find himself unable to ask his friends for the support he needs. Lastly, the stereotype is that men are strong and women are victims. Skipping the whole “stereotypes are bad” discussion, a man who has been forced into the role of victim would probably feel diminished in his masculinity.

Just me rambling on. If what I said is complete nonsense, feel free to ignore me.

8

Okay. My caveat. When we talk about predictive factors of psychological trauma, it’s very difficult to generalize. While numerous different factors such as race, class, history of previous trauma, gender etc. play into it, we can’t definitely state that X trauma is worse for X group of people. Effect sizes for many risk factors are quite small or only moderate, suggesting that there is a lot more to the psychology of trauma than we are currently able to articulate.

However, there are some major factors that predispose a person to develop psychological trauma. Probably the biggest one is if the trauma is rape. Rape has consistently been shown across the board to be the most psychologically damaging type of trauma there is.

Gender does play into it, but often on a contextual basis. For example, female rape victims in the military have one the highest rates of PTSD out of any group, but being male in general tends to predispose one to be further traumatized by rape.

[QUOTE=Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, McNally 1999]

Epidemiologic data indicate that rape is the most consistent traumatogenic high-magnitude stressor. <snip>

Both men and women who had been raped categorized it as the most distressing thing that ever happened to them; 9.2% of the women [in a study of trauma survivors] and .7% of the men had experienced this trauma. Among rape victims, 65% of the men and 45.9% of the women had developed PTSD. <snip>

Risk factors [found for all survivors of trauma] include female sex, neuroticism, lower social support, pre-existing psychiatric illness, including mood and anxiety disorders, childhood physical or sexual abuse, having a parent who survived the Holocaust, childhood separation from parents, a family history of mood, anxiety or substance abuse disorders, preliminary family events, and childhood instability.
[/QUOTE]

Another study, which I describe in detail here, found that the three greatest predictive factors of PTSD were severity of the event, level of social support at time of incident, and presence of other stressors in life at time of traumatic event. Female gender was found to be a risk factor but the effect size was smallish.

[QUOTE=Risk Factor Estimates]

The three factors relating to events during and after the trauma (i.e., greater trauma severity, lack of social support, and more subsequent life stress) convey the strongest risk of PTSD, with effect sizes that are individually small to moderate in Cohen’s (1988) terms. Next, there was a group of demographic and prior history variables that had similar effect sizes in the range of .10 to .19, including female gender; lower SES; less education; lower intelligence; a positive psychiatric history; a reported history of abuse, other trauma, or childhood adversity; and a family psychiatric history. These individual effect sizes are generally regarded as small, according to Cohen. Finally, two variables, younger age at trauma and race (minority status), had effect sizes that were weaker still, although highly significant because of the large numbers involved.
[/QUOTE]

This data is largely based on studies of trauma in general, not rape per se, but that’s the best I got for right now.

My personal WAG is that, knowing that social support is so crucial for how people cope with a trauma, men who are raped are going to have high incidence of PTSD because they are significantly less likely to receive social support than women. (I also believe this is why rape trauma has been shown to be so damaging across the board – because social support is significantly less likely than for other traumas.)

I’ll continue digging and see if I can find something more specific to gender and rape.

ETA: OMG kanicbird totally threadraped the rape thread!

9

The bias would be towards women being more traumatised in my view, but the individual variation would be massive, to the point of it being meaningless to compare in my view. Suicide and/or lifelong damage is a not unknown outcome for either gender, so it can ‘max’ for either gender.

Then theres the definition of potentially traumatising issues, and even how you define ‘trauma’. Potentially being pregnant etc and a 20 year+ commitment is an issue men dont have to consider for instance. On the other hand less people will suggest a women is homosexual because of it or possibly going to become a perpetrator themselves. But they will get messages suggesting they asked for it in other ways.

The stranger vs known person, and gender of person you’re likely to continue having relations with vs who you were raped by can play out a number of ways.

The very large majority of women dont get support either. Plenty of women feel diminished as well.

Otara

10

Just finished beers with a friend of mine who figured it would be worse for women for the same reason that Cat Fight touched on. Men are less likely to want to experience penetrative sex in a pleasurable way after the incident, whereas women have now had the default act of sex tainted by rape. Of course not to diminish sexual orientation and what have you, I enjoy playing with a bumhole as much or more as the next guy/girl.

11

Assuming that by rape it is penetrative violent rape, I thought studies had been done that suggested this was worse for men than women?

  1. It brings their masculinity into question
  2. There are less support networks
  3. A man that has been raped is less able to share than a woman.

Now a man being raped by a woman…not sure how that one would play out…

12

Can anyone provide a cite for that?

13

If you mean “how is it done”; the man is normally either tied down or otherwise restrained to negate his strength advantage, and it really isn’t that hard to force an erection. The most reliable, easy method is to suffocate or strangle him. That causes a reflexive erection; there’s a fair chance of killing him that way but then nice people don’t rape in the first place.

14

More commonly, actually, she just sodomizes him with whatever’s handy. Rape is a crime of power and humiliation.

15

With respect to the stigma, what the data generally shows is that there’s more “blame” attached to a victim if his or her sexuality would tend to lead one to expect attraction to a member of the rapist’s class. In order, for a male perpetrator (and all other things being equal), blame would attach most to a gay male victim, then heterosexual female, lesbian, straight male. Plenty of cites available but I’d have to look around for a full-text one.

So provided that the perpetrator is male - which is not the question here - the above statement holds true only when compared to straight men.

16

I thought the exact same thing, and by all rights I should’ve been the one making that post – but I’m very happy to see the term catching on. :slight_smile:

17

I agree, and think it would be especially so with a female abuser, because of the whole “men can’t be raped by women” mindset. But female-on-male sexual abuse or harassment or whatever can be very damaging especially because of the lack of support and sympathy for the victim, and societal prejudices which tend to automatically assume perpetrator/victim roles for each gender.