It came up in the recent rape threads, where it was something of a hijack, someone pointed out that MRAs object to envelopment (women raping with their vaginas) not being counted, some people said rape was a primarily women’s issue, someone said the rape of men was overwhelmingly either something that happened in prison or something that happened to boys at the hands of men. There seems to be a great desire to reinforce traditional gender roles, and a huge resistance to the idea that women can be perpetrators too.
Obviously there is prison rape, as documented in the Human Rights Watch report “No Escape”. That on it’s own rivals all rape of women in America for prevalence, using the figures in the report and the FBI figures for rape. It’s also widely seem as a subject for humour, soap dropping and so on, which is not the case for the rape of women, and is mostly perpetrated by the guards, agents of the state provided by the taxpayer, not just random predators. I saw a headline the other day about Obama having a plan to reduce it, which is nice but about twenty years later than it should have been.
There’s also the rape of underage boys, the Canadian government report “The Invisible Boy” is quite informative, and makes it clear that boys are about as likely to girls to be molested, and women are as likely as men to be their victimisers. Boys, it is further reported, are much less likely to report their abuse, less likely to be believed if they do. And of course they may well be told they were “lucky” to be raped, if raped by a woman. Again, something not normally said to female rape victims. There was a recent news story about a Canadian university where a group were trying to set up a men’s centre, which the local feminists were strongly against. The article I read about that covered another mens’ centre already operating in Canada, and most of the men they deal with are men dealing with the consequences of being sexually abused as children. There’s a documentary on that issue by the BBC on youtube, which includes a woman who raped a twelve year old boy, she held him down and forced him to have sex and then pushed him off a bridge so he wouldn’t talk, but couldn’t be charged with rape because women can’t be charged with raping men. I saw a debate over feminism, in which a young man points out that marital rape was “legal” until the early nineties, and an anti-feminist points out that women could also rape their husbands. But no-one pointed out that women can still rape their husbands, or any other man, and not be charged with rape, whereas husbands have been able to be charged with rape since the beginning of the nineties.
Then there is rape as a weapon of war. I first came across this when Eve Ensler drew attention to it happening in the Congo. To women, of course. But this page cites the JAMA as claiming about 40% of victims of sexual violence in the Congo are men, and quotes the author of the study claiming the reaction was anger at the plight of men coming to public attention. Eve Ensler’s charity also, along with Google and the UN, provides reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation, and even a women-only “City of Joy”, where women can live without fear or shame. Male victims, on the other hand, stand to be arrested for homosexuality if they come forward, are more likely to be rejected by their communities, have no international support network and are more likely to have suffered major permanent damage without the promise of reconstructive surgery. In addition 40% of female victims report their attackers to have been female, as do 10% of male victims.
This TIME article claims a fifth of all Tamil men faced sexual abuse in the Sri Lankan civil war and that only 4% of publications on combat rape even mention male victims.
Then there’s more normal rape, just sex which happens without consent, maybe with violence, that sort of thing. “Rape rape”, you might say. Not in prison or a warzone, not against children. As I said further up, someone mentioned MRA claims about that in another thread. I believe he was referring to this female MRA’s article on the CDC 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, which she says claims men were as likely to be “forced to penetrate” in the twelve months preceding the survey as women were the be raped. The lifetime figure, on the other hand, is three times as high for women, which she suggests is because men have a much lower disclosure rate. She presents several studies showing both that men are less likely to remember having been sexually victimised when they have an established history of sexual victimisation, and that eyewitnesses and victims both revise their memories overtime to minimise the extent of female-perpetrated violence. The men raped report female abused in 80% of cases, making women about 40% of rapists overall, accepting men forced to have sex as being rape victims, of course. This similar article by the acceptable face of anti-feminism also claims women use similar methods of coercion and so on, based on similar sources.
There are also these two studies (1,2), both of which look at victimisation by women, and conclude men and women are roughly as likely as each other to have been forced to have sex by the opposite sex, and to have been taken advantage of while unconscious or incapacitated and to have been pressured into sex, both in general and by their most recent heterosexual partner. But I don’t know how reliable they are, although I see no obvious faults in them.
So it would seem that men are, in total, more likely to be raped than women, and the impact will be just as great while sympathy will be harder to come by. In addition women are just as likely to be sexually aggressive against children, and also perform a wholly under-recognised role in heterosexual rape, which is also unlikely to be taken seriously. But despite that we allow people to act like rape is a women’s issue and a feminist issue, rather than just a violent crime like any other. Like any other violent crime, it’s more likely for men to be the victims, and more likely to be accepted when men are the victims.
Rape is a criminal issue, like any other violent crime, not a women’s issue. The minimising and blaming of rape victims is more a men’s than a women’s issue.
