When we talk about the problem of rape and sexual assault we are usually focused on women as victims and men as perpetrators. There is no shortage of real and serious problems to focus on under those terms of reference. As more or less a separate topic we talk about child sexual abuse and pedophilia. What generally gets left out of the discussion is adult men who are victims of sexual assault. The conventional understanding has been that they make around 10% of victims. It seems that more recent surveys are beginning to report a significantly higher percentage of the total incidence of sexual assault.
When Men Are Raped: A new study reveals that men are often the victims of sexual assault, and women are often the perpetrators.
Last year the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men. The number seemed so high that it prompted researcher Lara Stemple to call the Bureau of Justice Statistics to see if it maybe it had made a mistake, or changed its terminology. After all, in years past men had accounted for somewhere between 5 and 14 percent of rape and sexual violence victims. But no, it wasn’t a mistake, officials told her, although they couldn’t explain the rise beyond guessing that maybe it had something to do with the publicity surrounding former football coach Jerry Sandusky and the Penn State sex abuse scandal.
Stemple, who works with the Health and Human Rights Project at UCLA, had often wondered whether incidents of sexual violence against men were under-reported. She had once worked on prison reform and knew that jail is a place where sexual violence against men is routine but not counted in the general national statistics. Stemple began digging through existing surveys and discovered that her hunch was correct. The experience of men and women is “a lot closer than any of us would expect,” she says. For some kinds of victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences. Stemple concluded that we need to “completely rethink our assumptions about sexual victimization,” and especially our fallback model that men are always the perpetrators and women the victims.
One thing that has long been clear is that anyone attempting to study the problem of sexual assault must go beyond official crime statistics. There is great pressure on victims both female and male to slink off in shame and humiliation and not report the crime to authorities. There is also the problem with the way that the FBI has traditionally defined the crime of rape by limiting it to vaginal penetration of females. The definition has been recently revised.
There is the fairly well understood situation of men being raped anally by other men. As a gay man, I have in the past found myself in sexual situations that were unpleasant and somewhat abusive. While I wouldn't consider any of them to have risen to the level of rape/sexual assault, thinking about the experiences has been sufficient to give me a basis for personal empathy when listening to women talk about the experience and feelings associated with sexual assault.
This article from Slate is dealing with something that comes at the subject from a different angle.
Data hasn’t been calculated under the new FBI definition yet, but Stemple parses several other national surveys in her new paper, “The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions,” co-written with Ilan Meyer and published in the April 17 edition of the American Journal of Public Health. One of those surveys is the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, for which the Centers for Disease Control invented a category of sexual violence called “being made to penetrate.” This definition includes victims who were forced to penetrate someone else with their own body parts, either by physical force or coercion, or when the victim was drunk or high or otherwise unable to consent. When those cases were taken into account, the rates of nonconsensual sexual contact basically equalized, with 1.270 million women and 1.267 million men claiming to be victims of sexual violence.
“Made to penetrate” is an awkward phrase that hasn’t gotten any traction. It’s also something we instinctively don’t associate with sexual assault. But is it possible our instincts are all wrong here? We might assume, for example, that if a man has an erection he must want sex, especially because we assume men are sexually insatiable. But imagine if the same were said about women. The mere presence of physiological symptoms associated with arousal does not in fact indicate actual arousal, much less willing participation. And the high degree of depression and dysfunction among male victims of sexual abuse backs this up. At the very least, the phrase remedies an obvious injustice. Under the old FBI definition, what happened to Rafael Yglesias would only have counted as rape if he’d been an 8-year-old girl. Accepting the term “made to penetrate” helps us understand that trauma comes in all forms.
I am sure that there are a lot of people who will have difficulty in processing the plausibility of this as sexual assault on a par with the experience of female victims. The article goes into more detail, particularly in terms of prison situations that involve female guards and male prisoners.
has an article on the subject.
I don't have any sweeping conclusions to draw from this. However, anybody who has tried to make a reasonably serious exploration of issues involving sexuality and gender is pretty likely to come to a couple of conclusions. What people actually do doesn't correspond very closely to what traditional culture has told them they are supposed to do. The other obvious conclusion is: it's complicated.