Thanks to TyphonBlue for inspiring this piece.

Rape is generally seen as a women’s issue.  People view women as the primary victims of rape, and legal and societal institutions reflect that.  It’s just common knowledge, and it’s treated as such.  The problem, of course, is that many pieces of so-called “common knowledge” turn out to not really be true.  This is no exception.  When the largest and most authoritative survey on sexual and intimate partner violence is reviewed in a gender neutral fashion, it turns out that the facts may disagree with this notion of “male perpetrator, female victim”.

In order to even discuss this, though, we first must have a clear definition of rape.  After all, it’s it’s pretty hard to talk about something when we can’t even properly describe what it is.

That’s easy.  Rape is forced sex.  Right?

That’s still a bit unclear, though.  What “sex” actually involves varies from person to person quite a bit.  For some people, sex means “penis in vagina (or anus) with thrusting for a period of time”, and that’s it.  For others, sex is a more inclusive term that includes oral sex, mutual masturbation and a whole slew of other acts.

The definition of rape can really have as wide or narrow a definition of “sex” as the party creating it wants, but that definition should be designed to be consistent and egalitarian; perpetrators or victims should not be excluded simply due to demographics.

This may seem obvious but to many people, people who should really know better, it’s apparently anything but.  For example, at the moment of writing England and Wales, India, Northern Ireland, and Israel have laws that explicitly state that men, and only men, can be guilty of actually raping someone.  In other words, a woman who forced a man to have sex with her would be charged with a lesser crime, usually “sexual assault.”  New Zealand and Scotland don’t explicitly state that only men can be rapists, but their rapists must have a penis which for most intents and purposes does the same thing.  Many other countries have similarly problematic definitions.

Some other countries are doing somewhat better.  The United States, for example, has recently attempted to make some steps with its definition of rape to become more gender-neutral.  From 1927 to 2012, the FBI used “The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” as its definition of rape for its annual Uniform Crime Reports.  This definition by default ignores male victims and female perpetrators.  Furthermore, it can be read to imply that physical force is required for rape, something that simply isn’t true.

In 2012, the definition was changed to “to “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”  This is similar to a number of definitions currently in use elsewhere in the first world.  This definition is an improvement because it acknowledges that rape doesn’t have to be “forcible”; as long as the victim does not consent, the incident might be rape.  Additionally, it includes rape with an object which can be just as traumatizing as rape with actual body parts.

More importantly - and this is thought of by many as a large victory - this definition at first seems to be relatively gender-egalitarian.  Women can rape just as men can, and men can be raped just as women can.

Unfortunately, the operative words here are “at first”; this definition isn’t as inclusive as it could be, and is far less inclusive than it initially appears.  This definition, and its usage in the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Reports, portrays rapists as having to penetrate, and victims as having to be penetrated.  This might not seem that bad until you realize that a ciswoman forcing a cisman to have heterosexual intercourse would not be considered rape.  For more discussion on this particular issue, see our post on it here.

While perhaps this definition doesn’t directly affect any laws, it can greatly influence policy and the public mindset through skewing of statistics, and many state legislatures take cues from the federal government.  It may not be direct law now, but it’s certainly going to influence them in the future.

Probably the best example of an exceedingly influential study that uses this definition is the Center for Disease Control’s 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey.  The 2010 CDC NISVS is widely considered one of the best resources in existence in regards to sexual assault and violence statistics in the United States.  

As you’d expect, the NIPSVS found that the number of men raped in the past 12 months was absolutely miniscule compared to the number for women, and that men were the perpetrators in almost all cases of rape.

After all, women raping using their vaginas wasn’t considered rape for the purposes of these statistics: this was considered “other sexual violence”.  Considering how the study’s definitions excluded the vast majority of male victims, is it really any surprise the results were so skewed?

Luckily, the study also recorded forced envelopment (albeit in the wrong category), something that many other studies fail to do.  With these figures, we can figure out the real statistics for rape in the United States.

These tables can be found on pages 18 and 19 of the report, or 28 and 29 of the pdf.

1,267,000 men were made to penetrate within the last 12 months.  This figure really isn’t far from the 1,270,000 women forced into sex within the last 12 months.

In other words, when the rape of men is actually counted properly, an about equal number of men and women are raped in the United States annually.

The “lifetime” figures in the chart seems to disagree with this idea.  While the 12-month rape figures are about even between genders, the women’s rape figure is about four times that of the men’s “made to penetrate” figure.  In fact, the lifetime figure for men is only five times that of the 12-month figure for men.

Unless 2010 represented an incredible boom in the number of female rapists or it’s a small group of men who are repeatedly being raped, the lifetime figures for men have something wrong with them.

TyphonBlue’s Genderratic article has a pretty convincing explanation having to do with traumatic memory recovery and false negatives; basically, people tend to stop recalling past trauma when prompted after a while.  In fact, this tendency is far stronger in men than women.  For example, women with a documented history of childhood sexual abuse were four times more likely to recall their trauma than their male counterparts.  More research into this topic may be necessary, but it’s a pretty sensible theory.

The perception that men really don’t get raped much at all is reinforced by almost everything that has anything to do with rape.  Laws and the courts that interpret them give far more attention to male perpetrators and female victims.  So do nongovernmental organizations like RAINN which create campaigns to “teach men not to rape”.  Lots of people don’t even realize male rape has happened when they witness it because it just doesn’t cross people’s minds that sometimes, men just don’t want to have sex.  It’s a vicious self-perpetuating cycle of victim erasure where ignorance of the problem is used as proof of its absence.

-DJ