Why Yes, Rape Can Be Gendered – Against Men (and by Women)

NOTE: I am borrowing from the work of Jacob Taylor at Toy Soldiers for this article and I thank him for having done the hard work in digging out some key references.

There is quite a bit written about the "gendered nature of abuse" and much of it is often used to silence or minimize male survivors.  When stats are reviewed that actually treat male and female survivors equally by asking the SAME questions and using the SAME terminology to classify the results, then the numbers change drastically.  See (http://toysoldier.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/yes-women-do-rape-boys/) for links to the studies and more in depth discussion:

• In 1994, David Finkelhor published a paper reporting that women commit 20 percent of the sexual abuse against boys.
• In 1996, the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect found that women committed 25 percent of sexual abuse against children.
• Both the 2000 American Association of University Women study and the Cameron study showed that about 42 percent of students reported abuse by women.
• The 2005 Long-Term Consequences of Childhood Sexual Abuse by Gender of Victim study found that women committed 38 percent of the abuse against boys.
• According to a 2008 University of British Columbia study of homeless youths, nearly half the youths said at least one woman sexually exploited them, and 1 in 3 said that only women exploited them.
• The 2008-09 Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth report found that of the staff members who sexually abused juveniles, women committing 95 percent of that abuse.
• In 2009, ChildLine received 2,142 calls from children abused by women, and found that boys reported more abuse by women (1,722 cases) than by men (1,651 cases).

Then, we have recent CDC study which intentionally misclassified rape against men by women as "forced to penetrate others", in which case when men were victims, the perps were 79.2% women and when men had been coerced (threatened, blackmailed, etc.) into sex, women were the perps 83.6% of the time.  When men do this to women, the CDC properly classifies it as rape.  However, when women do it men, the CDC classifies it otherwise.  Yet some people use such clearly biased and skewed stat models to beat male survivors into submission with diatribes about how rape is gendered solely as man against woman.  When men are raped, they are just victims of Teh Patriarchy.

From page 24 of the CDC report, where apparently men cannot be raped by women:

For male victims, the sex of the perpetrator varied by the type of sexual violence experienced. The majority of male rape victims (93.3%) reported only male perpetrators. For three of the other forms of sexual violence, a majority of male victims reported only female perpetrators: being made to penetrate (79.2%), sexual coercion (83.6%), and unwanted sexual contact (53.1%). For non-contact unwanted sexual experiences, approximately half of male victims (49.0%) reported only male perpetrators and more than one-third (37.7%) reported only female perpetrators (data not shown).

See http://toysoldier.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other/ for more information and discussion.

So, it does appear that for men, rape is gendered and that in some classifications of rape (even though the CDC intentionally misclassifies such to skew the numbers), women are the primary perpetrators.

It is far past time to stop promoting and defending statistical models that intentionally erase MILLIONS of survivors simply because they have the wrong genitalia to fit certain preconceived political arguments.  Maybe before shouting "What About Teh Menz" in a mocking fit, you might want to check yourself and make sure you aren't part of the problem by promoting intentionally skewed stats that misrepresent the facts and hurt other survivors.  It is one thing for a person to "speak the truth about their own experience", but quite another to misuse stats or create hierarchies of survivorhood based on gender.

If we are going to have adult conversations on rape and gender, then let's use real facts that treat survivors equally, rather than tortured stats that treat the same acts differently based solely on the gender of the victim and perpetrator.

That would be far more compassionate and mature than continuing to mock us in ignorance.