Rape will be the main topic here since I have recently heard rape argued from a perspective that it is a crime where women are the only victims or the male aspect is completely ignored. I am not suggesting crimes against women are any less important. There are many facts we can see from statistics like women are more often the one who files for divorce and receive custody 84% of the time. ("A voice for men" list a lot of information on male victims with sources.) However, rape of men is not so clear. So are women the only ones who suffer from rape? I define rape as one person forcing a sexual activity on another without informed consent.
One issue when researching rape is that until January 2012 the FBI didn't include rape of men as victims which means than any crime statistics you see only report women victims with male rapist. Even those numbers are problematic because the old 1927 definition required that the victim physically resisted (IE: forcible rape, think "legitimate rape").
This means that the 10 victims of Sandusky were not reported as a crime because his victims are male. Of course, Sandusky was found guilty of the crime but his victims are not reported as a part of crime statistics for rape. However it is still a problem because even the updated definition doesn't include women as the rapist. According to the FBI you must have a penis to commit the crime of rape. Imagine if Sandusky had been a woman and what the general attitudes toward the victims would be. I have often heard male victims of female rape as lucky especially if their rapist is attractive. Even when those women are brought to trial they often receive lighter sentences for their crime then a male with similar offenses.
Almost every where that talks about male victims is using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. (This is where the 1 in 10 men victim comes from.) In 2010, there were 85,000 recorded rapes in the USA by the FBI UCR. The National Crime Victimization survey recorded 189,000. Why is there a large gap and how many of those are men? This is not as reliable as crime statistics because there's no way to tell if all the male victims disclose their assault to the survey. Another issue is the survey ignores female-male and female-female rape. Thus the survey can only be used as a guide and not as fact. The problem seems to be wide spread according to Lara Stemple of the U of California's Health and Human Rights Project, of the 4,000 International nongovernmental organizations (NGO) reports addressing wartime sexual violence only 3% mention male victims in passing.
In the Congo men were often the victim of rape and sometimes the aggressor was a women. In addition, these male victims were often castrated and/or penetrated with tree branches. However, we usually only hear about the women victims. In the Congo, 22% of men and 30% of women were the victim of rape. We should expect a higher percentage of men when you consider that men were more likely (2 to 1) the victim of violence. Homosexuality is also illegal in the area (men who are raped could be found guilty of homosexual crimes) and with the social stigma its difficult to determine the exact number due to under reporting by the victims.
Denise A. Hines has done a lot of research in the last 5 years on this topic and she shows the genders are largely equal when it comes to abuse in relationships. This information is largely based on surveys because statistics are not available.
So are women the only ones who suffer rape? I don't know. Technically no one can say much about men because there's almost no data. No one can even say how often men are raped without large margins of error. It's difficult to say how often a crime occurs when the action in question it's not considered a crime.
The absence of evidence for male victims of rape should raise concerns since the information we do have indicates that men are the victims of rape. The only way to fix this is to treat rape the same way for both men and women.
Sources:
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-men
- http://www.theprisma.co.uk/2012/05/13/the-untold-story-of-raped-men/
- http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-01-06/fbi-rape-definition-adds-men/52398350/1
- http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/facultybio.cfm?id=687
- http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/dhines/results.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Crime_Victimization_Survey
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_rape
- http://www.avoiceformen.com/mission-and-values/about/
- http://owningyourshit.blogspot.com/2012/08/transcript-of-are-vaginas-in-house.html
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUPxRYWpglQ
