Toxic victim-consciousness is the process by which women are made into class “acted upon” by emphasizing a disproportionate victimhood where none actually exists or isn’t proven.
In “Women Do Not Benefit: The Science“, I outlined how toxic victimhood limits women and socializes them to undermine their own achievements. Toxic victimhood promotes the perception that women are “acted upon” rather than actors. When a society is promoting toxic victimhood, there is no need to limit women overtly through legal, financial or social restrictions. Instead women will limit themselves through their own mental foot-binding.
Here I will look at a recent and very successful effort to manufacture toxic female victimhood whole-cloth, the CDC’s 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey.
The much publicized figure on rape from this survey is that 1 in 5 women versus 1 in 71 men are victims of rape in their lifetime. (If the rate men are raped is reported on at all.)
Let’s see exactly how the female-as-victim juggernaught churned this nugget out.
Question: When is Rape Not Rape? Answer: When a Rapist Uses Her Vagina
The first thing to note is that the NIPSVS decided that men being forced to have sex with women isn’t rape. Let’s think about this again. The NIPSVS finds that men are the majority perpetrators of rape. 98% of female rape victims and 93% of male rape victims had a male perpetrator. A woman shoving her fingers up a man’s anus is rape, but a woman shoving her vagina down on his penis is not. The latter is not classified as rape, but as “made to penetrate” and is placed in the category of “other sexual violence”.
Logically, if you define rape as penetration, but not envelopment, you are going to end up with an arbitrarily large number of male rapists compared to female rapists.
Rape could easily be redefined as forced envelopment, which is exactly as arbitrary as the NIPSVS’s redefinition of rape. In that case we would find that 80+% of rapists are female. Which is as fatuous a finding as the reverse.
So why are significantly more men than women rapists and significantly more women raped than men? Because when women rape using their vaginas it’s not rape, it’s “other sexual violence”.
Men are the vast majority of rapists and women are the vast majority of victims because rape was defined in such a way to make sure that this was so.
The Real Risk of Rape in the Last Twelve Months
It should be noted the NIPSVS presents no statistics on male victims of rape through penetration for the last 12 months. This is interesting because the 2000 National Violence Against Women Survey found that 0.3 percent of women and 0.1 percent of men surveyed said they were raped via penetration in the previous 12 months.
The NIPSVS says: “The estimates for male victims raped by other types of perpetrators were based upon numbers too small to calculate a reliable estimate and therefore are not reported.”
The NIPSVS surveyed 18,000 people; The NVAWS surveyed 16,000. Did the risk of rape of men by other men take a nose-dive between the NVAW survey and the NIPSVS survey?
Luckily the NIPSVS did track the risk of “made to penetrate” for men in the last year. It was 1.1%, identical to the 1.1% of women “made to envelop”.
If the act of forced envelopment is correctly classified as rape—namely a woman forcing a man to have sex using her vagina, the vagina being one of the two most commonly used instruments of sex—then you get an equal risk of rape between men and women in the last twelve months.
An equal risk of rape between men and women in the last twelve months.
Why then, is the lifetime risk of rape so different?
Men Rape; Women Are Raped
Researchers into the field of traumatic memory recovery note that the longer the period of time a person is asked recall a traumatic event, the less likely they are to remember it. How this works is that surveys that ask about a traumatic event in the last six months get less false negatives than those that ask about a traumatic event in the last twelve months which, itself, gets considerably fewer false negatives than lifetime prevalence.
For men this effect is even more pronounced.
16% of men with documented cases of sexual abuse considered their early childhood experiences sexual abuse, compared with 64% of women with documented cases of sexual abuse. These gender differences may reflect inadequate measurement techniques or an unwillingness on the part of men to disclose this information (Widom and Morris 1997).
Only 16% of men with documented case histories of child sexual abuse disclosed that abuse on a survey intended to capture child sexual abuse. Sixteen percent of men compared to sixty-four percent of women.
That amounts to a disclosure rate of child sexual abuse four times higher in women than in men.
Is it any wonder that the CDC’s 2010 survey (correcting for their mis-categorization of female-on-male rape) found that 18.3% of women and 6.2% of men were victimized over their lifetimes?
Comparing the lifetime rate of sexual abuse for men and women is misleading in determining their relative risk of sexual violence, simply because men disclose childhood sexual abuse four times less often than women.
There may be many reasons for this. It’s unlikely that it’s due to sexual abuse being less impactful on men because studies have shown that sexual abuse does have a profound impact on men, and this includes female-on-male sexual abuse. For instance, the link between sexual abuse and suicide attempts is stronger in boys (Rhodes et al. 2001) and sexually abused boys are twice as likely to commit suicide (Molnar et al. 2001) than sexually abused girls. In addition to that, there is a risk factor for sexually abused men to sexually abuse others is if their abuser was female (Salter et al. 2003.)
One possible reason for men not disclosing, or even “forgetting”, is quite simple: our social narrative does not allow for, nor does it depict, the sexual abuse of males. To a degree it allows for the sexual abuse of boys by men, but not boys by women or adult men by anyone.
In a study on the effects of retention interval and gender on the perception of violence, Ahola et al. (2009) found that eyewitnesses rated female perpetrators less violent than male when reporting after an interval of one to three weeks as opposed to ten minutes. Ahola et al. (2009) proposed that over time eyewitnesses reinterpreted the behavior of perpetrators in order to conform to gender stereotypes regarding violence.
Widom and Morris (1997) propose that a similar process is occurring with male victims of sexual abuse (particularly by females) as, over time, they reinterpret their victimization to conform with the dominant social narrative regarding sexual abuse: that it happens to women and is perpetrated by men. They will do this by reframing their abuse as consensual or as a rite of passage or less violent than it was or by “forgetting” it completely. The more time passes, the more our memories conform to the dominant social narrative.
Gender differences in reporting and in perceptions of early childhood experiences may reflect early socialization experiences in which men learn to view these behaviors as non-predatory and non-abusive. Many of the sexual experiences considered to be sexual abuse (showing/touching sex organs, kissing in a sexual way) may be seen as developmental rites of passage, part of a learning process (Widom and Morris 1997.)
Note that this “forgetting” does not mean that there is no psychological effect; only that the source of that effect is buried, becoming a silent trigger for self-destructive behavior.
The Real Ratio of Male to Female Rapists
If we look at the more reliable statistic, the risk of rape in the last twelve months, and we fix the NIPSVS’s mistake in classifying forced envelopment as “other sexual assault” and not rape, we find that 80% of men report a female rapist and 98% of women report a male rapist. (This estimate is based on the sex of reported perpetrators for sexual assault over a lifetime. There is no reason to think the number of female perpetrators for ‘forced envelopment’ would decline between the lifetime and last year reports: if anything they would increase)
Since there were roughly equal numbers of men(forced to penetrate) and women(forced to envelop) raped in the last year, if we look at a population of 100 rape victims, 50 of which are male and 50 of which are female and apply the statistic that 80% of the male victims were raped by a woman, we get 40 male victims raped by a woman.
That works out to about 40% of rapists being female and 60% being male. A far cry from 95+% of rapists being male.[1]
Instant Female Victimhood, Just Add Media
The cautious and least sensationalistic position to take based on the NIPSVS’s findings is that men and women are most likely at an equal risk of rape and that the proportion of male to female rapists is not significantly gendered. [2]
But this is obviously not what anyone really wants to hear. Instead, the NIPSVS manufactured a non-existant female victimhood by first redefining rape to exclude the vast majority of female-on-male victimization. Then mainstream media (and other parties interested in female victimhood) followed up by selecting the statistic most likely to be fraught with reporting error while completely ignoring the more reliable statistic that suggests parity and further ignoring the ratio of female to male abusers (40/60).[3]
And so from a survey that strongly suggests that neither rape victimization nor rape perpetration is significantly gendered, we get a resounding shout of ‘MEN RAPE/WOMEN ARE RAPED!’
Men act, women are acted upon.
And the juggernaut rumbles on.
References
Ahola A. S., Justice needs a blindfold: Effects of defendants’ gender and attractiveness on judicial evaluation. 2010.
Black M., Basile K. C., Breiding M. J. , Smith S. G. , Walters M. L. , Merrick M. T, Chen J. and Steven M. R., The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey(NIPSVS): 2010 Summary Report , National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, November 2011
Rhodes A. E, Boyle M. H. , Tonmyr L., Wekerle C., Goodman D., Leslie B., Mironova P., Bethell J., and Manion I., Sex Differences in Childhood Sexual Abuse and Suicide-Related Behaviors, Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 41(3) June 2011
Molnar B. E., Berkman L. F. and Buka S. L., Psychopathology, childhood sexual abuse and other childhood adversities : relative links to subsequent suicidal behaviour in the US, Psychological Medicine, 2001, 31, 965–977.
Salter D., McMillan D., Richards M., Talbot T., Hodges J., Bentovim A., Hastings R., Stevenson J., Skuse D., Development of sexually abusive behaviour in sexually victimized males: a longitudinal study, The Lancet, Vol. 361, February 8, 2003
Tjaden, P. & Thoennes, N. , Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey(NVAWS), Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice, November 2000
Widom C. S. and Morris S., Accuracy of Adult Recollections of Childhood Victimization: Part 2. Childhood Sexual Abuse, Psychological Assessment, Vol. 9, No. l, 34-46, 1997
[1] When same-sex rape is excluded the ratio becomes 44/56 male/female rapists. One reason why same-sex rape should be excluded for an accurate picture of the gender proportions of rapists is because male-on-male rape may be inflated relative to female-on-female rape due to the large population of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men. The greater rate of male-on-male rape may be a byproduct of more men cycling through society’s rape-camps (otherwise known as ‘prisons’) at a greater rate then women.
[2] The moderate skew in favor of male rapists may just be an artifact of using female interviewers. We won’t know for sure until a survey is done that doesn’t require male victims of female aggressors to disclose their victimization to a female interviewer. Likely the NIPSVS used female interviewers preferentially in order to capture as much female victimization as possible; the logic being that women would be more likely to disclose to another woman.
[3] The 80% rate of female perpetration of forced envelopment is based on the lifetime risk numbers. However, it’s likely that the ratio of male to female rapists who forced envelopment on a man does not change significantly between the twelve month and lifetime time frame. If there is any change, asking men to report sexual abuse by females over their lifetime likely undercounts the proportion of female rapists since female-on-male rape is not congruent with our social stereotypes regarding rape and gender. Additional data on this issue is provided by Predictors of Sexual Coersion. Although Predictors only studied college populations, it found a similar parity in rape victimization risk between men and women in the last twelve months. 2.3% of women and 3.0% of men reported forced sex, which gives a ratio of 57/43 female/male rapists.
Great post. The blatant skew of the definition of rape in the study, and the skew in the coverage of the study by others, are both extremely frustrating.
Great post. I am working on a copy and paste resource of the CDC Survey ( http://feck-blog.blogspot.com/2012/01/cdc-survey-copy-and-paste-resource.html – I welcome critic) and the studies cited easily add to the explanation. Thanks.
One thing that I don’t understand (from a perspective of amoral pragmatism) about the media completley ignoring the gender parity in the annual rate of rape is how none of them have noticed what an attention grabbing headline “American Men at Equal Risk of RAPE” would be. In the end I have to conclude that because the CDC wouldn’t call “forced penetration” rape, the news papers feel they can’t either. Which leaves me kind of fucked off with the CDC… (though I am still greatful they asked at all, I mean, they could have just left that question out like all the others).
I remember ages ago there was a bit of a stink over at NSWATM about RAINN using a study which didn’t count forced envolopment in reaching the conclusion that dramatically fewer men than women were raped. I wonder if they’ve updated.
(from a quick check I got this: http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assault-victims and they have not)
Thank you for a fantastic post. I learned a great deal from this and particularly the important 16% versus 64% discrepency in reporting. Mind blowing and so important when it comes to understanding the numbers. I think again it boils down to the problem of a man’s emotional pain being taboo in our culture. There are literally no containers to hold his pain and without containers it is simply invisible. Women’s pain otoh is something that everyone wants to do something about. There are multiple containers for women’s pain.
Typhon – have you thought of putting some of these articles together into an ebook and selling it on amazon?
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@typhonblue
First of all, great post!
Regarding footnote [3]. You wrote: “The 80% rate of female perpetration of forced envelopment is based on the lifetime risk numbers.“ As far as I can tell the 80% rate is based on the last 12 month and not the lifetime risk. Is this a mistake or am I missing something?
I believe “Predictors of sexual coercion” is not only about college students but about college students in relationships. I can’t find the questionnaire right now, but I remember that they specifically asked about sexual violence in relationships. So stranger rape would not be documented in the study. But stranger rape is probably much more gendered, with a vast majority of female victims, than date rape, relationship rape. Though, a minority of all rapes a committed by strangers. Just as an additional note. Your overall point obviously stands.
@ Thomas
“But stranger rape is probably much more gendered, with a vast majority of female victims, than date rape, relationship rape.”
You might not be considering the large number of male-on-male stranger rapes though.
Actually, I thought about this, but I have never seen any actual numbers. Prison rape is certainly a huge problem, at least in the US. I have no idea if the stereotypical stranger in a dark alley scenario happens to men too at a mentionable rate.
Thomas, what does happen to men a lot is acquaintance rape – sex with a drunk man, sex by coercion – and usually only feminists or people who have been sensitized by feminists ot the issue ever consider it rape.
Your statistic that “40% of rapists are female” is demonstrably false.
If you look at the CDC’s reports regarding sexual violence, about 62% of women will be the victim of some form of sexual violence during her lifetime, compared to only 22% of men. Now, only about 56% of the people who commit some form of sexual violence against men are women, and women make up less than 5% of those who have committed some sort of sexual violence against women. Thus, 44% of people who rape men are men, and 95% of people who rape women, are men. And while roughly 59% of women can expect to be sexually assaulted by a man during their lifetime, only 12% of men can expect to be sexually assaulted by a woman.
If we define rape as “forced penetrative intercourse,” the stats are 18% of women, 2% of men, more than 98% all of the perpetrators being male. If you want to expand that to include “forced to penetrate,” it is still 18% of women, 6% of men, with 61% of those men being victimized by women and more than 98% of those women being victimized exclusively by men.
Now the stats of those surveyed in the CDC report –
MALE RAPE VICTIMS
Forced Penetrative Intercourse
Penetrated by force: 1,581,000 (100% male perps)
Forced to Penetrate: 5,451,000 (79.2% female perps)
Total: 7,032,000 total male victims
• 4,317,192 (men raped by women)
• 2,714,808 (men raped by men)
FEMALE RAPE VICTIMS
Forced Penetrative Intercourse
21,840,000 (98.1% male perps)
• 21,577,920 (women raped by men)
• 262,080 (women raped by women)
Total: 21,840,000 (women raped by anyone)
Victims of Both Genders by Gender of Perp
28,872,000 (people raped by anyone)
• 24,554,808 (people raped by men)
• 4,579,192 (people raped by women)
Grand total, 14% of rape victims are raped by women. 86% of rape victims are raped by men.
++
If we expand the definition to include any kind of unwanted sexual contact, the numbers change, but the percentages remain pretty consistent. Let’s see how those numbers break down when we widen the parameters:
26,711,000(m) vs. 75,014,000(f) = 101,725,000 rape victims total
• 21,577,920 (women raped by men)
• 49,451,820 (women assaulted by men)
• 71,029,740 (women raped or assaulted by men)
• 262,080 (women raped by women)
• 3,722,180 (women assaulted by women)
• 14,958,160 (men raped or assaulted by women)
• 11,752,849 (men raped or assaulted by men)
82,782,589 people raped or assaulted by men
18,942,111 people raped or assaulted by women
Now using these numbers, provided by the CDC, dividing by our total, we get the following:
18.6% of rape victims have been assaulted by a woman.
81.4% of rape victims have been sexually assaulted by a man.
These statistics are from the CDC, not some random feminist website. So tell me, where did your statistics come from?
Of course, by this, I most certainly do not mean to assert that sexual violence against men is more acceptable than sexual violence against women — merely that it is more prevalent, which is impossible to dispute. Most rapists are male. Most rape victims are female. And some of the factors that contribute to this discrepancy are cultural.
Kathy with a K,
My stats come from the most current CDC survey, as cited.
Incidentally I believe you’re using the lifetime victimization numbers, which, as I illustrate in my post, are unreliable. Far more reliable are the 12-month numbers, which find parity between male and female rape victims (as long as you define ‘forced to penetrate’ as rape, which I do.)
Now, 80% of men ‘forced to penetrate’ were forced to penetrate by female aggressors while approximately 100% of women were forced to envelop by male aggressors. That means out of one hundred rape victims, 50 male and 50 female (parity indicated by the 12 month stats), 40 of the male victims will have been raped by women. That makes 40 female rapists and 60 male. And if you exclude same sex victimizations the numbers get even more equal at 44 female rapists for every 56 male rapists.
Please read the original post more carefully before responding next time.
I’ve been kicked in the nuts and have my pants pulled down in front of others. Do people consider this sexual violence? I’ve had strange women put their hands down my pants and up my shorts. Does this count? I’ve had a strange drunk man (granted a fellow student) come into my dorm room and get into bed with me while I was asleep. Does this count? I’ve never “reported” any of this. Sorry , if I am minimizing truly unconscionable acts. I ask out of legitimate curiosity. I imagine a lot of other men have had similar experiences, probably even worse, and they barely bat an eye over it…at least externally. And, for me, these experiences I’ve had were not traumatic for me, but neither were they completely trivial.
First I would like to say that both of my parents are victims of some form of sexual assault or abuse. My mother was molested by a doctor as a child, and raped by multiple men while partially unconscious at a party. My father was sexually molested by a female teacher. Both of my parents were equally traumatized by these events. So even though I think world wide, an adult female is more likely to be raped than an adult male, I think that the emotional impact of being violated in such a way is such that male victims should not be overlooked.
I didn’t go through the statistics of the CDC article myself. I’m not familiar with the circumstances in which these “forced to penetrate” incidents most often occur. But I know one thing about rape of adult males, and that’s that it’s a very big problem in prisons, some prisons more than others, and prison staff more or less allows this to occur. Just because someone is incarcerated doesn’t mean they deserve to be raped, and I think it’s appalling that this is such a well known problem that no one does anything about.
@ M. Smith
“So even though I think world wide, an adult female is more likely to be raped than an adult male”
There is no solid evidence to make a proclamation like this.
“There is no solid evidence to make a proclamation like this.”
In fact we are likely to find that if the same standards are used to identify rape, more adult men than women will be found to have been raped, since social and legal sanctions against men committing those acts are so muchmore widely understood and applied.
Just wanted to point something out, although I’m not sure if I’m correct.
If we take ‘made to penetrate’ as rape, then we can make the following calculations according to CDC statistics (the one you are using when you say %98.1 of females report a male perpetrator). First, as %4.8 of men accepted being ‘made to penetrate’, and %79.2 of those reported a female perpetrator, we get that %3.8 of men were raped by women. We don’t know how many men were ‘raped’ (in the CDC’s sense) by a women, sadly. So the only thing we know for sure is that, in our definition of rape, %6.2 of men surveyed were raped in their lifetime.
So we now have to calculate how many men were raped by a female perpetrator. To do that, we calculate %3.8 as a percentage of the %6.2 (i.e. 3.8*100/6.2) and we find that %61.3 of men reported being raped only be female perpetrators.
This contrasts with your %80 lifetime number, that I’m not sure how you calculated, although I would like if you could enlighten me.
As we are using lifetime numbers, we must continue using lifetime numbers, we cannot change to 12 months now and continue with those numbers. So we know from this survey that 18.3% of women surveyed reported being raped, and 6.2% of men reported rape (including ‘made to penetrate’). If we use the percentages calculated, now can calculate what the number for rape with female perpetrators is.
We don’t know any numbers of only women perpetrators against women, sadly, but we know that %3.8 of men were raped solely by a woman. If the total population in this case is %24.5 (18.3% and 6.2%), we get that 15.5% of those cases were done solely by women. If we calculate the same for men, we first calculate the percentage of women raped by men, which is the %98.1 of %18.3, which is 17.9%, which is 73.1%.
From these numbers, we get that mostly, in lifetime numbers, men were the perpetrators of rape, while women also did their share. Of course, sadly, as we cannot mix lifetime with 12-months, we can only come to this conclusion that does not really explain today’s situation. So if you had a room filled with people that were raped, most probably were raped by men.
I must give you that almost the same amount of men and women were raped in the last twelve months according to NISVS report, but as we don’t know the sex of the perpetrators in these cases, unfortunately, we cannot guess what percentage of women were the perpetrators.
Of course, it is real that mostly women are central when we talk about rape, and that is a sad fact. But, and this is a big ‘but’, these numbers only account for rape in the U.S., so maybe the rape-women thing is something international that permeates american culture.
@ Random
If we can’t use the lifetime stats for male-female perpetration then we don’t know how many women in the 12-month stats were raped by other women.
It could be any number therefore we can either say ‘we don’t know the ratio of perpetrators in our most reliable statistic on rape prevalence’ or ‘we will approximate the ratio using the life time numbers.’
Neither case supports a finding that men rape women significantly more then women rape men.
Random,
Thanks for that. I have to look at your umbers to make sense of them, but either way, thanks.
” But, and this is a big ‘but’, these numbers only account for rape in the U.S., so maybe the rape-women thing is something international that permeates american culture.”
It is bound to be country and culture specific. In cultures with intense slut-shaming of women women do NOT have the liberty they do in the US to apporach and pressure men. There goes a big tranch of rapes right there. In countires liek these young men and women are much more closley supervised than in the Us – which is not hard, considering that oyung men and women are not supervised at all in the US – so that means they don’t have drunken parties together at college and have drunk sex that pretty quickly shades off into rape. So you’re probably right.
@ typhonblue:
Well, what I meant is that we can use those numbers, to say things like how many people raped were raped by men or women. We cannot say that in the last month itself more men or more women raped other people. Luckily, there’s improvement in this area and more surveys and studies are being done to look at what’s happening.
@ ginkgo
Yeah, it’s probably a culture specific thing. Either way, we can estimate global numbers and make sense of that, and we can also try to see rape in only western countries and things like that. Basically, we need more research done in these topics to unequivocally find the root of the problems.
“‘Penetration’ is a one-sided view of sexuality. If I eat a corndog, it’s not ‘penetrating’ me.”
I just came across this quote and thought it relevant to this thread.
This was a great read, thanks for crunching those numbers.
Great article. Very well argumented.
Looks like this ought to be a scientific paper, to be published at a peer reviewed journal (not reviewed by feminists, though)
So rape of males by females is seriously under-reported. We need more males to come forward.
Most men I know have been raped by a woman, but were not aware they were. Very common for a man to orgasm and want to stop. And the woman still wants to get her rocks off in spite of the man’s protests (what part of “stop” don’t you understand?). Men just swallow it, and don’t take it seriously
Women on the other hand report “Five second rape” (go google it) and other terrible traumas
Come over to human-stupidity and comment. You might want to choose the categories, about men’s rights.
Actually, our preferred solution would not be for men to report more, but for women to stop making a police case out of every little inconvenience (like harassment complaints because of a dinner invitation).
While things as they are, increasing male complaints is a good policy.
But we think rather the re-definition of rape is wrong.
Rape should refer to true forcible rape, and not to all types of consensual activities turned sour. Or to a wife that, 10 year after the fact, accuses the husband of one instance of rape.
http://human-stupidity.com/stupid-dogma/social-rules-habits/manipulate-language/rape-is-rape-is-rape-is-a-lie-joe-biden-20-different-types-of-rape
We should stop over-burdening lawyers, police, the justice system with the avoidable and less serious types of rape. Especially with the he-said she-said unproven uncorroborated rape.
We should also raise awareness that 40 to 60 percent of rape accusations are estimated to be false.
http://human-stupidity.com/stupid-dogma/mens-rights-feminism/one-in-two-rape-accusations-are-false-strauss-kahn-presumed-guilty-jailed-slandered-without-due-process-escaped-others-are-not-so-lucky
HEY guess what.
Kathy with a K is right. Typhonblue is CLEARLY wrong.
Yes, both of you did the math perfectly correctly.
Typhonblue, you have chosen to take 100 rape victims, 50 male and 50 female to create your statistic that 40% of rapists (including forced to penetrate) are female. This is true only in a world where the number of men raped (50) is equal to the number of women (50)! You’ve stated in this very same article that this number is not equal. Since the percentage of men in the population is roughly half, this does not mean that they comprise half of the rape victims in this scenario. You cannot calculate this 50/50 based on sex/gender, but rather need to calculate it based on the percentage of men/women that comprise the total number of rapes!!
I urge everyone to take with you the MESSAGE from this article; we cannot overlook sexual violence targeted towards men. Men can be victims too. But please disregard the ultimate 60/40 finding.
stj1127 :
Typhonblue looked at the “last 12 months” prevalence numbers when she calculated this. 1.1% of female respondents reported being raped in the last 12 months while 1.1% of male respondents reported being made to penetrate someone else the last 12 months.
To simplify a bit one could say that in the context of NISVS 2010 “the last 12 months” means 2009. The calculation by Typhonblue then is that the gender distribution of rapists who committed rape in 2009 are 60% male and 40% female.
@ Tamen
It’s getting annoying how many people are commenting on this article without having read it.
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Typhon, your piece was extremely compelling. But I haven’t been able to find the “smoking gun” it points out. How did you find out that the CDC’s survey does not count “made to penetrate” as rape and counted it instead as “other sexual violence”? This verification is absolutely invaluable to the credibility of your assertions and I haven’t been able to find it anywhere (I apologize in advance if you listed it and I missed it).
@ Dave Heide
“How did you find out that the CDC’s survey does not count “made to penetrate” as rape and counted it instead as “other sexual violence”?”
Here is a link to the tables in the CDC’s report:
http://puu.sh/XPt2
Note how “made to penetrate” is listed under “other sexual violence” rather then rape.
Dave Heide:
Although typhonblue did not link to the NISVS 2010 Report it is readily available just a short google search away. As a public servive I’ll supply the link here: http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf
If you read the report yourself it is very clear that “being made to penetrate someone else” is considered not to be rape.
It is stated outright on page 84 with the following sentences (my emphasis):
This idea that it’s not rape is not incidental, it’s intentional. Take a look at this post on this blog which links to an article by well-known feminist rape researcher Mary P. Koss in which she underlines the importance of not counting male rape as rape unless the man have been penetrated:
The exact definitions of rape and “being made to penetrate someone else” used in NISVS 2010 can be found on page 17 in the report.
thank you , thank you, thank you. a million thank yous. you folks (especially you, typhonblue for putting that article together) are exactly what this world needs.
“80% of men report a female rapist and 98% of women report a male rapist.”
This aspect leads to men being 60% rather than 50%, right?
I say we look closer.
Is it possible that we are underestimating the number of female rapists because of under-reporting or lack of inclusion of lesbian rapes?
We are aware of how ‘forced envelopment’ of the penis is overlooked. Is the forced envelopment of the clitoris also overlooked? Perhaps the only segment of lesbian rapes represented here are those who stick things into the vagina.
This means we would not be including as female rapists, women who forcibly envelope (or fondle) the clitoris.
Tyciol,
“Is it possible that we are underestimating the number of female rapists because of under-reporting or lack of inclusion of lesbian rapes?”
The telling silence around lesbian rape in the outrage over rape in the military is not anomalous. You have probably idnentified one source of error here.
Is it possible that we are underestimating the number of female rapists because of under-reporting or lack of inclusion of lesbian rapes?
Chances are women raped by women are severely undercounted. Even more so than men raped by women. Women who are raped by women have the double whammy of being in a homosexual situation (not that the women being attacked are gay just that woman against woman rape is a homosexual situation) and being attacked by a woman.
Homosexual abuse and raped are often left out of the conversation and abusive women are left out of the conversation.
I can’t stop crying I didnt think what she did was rape but maybe it was. I was only seventeen when it happened. I didnt think that women could rape boys but I guess I was raped then.
I am so sorry for your pain Shilo.
Recognizing it for what it was made it easier to resolve that she ultimately was completely responsible for her own actions which she decided to do to me while I was asleep. That brought closure and healing to me regarding that incident, although I now find myself pretty angry about the way our society either ignores or ridicule male rape – and female-on-male rape in particular.
I hope you are able to find healing and comfort.
Best wishes,
Tom
Shilos, not Shilo. Apologies for that.
The front page of this blog has a list of Non-ideological Survivor Resources near the bottom of the right bar. One of the links goes to Toysoldier’s blog which have a few more links to survivior resources.
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Looking at the original paper, here are the numbers I found:
For female victims:
A. Male perpetrator (rape): 98.1%
B. Male perpetrator (other, inc. envelopment): 92.5%
For male victims:
C. Male perpetrator (rape): 93.3%
D. Female perpetrator (other, inc. envelopment): 79.2%
Seems like when you guys corrected the numbers to include envelopment, you ONLY went for the D statistics (~80%) and forgot to include C (males being raped by males). But also, you seemed to have done this ‘correction’ for male victims only, and left out the one for female victims (B).
Taking all of this into account, the overall percentage of male ‘rapists’ would come up to about 76%.
Am I missing something?
@ Mahyer
You are missing the fact that we’re using the 12 month numbers and the “forced envelopment” statistic for men wasn’t reported for the 12-month numbers(similarly the “forced to penetrate” statistic for women wasn’t reported for either 12-months or lifetime, so we don’t know the rate of women being to forced to penetrate). Therefore the numbers you’re citing are irrelevant to determining the 12-month figures.