Woman here...I want your opinion on the statement "Rape/abuse/domestic violence DOES happen to men, but it happens to women more often!"

nessfalco · 2013-11-26T01:46:07+00:00

If you count prison rape then it absolutely happens to males more. I don't see the point in squabbling over it though. People can be abused by other people and we should regard it as equally reprehensible no matter the gender of the victim or perpetrator.

soulslawter · 2013-11-26T00:45:39+00:00

Well, i think it is bullshit that the CDC says that if a man is forced to penetrate a partner against his consent, it does not count as rape

2013-11-26T04:27:04+00:00

Yes rape happens more often to women.

But that's because rape, as its defined by any propper orgonization can only apply if there is a female victim. Two easy examples, the FBI and the CDC

http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/male-disposability-and-mary-p-koss/

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/fbi-scraps-long-standing-definition-rape-include-men-victims-article-1.1001900

In both of these cases a woman -can- rape a man, but not with their vagina. A vagina can't rape because a vagina cannot penetrate, only men can rape with their sexual organs.

this is why you see more female rape victims, because men are seen as disposable so male rape doesn't matter. If you add in male under-reporting and prison rape men are raped much more often.

The frosting on top: a male rape victim is forced to pay child support.

2013-11-26T03:32:14+00:00

Do you feel rape/abuse/violence happens more to women than to men?

What do you mean feel? This isn't a feels issue. It's an empirical issue.

Even if men received half of the rape/abuse/violence that women do, the current DV system and the other aids we give to female victims don't reflect this.

2013-11-26T01:45:09+00:00

As I am sure that other members will answer your question with specific details, I am going to go another way.

What if it was the case? What would that change? Would that justify anything? In what way would the suffering of the few be diminished in any way by the suffering of many? What is achieved leaving victims in the dark or downplay their importance?

Nothing. And that is the problem I see with many feminist takes on DV and rape (not saying you are a feminist), they monopolize the attention, resources and public imagination and channel it exclusively to women, helping many but increasing the suffering of the male victims who are left helpless and resourceless and in the dark.

I simply feel that this question helps nobody and only serves for futile forum squabbles. It's time we leave this mentality behind us.

Geohump · 2013-11-26T05:20:56+00:00

Do you feel rape/abuse/violence happens more to women than to men?

Not to be contrary, But I have no interest in how people "feel" about the rate at which something happens.

I want real numbers from scientifically valid research.

G-O · 2013-11-26T02:09:55+00:00

If you take a human problem and divide the people who that problem effects into groups (gender, race, nationality, sexuality...) for the purpose of distributing resources for a solution to only one of those groups, you become the problem.

Scott2508 · 2013-11-26T04:50:15+00:00

As a male who has experienced both sexual and physical abuse by a woman and with all respect truly meant but its 4.50 am and i cant think of the words that make this sound softer i think the correct response to the more often part is " who cares " , and before amr or another bashing sub takes this and uses it as an example of mra who dont care, what i mean is that its something that is irrelevant , i dont care if it was 1 man to a 1000 woman ( which it isnt ) all that matters is that every single one of them is just as valid and just as worth care.

2013-11-26T11:48:43+00:00

The same argument should be used to deny funding and resources to women who have been injured in combat. There children should not be eligible for scholarships, the veterans should not get preferential hiring treatment, they should have to go to the end of the line for medical care.

rapiertwit · 2013-11-26T14:17:48+00:00

I have two friends who have been terrorized by female partners with violence, controlling behavior and legal threats. One of them called the cops on his wife once, but only when he felt she actually posed a danger to their kid. My other friend was routinely kicked, hit with objects and threatened with deadly weapons (a baseball bat, for example). He suffered through it, trying to "fix" her, until he found himself locked in the bathroom, with her announcing that if he didn't come out she was going to hurt herself and call the cops and have him put away. It was only then that he saw he had to get the fuck out of there. He climbed out the bathroom window and dropped to the street, breaking his ankle (2nd story bathroom) and hobbled over to a neighbor's house to call the cops before she could. Fortunately for him she had failed to act on her threat to injure herself. He had bruises on his face and scratches on his arms. The cops did a "cool down" and talked to them separately, then left without arresting her. Even if women are more frequently abused by men (which may or may not be the case), the way society and the legal system treats male and female victims is seriously imbalanced. And DV awareness programs that present only the male abuser, female victim image only exacerbate the problem - when men don't think they can be victims, they find themselves in the situation my friend did, where he didn't even recognize what kind of relationship he was in until he was locked in a bathroom being offered a choice between coming out and taking his beating, or staying put and maybe going to jail. He found a third option luckily - but he had to jump out a second story window to take it.

sens2t2vethug · 2013-11-26T01:53:38+00:00

Welcome, if you're new. There are a few different issues, albeit sometimes related ones, in your post. "Abuse" for example is potentially a very broad category. It seems clear that men are more likely than women to be murdered overall, and more likely to be violently assaulted by a stranger. On the other hand I don't think there are very good statistics on things like relational and psychological abuse amongst adults, so it's hard to say.

One of the most common reactions to rape is denial and/or trying to rationalise what happened in some way. It may be that men are more likely to react this way than women, possibly because for a man to be vulnerable or exploited goes against stereotypical notions of masculinity more so than those of femininity. There's some evidence that this happens,[1] although I don't think it's a settled issue:

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).

In the end, it doesn't seem that important who it happens most often to. The important thing is that all people who are vulnerable get the help they need. Sweeping generalisations like "men rape; women are raped" make that harder to achieve. And they might also reinforce a lot of harmful gender roles for all of us. For example, emphasising that naive view might have women be anxious, timid and depressed; and men, angry and frustrated.

[1] http://www.genderratic.com/p/836/manufacturing-female-victimhood-and-marginalizing-vulnerable-men/

YetAnotherCommenter · 2013-11-26T05:15:25+00:00

I think that the sexes probably experience these traumas at similar (not necessarily identical) rates, but gender norms shame men from coming forward or complaining or being 'victims' etc. etc. so obviously we will hear more about female victimhood. Additionally, certain institutionalized ideologies (i.e. today's 'official' feminist movement) find that female-victimhood-male-perpetration advances their preferred narratives, so both 'official' feminism and gender traditionalism factor into the higher social prominence of abuse of/violence against women.

That said, I really don't think the issue of "who gets raped/abused more often" is particularly important, and it generally ends up as an attempt to play Oppression Olympics. No one, whatever their anatomical sex or gender identity or sexual preference or whatever, should be raped or abused or attacked.

That said, discussing the relative rates of rape/abuse/DV/etc. may have value when rebutting the perception that male victimhood is "incidental" (rare and caused by freak accidents and not related to gender norms) whilst female victimhood is "systemic" (frequent and encouraged by gender norms). If both sexes experience rape/abuse/DV/etc. at similar rates (not necessarily the same, but similar), then that would certainly cast doubt on the idea that one sex's suffering is "systemic" whilst the other sex's is "incidental."

dejour · 2013-11-26T07:03:36+00:00

Well, it's clear that DV happens just as often to men as women.

http://www.menwebjournal.com/ArcherSexDifferencesMeta-AnalyticReviewf2000.pdf

Stranger violence happens more often to men than women.

I think that the jury is out on who is raped more outside of prison. There is clearly a bias against recognizing male rape victims. Some have argued here that it's equal based on a couple of studies (including the CDC one). Obviously it's a joke that "made to penetrate" doesn't count as rape. The CDC study itself showed that there seem to be equal number of victims in the past 12 months, but many more female victims over a lifetime. Typhonblue and others have argued that the past 12 months is a better indicator because you reduce problems associated with poor memory. There is something to that, but I still would like to see more well-designed studies that are upfront with their results.

Why do people see women as more frequent victims?

men don't always recognize themselves as victims
men are seen as weaker, less attractive and deserving of scorn if they are victims, so men don't come out as victims (while women can often get love and support for revealing themselves as victims)
media tends to show more female victims (if a boy is attacked it's not as big news as if a girl is)
the law doesn't support male victims ( a man reporting DV faces a very real risk of being charged with a crime - especially if he blocked a punch or two from his wife in self defence)
men are assumed to always want sex, so they can't really be raped
women's violence against men isn't seen as serious (If a woman kicks a man in the balls and he doubles over in pain, there is a good chance people will react with laughter. It's hard to imagine anything a man could do to a woman that would cause her the same pain that would draw laughs)

Number357 · 2013-11-26T07:12:23+00:00

Feminists often tout statistics like "90% of rape victims are women" as a way to justify focusing almost solely on female victims. However, feminists conveniently use a rather bigoted definition of rape that excludes the vast majority of F-on-M rape. From RAINN "Rape, as defined by the NCVS, is forced sexual intercourse. Forced sexual intercourse means vaginal, oral, or anal penetration by offender(s)." In other words, according to RAINN and the feminists that use the same statistics (eg, virtually every women's studies department in the US), the only way a woman can rape a man is by sticking something up his anus. Forcing him to have sex isn't rape unless she also sodomizes him. Mary Koss, a prominent feminist researcher best known as the author of the original "1 in 4 women will be raped" study, has defended this practice by essentially saying that while it's wrong for a woman to force a man to have sex, it's not as bad as when men do it to women so we shouldn't call it rape and we shouldn't include it in rape statistics. This view is shared pretty much universally by academic feminists and Women's Studies departments, which are usually the ones spreading rape statistics. Obviously if you use such a skewed and bigoted definition of rape, it's going to show more female victims.

As for DV, http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm

SUMMARY: This bibliography examines 286 scholarly investigations: 221 empirical studies and 65 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 371,600.

This has been established for over 40 years. Erin Pizzey, who founded the first DV shelter in the world, also wanted to help male victims when her research showed men made up ~50% of DV victims. Feminists were... less than pleased, to put it mildly, and the movement has spent the last several decades turning a blind eye to the literally hundreds of studies showing that women abuse men as often as men abuse women.

TheCameraLady · 2013-11-26T11:43:57+00:00

Maybe. I don't know for sure.

I don't think it matters though. We don't need to arbitrarily divide up attention or resources based on things like gender or race or class. Why not just help all rape victims and go after all rapists, regardless of any other factors?

PerfectHair · 2013-11-26T12:48:12+00:00

It's irrelevant. Curiously though, it's used by the same people who say that the spotlight for homelessness should be on homeless women because they are often overlooked due to the majority of homeless people being men.

SilencingNarrative · 2013-11-26T13:12:41+00:00

Hard to say which gender rapes the other more, or which is raped more often, emprically. What I have noticed, however, is how widespread the efforts are to deny that men are raped, or that it matters when they are, or that a woman sexually abusing a man is a big deal at all, let alone as big a deal as a man sexually abusing a woman.

I would guess that women and men rape each other with roughly the same frequency. While, these days at least, most people believe that women are just as good as men (honorable, intelligent, talented, generous, ...) , there is a lot of resistance to believing that women are just as bad a men (violent, petty, lazy, vicious, ...). Until feminists start believing that women are just as bad as men, they can not claim to believe in equality. That men are more physically powerful than women counts for little when you live in close quarters because you have to sleep sometime, and when you do, you are helpless. Your opponent can kill you, or stun you so badly that you can't defend yourself, and they can then proceed to beat / torture/ rape you with impunity. The only real limit to how much damage one person can do to another that they live with is how vicious they are. And I would guess that women are just as vicious as men are.

Part of the reason that we view women as morally superior to men, and that we see women as not as capable of violence as men, is that that belief is a strong organizing principle of society. It can move mountains and convince people to willingly risk everything in large numbers. What is the quintessential war cry, the argument that can mobilize a society to send a large fraction of ifs entire male population to face death on the battlefield? "If we don't go to war, they will come here and rape our women."

We often hear about women being raped during wartime, but we almost never hear about men being raped during wartime. Not only are men routinely raped during wars, you don't have to look far to find evidence that it may happen on roughly the same scale. And unlike the female victims of wartime rape, the male victims are completely silenced.

From the article:

It's not just in East Africa that these stories remain unheard. One of the few academics to have looked into the issue in any detail is Lara Stemple, of the University of California's Health and Human Rights Law Project. Her study Male Rape and Human Rights notes incidents of male sexual violence as a weapon of wartime or political aggression in countries such as Chile, Greece, Croatia, Iran, Kuwait, the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. Twenty-one per cent of Sri Lankan males who were seen at a London torture treatment centre reported sexual abuse while in detention. In El Salvador, 76% of male political prisoners surveyed in the 1980s described at least one incidence of sexual torture. A study of 6,000 concentration-camp inmates in Sarajevo found that 80% of men reported having been raped.

I've come to Kampala to hear the stories of the few brave men who have agreed to speak to me: a rare opportunity to find out about a controversial and deeply taboo issue. In Uganda, survivors are at risk of arrest by police, as they are likely to assume that they're gay – a crime in this country and in 38 of the 53 African nations. They will probably be ostracised by friends, rejected by family and turned away by the UN and the myriad international NGOs that are equipped, trained and ready to help women. They are wounded, isolated and in danger. In the words of Owiny: "They are despised."

The article I linked goes on to show many examples of how attempts to get help for men are resisted, shut down, and ignored. Here is an example:

Stemple's findings on the failure of aid agencies is no surprise to Dolan. "The organisations working on sexual and gender-based violence don't talk about it," he says. "It's systematically silenced. If you're very, very lucky they'll give it a tangential mention at the end of a report. You might get five seconds of: 'Oh and men can also be the victims of sexual violence.' But there's no data, no discussion."

As part of an attempt to correct this, the RLP produced a documentary in 2010 called Gender Against Men. When it was screened, Dolan says that attempts were made to stop him. "Were these attempts by people in well-known, international aid agencies?" I ask.

"Yes," he replies. "There's a fear among them that this is a zero-sum game; that there's a pre-defined cake and if you start talking about men, you're going to somehow eat a chunk of this cake that's taken them a long time to bake." Dolan points to a November 2006 UN report that followed an international conference on sexual violence in this area of East Africa.

"I know for a fact that the people behind the report insisted the definition of rape be restricted to women," he says, adding that one of the RLP's donors, Dutch Oxfam, refused to provide any more funding unless he'd promise that 70% of his client base was female. He also recalls a man whose case was "particularly bad" and was referred to the UN's refugee agency, the UNHCR. "They told him: 'We have a programme for vulnerable women, but not men.'"

baskandpurr · 2013-11-26T13:48:22+00:00

I think the topic is so obscured in false reporting, sexuality, bias and emotional reasoning that its almost impossible to form any accurate statement. The evidence we have says that women are raped most often. However, people have only collected evidence of female rape so that really doesn't tell us anything.

I think its a bad idea to focus on how much rape occurs. Rape is a terrible crime, but its given far too much focus by feminists and most men are not rapists. It better to ensure that rape victims are given the proper assistance whatever gender they may be.

I'd like to mention rape prevention, as in guarding your friends. But that overlaps with sexual politics in very many ways. The focus appears to be exclusively about guarding females from males and it falls awkwardly into sexism itself. It assumes that women should be considered incapable of making sensible choices and needing protection from themselves. It would be good to have a sensible debate about that, but from a male perspective, the female side appears to want it both ways.

2013-11-27T13:25:03+00:00

I don't care who it happens to more.

There was virtually no precautions thrown at me during my childhood and education to watch out for rape.

Got raped by a woman, and it took me over a month to even realize that the horrific event actually counted as rape and not something else. In some states, female on male rape isn't called rape.

thus, it's statements like this that do a grand disservice. Who cares who it happens to more? The fact that it happens is enough to warn everyone how to take precautionary measures.

rightsbot · 2013-11-26T00:22:17+00:00

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2013-11-26T01:56:18+00:00

Look up Erin Pizzey's work. She's conducted many studies that show that men and women commit intimate partner violence at the same rates. UK feminists sent her so many death threats that she had to move to the U.S. there have been many, many more gender biased studies that only study male on female intimate partner violence, and they are used to push anti-male domestic violence policy ad nauseum because it's political suicide to argue against policy that claims to benefit or protect women. anyone who's been through the domestic violence justice system knows that men are basically assumed to be guilty and that women can easily get away with false accusations of domestic violence.

themountaingoat · 2013-11-26T02:38:59+00:00

In terms of domestic violence it is pretty clear that women are violent with their partners more. It does seem that men are more likely to seriously hurt their partners, although those statistics could still be misleading for several reasons.

But it is pretty clear that women aren't injured by men in any sort of power struggle but because men are simply stronger, and so when they happen to lose it the consequences can be more serious.

Rape is sort of a different story. Feminists and most women these days use definitions of rape that are quite ridiculous. These definitions include anything that doesn't have explicit verbal consent while entirely sober as rape. By these definitions 90% of sex is rape (of course in practice feminists/women only call it rape when women feel upset about the sex afterward).

The above definitions are what causes ridiculous rape rates, and when you apply the same ridiculous definitions and ask men, you find that men are raped in similar numbers to women.

However, in reality rape is not those feminist definitions, and is in reality relatively rare. It does occur primarily to women (unless of course you count prison rape).

pcarvious · 2013-11-26T03:34:40+00:00

If I only ask women if they've been raped or use definitions of rape that preclude female rapists then I'm only going to have female victims of rape. The same can be said for DV and other statistics that gather or attempt to enumerate the number of victims of the crimes you listed above. If we refuse to acknowledge a crime or the victim never reports it then the date will not be an accurate representation of reality.

Rattatoskk · 2013-11-26T09:02:11+00:00

"you are less of a man, a weakling, or accused that you somehow "wanted it"."

This to me is the embodiment of projecting learned stereotypical "female" ideals onto males. It's trying to understand us through a female's perspective, but it can't work in matters of tribulations. There's no comparison between male and female coping methods available.

It's certainly a part of it, but it's the sort of unempathetic assessment that I would expect from a person with options that men don't have.

One of the first things to understand about men that really is hardly ever understood by women, is that by and large, WE CANNOT OPT OUT. It's not that we keep it a secret BECAUSE of those reasons until we "let it out". That's just a completely feminine mindset. There's no where to turn for a man. You are thinking as a woman who has a final option of airing out your grievences and pointing a finger at your rapist. Pretend that pointing out your rapist has no effect. There is no nuclear option. Crying rape is just seen as a bad joke. It's a non-option effect-wise. It's expending energy on a dead end.. a waste of energy.

Our pain is just there. No one cares, and they've got their own problems even if they do listen. It's not that we are terribly afraid to come forward for fear of shame.

It's that there is no point. In fact, to us, it is often times just a normal extension of having to handle our own problems. It gets filed with the rest of the secret pain that we don't bother the world with.

We get taught early on that pain is part of our lives. It's not foreign to us. It's ours, and we've got to bear it regardless of our situation.

So, it's not like a pressure that's building up.. It's not like.. "I have to tell someone about this but they'll laugh at me" It's like.. The thought of telling someone just seems absurd. They won't take it seriously, sure, but also, what are they going to DO about it? Nothing. The shame thing is secondary to the lack of utility. Women can TELL people things, because then things happen for them. Men have to DO something about their pain, or learn to shoulder it.

Think of it this way.. You are the blacksmith. Everyone in town can yell at you or beg you, or bribe you to make a horseshoe. At the end of the day, they are the talkers, and you are the doer.

But what happens when YOU need a horseshoe? Do you spend time talking yourself into making one? Bribing yourself? Well, maybe you do.. but all that dialogue is internal. No one sees it. It's between you and yourself. At the end of the day, if the smith wants a horseshoe, he doesn't get to talk one into existence. He has to hammer one himself.

That's what it's like for men. At least, a large portion of men.

So, when we have a great hurt occur.. what's the point of reporting it? We just go about mending our wounds, and that's that. She smith has to hammer out his own shoe, because he knows the rest of the world is worthless at it.

And that, in a nutshell is why men don't report these things. We have 0 faith in the process. Our pain is ours. No one can lift it from us. So we don't chirp about our issues. We get on with settling them.

Sometimes that backfires. Sometimes we don't have the strength to handle the pain we are given.

But what is our option? That's the question. What would the point be of communication? It's akin to Atlas nagging on about the weight of the world. Why bother? He's the only one that can carry that weight. So what good does it do to complain to critters that can't hold up the sky for him?

d8q · 2013-11-26T09:52:21+00:00

Why do you think child abuse is not relevant?

double-happiness · 2013-11-26T11:22:54+00:00

Do you feel rape/abuse/violence happens more to women than to men?

You lump an awful lot of different behaviors together. In the context of war, I'd be tempted to say violence against men has been more common historically, but you've given such a broad categories I feel it's a pretty much unanswerable question.

If you want to measure the frequency of rape, abuse or violence by gender, you're going to first need statistical measures that overcomes false reports, under-reporting because of social stigma, gender differences in legal definitions, and then set strict parameters in terms of time and space. When in history are we talking about, the last year, ten years, or century? Where are we taking our figures from, the US, the industrialised West, or the entire world? What acts are we talking about, does an unwanted pat on the bottom count as abuse, or only such acts as gang rape in a slum shack in South Africa?

As programmers say, 'garbage in, garbage out', and if you're going to start with such broad categories you can't have any hope of gaining meaningful results. On the other hand, if you started with a more concrete and narrowly-defined question, such as 'do you feel rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence against men and boys is given a lower priority than rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence against women and girls in the G8 countries?', I would unflinchingly answer 'yes'. The fact that female-on-male rape is hardly or not at all recognised in some of these nations would surely serve as an indicator of the level of ignorance about sexual violence against men.

PowerWisdomCourage · 2013-11-26T14:01:27+00:00

Only considering hard, empirical evidence; men are the majority victims of rape and violence (not sure about abuse). More men are raped yearly in prison alone than women in general society and men have always been the primary victims of violence. You can easily find reports on both online. The problem is framing victimhood from a female perspective, which often denies male victims legitimacy.

Of course, that's not to play oppression olympics, both sexes have their fair share of issues, but feminism (the movement responsible for the prevailing view of victimhood from the female perspective only) has caused so much damage to society by purposefully neglecting male victims. Of course, now they're beginning to be held accountable and it's "misogyny."

DavidByron · 2013-11-26T19:06:39+00:00

Because of the hatred against men and the campaign to make male victims disappear that feminism has run for decades there's very little measurement of male sexual victims. This is intentional.

The NISVS (published by the CDC) says it is the ONLY national level professional survey to ask men if they were raped. Actually they refused to classify the male rape victims as "raped" because of their bigotry, but they did ask if they were forced by someone else to have sex against their will and called it "made to penetrate". Not "raped".

They found at least as many men raped as women over 12 months in the USA. This did NOT count prison rape.

avantvernacular · 2013-11-27T00:16:50+00:00

I think it's because no one cares. Look at television, the action stars kill 50 men to save one women. Look at the media, it's women and children who are the victims. Look at history, it's men who do the dying. Look at the streets, who's sleeping there. Look at our social services, who we help. Men are just so much more expendable. When you're expendable, by definition bad things happening to you don't matter.

If a man gets raped or abused or injured, what's the big deal? He was expendable anyways.

2013-11-26T18:48:48+00:00

You know, what happens to men more often? Murder. Doesn't mean, that murdering women is less of an issue than murdering men, does it?

Title	Woman here...I want your opinion on the statement "Rape/abuse/domestic violence DOES happen to men, but it happens to women more often!"
Author	SirComet
Upvotes	19
Comments	44
Date	November 26, 2013 12:20 AM UTC (12 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1rghn8/woman_herei_want_your_opinion_on_the_statement/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/woman-herei-want-your-opinion-on-the-statement.1157793 https://theredarchive.com/post/1157793

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