The CDC's NISVS is one of the largest and most comprehensive reports on sexual violence as a topic. Despite this, even they refuse to see male victims as true victims. The definition for sexual violence and coercion are unisex - but with this, they chose to split it. (link in comments)

AigisxLabrys · 2024-09-21T01:07:55+00:00

Is the problem that the CDC still doesn’t call men who were made to penetrate rape victims?

SomeSugondeseGuy · 2024-09-21T00:42:53+00:00

Here's the study: https://www.cdc.gov/nisvs/documentation/nisvsReportonSexualViolence.pdf The graphic is on page 3 - or PDF page 7.

Here's the larger scope of the surveys: https://www.cdc.gov/nisvs/documentation/index.html

The reason that studies are able to boast numbers that say that "most male rape victims are raped by other men" is because those studies use a definition for rape that is specifically and purposefully designed to exclude male victims of women - requiring that the victim be the one being penetrated, which is - mechanically speaking - not how women rape.

Imagine if studies boasted that the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults were committed by women, but when you actually read into it - it turned out that studies just didn't consider breasts as sexual and said that any woman who had been groped in that way had just "been touched on the chest".

Strangely, they also break apart "rape" and "sexual coercion".

I've combined rape, sexual coercion, and "a man being forced to have sex with someone against his will" as rape for these next few points:

If you combine all of these, with a 95% confidence interval - 3,218,000 men were victimized by women in the year of 2016 alone.

Female victims of men were numbered at 7,264,000 in the same time period by the same metrics. So women still make up the majority of victims, of course.

Meaning men make up 31% of victims of heterosexual nonconsensual sex.

Women make up a majority of victims, and that is terrible, and I am sorry for any woman who has been subjected to that.

But male victims are constantly and disproportionately dismissed and swept under the rug.

Side note - the definition of rape culture is: "a society or environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or trivializing sexual assault and abuse." I would personally argue that the CDC's clear and blatant erasure of more than 80% of male victims would fit that definition with flying colors.

le-doppelganger · 2024-09-21T02:01:11+00:00

Interesting that coverage of earlier studies revealed different, more equal numbers . . .

How could that be? After all, very few men in the CDC study were classified as victims of rape: 1.7 percent in their lifetime, and too few for a reliable estimate in the past year. But these numbers refer only to men who have been forced into anal sex or made to perform oral sex on another male. Nearly 7 percent of men, however, reported that at some point in their lives, they were "made to penetrate" another person—usually in reference to vaginal intercourse, receiving oral sex, or performing oral sex on a woman. This was not classified as rape, but as "other sexual violence."

And now the real surprise: when asked about experiences in the last 12 months, men reported being "made to penetrate"—either by physical force or due to intoxication—at virtually the same rates as women reported rape (both 1.1 percent in 2010, and 1.7 and 1.6 respectively in 2011).

In other words, if being made to penetrate someone was counted as rape—and why shouldn’t it be?—then the headlines could have focused on a truly sensational CDC finding: that women rape men as often as men rape women.

The CDC also reports that men account for over a third of those experiencing another form of sexual violence—"sexual coercion." That was defined as being pressured into sexual activity by psychological means: lies or false promises, threats to end a relationship or spread negative gossip, or "making repeated requests" for sex and expressing unhappiness at being turned down.

'The CDC’s Rape Numbers Are Misleading'

For years, the FBI defined forcible rape, for data collecting purposes, as "the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will." Eventually localities began to rebel against that limited gender-bound definition; in 2010 Chicago reported 86,767 cases of rape but used its own broader definition, so the FBI left out the Chicago stats. Finally, in 2012, the FBI revised its definition and focused on penetration, with no mention of female (or force).

Data hasn’t been calculated under the new FBI definition yet, but Stemple parses several other national surveys in her new paper, "The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions," co-written with Ilan Meyer and published in the April 17 edition of the American Journal of Public Health. One of those surveys is the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, for which the Centers for Disease Control invented a category of sexual violence called "being made to penetrate." This definition includes victims who were forced to penetrate someone else with their own body parts, either by physical force or coercion, or when the victim was drunk or high or otherwise unable to consent. When those cases were taken into account, the rates of nonconsensual sexual contact basically equalized, with 1.270 million women and 1.267 million men claiming to be victims of sexual violence.

'When Men Are Raped'

The results were surprising. For example, the CDC's nationally representative data revealed that over one year, men and women were equally likely to experience nonconsensual sex, and most male victims reported female perpetrators. Over their lifetime, 79 percent of men who were "made to penetrate" someone else (a form of rape, in the view of most researchers) reported female perpetrators. Likewise, most men who experienced sexual coercion and unwanted sexual contact had female perpetrators.

We also pooled four years of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data and found that 35 percent of male victims who experienced rape or sexual assault reported at least one female perpetrator. Among those who were raped or sexually assaulted by a woman, 58 percent of male victims and 41 percent of female victims reported that the incident involved a violent attack, meaning the female perpetrator hit, knocked down or otherwise attacked the victim, many of whom reported injuries.

'Sexual Victimization by Women Is More Common Than Previously Known'

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