Recognize that men are convicted for the majority of sexual abuses and especially rape, but this does not necessarily indicate that they perpetuate anything near that proportion of sexual abuse. The only way conviction rates would accurately reflect real prevalence would be if

  • [where it comes to "rape" specifically,] females could be charged with rape for forcing males into PIV (in many places, rape is legally defined as either specifically a man forcing a woman into sex or where the rapist penetrates the victim. This also applies to many sexual violence studies which define "rape" as being the perpetrator forcibly penetrating the victim, like the CDC study)

  • men / boys were as likely to report being raped by a female as women / girls are to report being raped by a male (which appears not to be the case)

  • the police were as likely to take a report seriously and thus begin an investigation if a man / boy reported being raped by a female as if a woman / girl reported being raped by a male

  • the prosecution were as likely to charge a woman who forces a man into sex with a serious sex crime as it is to charge a man for it

  • the jury were as likely to convict a female who does make it to court of a serious sex crime against a man / boy as they are a male who makes it to court

Considering that none of these things are the case, perhaps one can see how the conviction rates may be skewed compared with the prevalence of real-life assaults

I wanted to post this because it's something I've seen cropping up recently, e.g. here as well as the comments on this article; especially this one

In terms of the specific sources the user in the image cites, the first one is from here, and if one looks at the source of the "91% of the victims of rape and sexual assault are female, and 9% are male", what happens? It directs it to conviction rates skewed by both under-reporting and under-prosecuting the way that I explained. Same thing for her second claim "Nearly 99% of sex offenders in single-victim incidents were male"

Not to mention, these statistics are from 1992-2000. Up until 2012, rape was defined as "the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will", so of course the only statistics this user provides are for long before male victims of rape, let alone by female perpetrators, were even legally recognized

This is why statistics need to be closely examined. It's easy and requires no critical thought to look at the conviction rates and say "this proves men commit the vast majority of sexual violence. After all, it's the BJS; it's official government statistics; it can't be wrong." And yeah it probably was not wrong about the amount of convicted sexual abusers who are men in 1992-2000, but it is wrong to say this proves 95-99% of sexual abusers (convicted or otherwise) are men

On the other hand, when one look at the statistics from studies--that don't have the under-reporting bias from men worried about the shame from publicly confessing that they had been raped, and that don't have the skew from under-prosecution--one sees much different numbers