Proponents of the rape culture myth would assert that in Western democracies such as the US and the UK, sexual assault enacted upon women is trivialised, tolerated, or even encouraged. There’s often a perfunctory acknowledgement that sometimes men get raped too, but the message is clear: women are under constant threat of violence from predatory heterosexual men, and we live in a society whose norms and values fail to prohibit such transgressions either morally or legally.

This is leading to a dangerously misguided perception of men, and is creating a generation of young males who will be highly vulnerable to discrimination and false accusations.

Advocates of the ‘rape culture’ theory cite a high incidence of rape, as well as a low conviction rate. But some perspective is necessary. In the US—where the term ‘rape culture’ originated—rape remains a comparatively rare crime. According to FBI statistics from 2021 (the latest available), per 100,000 people in the US that year, there were 1,293 cases of larceny-theft, 203 cases of aggravated assault, 241 cases of motor vehicle theft, 53 cases of robbery, 39 cases of rape, and 6 cases of homicide.[i]

In 2020, the conviction rate for all violent crime was 42%.[ii] For rape, it was 31%. Among the crimes with lower conviction rates than rape were: robbery (28%), arson (22%), larceny-theft (15%), property crime (15%), burglary (14%), and motor vehicle theft (12%). Especially considering that the nature of rape means that witnesses are rare, it’s a stretch to say that the legal system is specifically failing victims of rape when compared with other crimes. In fact, the conviction rate for rape is the third highest of all offences, second only to homicide and aggravated assault.

It’s also worth noting that with the exception of rape, most victims of all the above offences are male. And yet, despite the conviction rate for many of them being less than half that of rape, feminists rarely characterise our society as one which causes undue injury to men through encouraging or failing to punish those crimes. There is no vogue within feminism for decrying an ‘assault culture’, a ‘robbery culture’ or a ‘homicide culture’.

[i] FBI Crime Data Explorer, cde.ucr.cjis.gov

[ii] Statista, ‘Crime clearance rate in the United States in 2020, by type’, Statista, 29 Sep 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-rate-by-type-in-the-us