Examples Agains Asian American Males in the Media
When Men Are Raped
A new written report reveals that men are oft the victims of sexual assault, and women are often the perpetrators.
Photograph by Thomas Northcut/Thinkstock
Terminal yr the National Law-breaking Victimization Survey turned upward a remarkable statistic. In request 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men. The number seemed so high that it prompted researcher Lara Stemple to call the Bureau of Justice Statistics to see if it maybe it had made a mistake, or changed its terminology. After all, in years by men had accounted for somewhere between 5 and fourteen percent of rape and sexual violence victims. Merely no, information technology wasn't a mistake, officials told her, although they couldn't explain the rising across guessing that maybe it had something to exercise with the publicity surrounding one-time football coach Jerry Sandusky and the Penn Country sex corruption scandal.
Stemple, who works with the Health and Human Rights Project at UCLA, had often wondered whether incidents of sexual violence against men were under-reported. She had once worked on prison house reform and knew that jail is a place where sexual violence against men is routine but not counted in the full general national statistics. Stemple began earthworks through existing surveys and discovered that her hunch was correct. The experience of men and women is "a lot closer than any of u.s. would expect," she says. For some kinds of victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences. Stemple concluded that we need to "completely rethink our assumptions about sexual victimization," and particularly our fallback model that men are always the perpetrators and women the victims.
Sexual assault is a term that gets refracted through the culture wars, every bit Slate 's own Emily Bazelon explained in a story about the terminology of rape. Feminists claimed the more legalistic term of sexual assault to put information technology squarely in the campsite of fierce crime. Bazelon argues in her story for reclaiming the term rape because of its harsh unflinching sound and its nonlegalistic shock value. But she also allows that rape does not help us grasp crimes outside our limited imagination, specially crimes against men. She quotes a painful passage from screenwriter and novelist Rafael Yglesias, which is precisely the kind of crime Stemple worries is too foreign and uncomfortable to contemplate.
I used to say, when some role of me was still aback of what had been done to me, that I was "molested" because the human being who played skillfully with my eight-year-quondam penis, who put it in his oral cavity, who put his lips on mine and tried to button his tongue in equally deep equally it would go, did not anally rape me. … Instead of delineating what he had washed, I chose "molestation" hoping that would convey what had happened to me.
Of form it doesn't. For listeners to capeesh and understand what I had endured, I needed to risk that they will gag or rush out of the room. I needed to exist particular and clear as to the details so that when I say I was raped people will empathize what I truly mean.
For years, the FBI defined forcible rape, for data collecting purposes, as "the lecherous noesis of a female person forcibly and confronting her will." Eventually localities began to rebel against that limited gender-spring definition; in 2010 Chicago reported 86,767 cases of rape but used its ain 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 forcefulness).
Data hasn't been calculated under the new FBI definition nonetheless, but Stemple parses several other national surveys in her new paper, "The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge One-time Assumptions," co-written with Ilan Meyer and published in the April 17 edition of the American Journal of Public Wellness. I 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 ain torso parts, either by physical strength or coercion, or when the victim was drunkard or high or otherwise unable to consent. When those cases were taken into account, the rates of nonconsensual sexual contact basically equalized, with one.270 million women and 1.267 million men claiming to exist victims of sexual violence.
"Made to penetrate" is an awkward phrase that hasn't gotten any traction. It'southward also something we instinctively don't acquaintance with sexual assault. Just is it possible our instincts are all wrong here? We might assume, for example, that if a man has an erection he must want sex, particularly because we presume men are sexually insatiable. But imagine if the same were said virtually women. The mere presence of physiological symptoms associated with arousal does not in fact indicate actual arousal, much less willing participation. And the high degree of depression and dysfunction among male victims of sexual abuse backs this up. At the very to the lowest degree, the phrase remedies an obvious injustice. Nether the old FBI definition, what happened to Rafael Yglesias would only take counted as rape if he'd been an viii-year-quondam girl. Accepting the term "made to penetrate" helps u.s.a. understand that trauma comes in all forms.
So why are men suddenly showing up as victims? Every comedian has a prison rape joke and prosecutions of sexual crimes against men are still rare. But gender norms are shaking loose in a way that allows men to identify themselves—if the survey is sensitive and specific enough—as vulnerable. A contempo analysis of BJS data, for example, turned up that 46 percent of male person victims reported a female perpetrator.
The final outrage in Stemple and Meyer's newspaper involves inmates, who aren't counted in the general statistics at all. In the last few years, the BJS did ii studies in adult prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities. The surveys were excellent because they afforded lots of privacy and asked questions using very specific, breezy, and graphic language. ("Did another inmate use concrete force to make you give or receive a blow task?") Those surveys turned upwards the contrary of what nosotros generally remember is true. Women were more likely to be abused by fellow female inmates, and men by guards, and many of those guards were female. For instance, of juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 per centum were boys reporting abuse by a female staff fellow member. In total, inmates reported an astronomical 900,000 incidents of sexual abuse.
At present the question is, in a climate when politicians and the media are finally paying attention to military and campus sexual assault, should these new findings change our national conversation about rape? Stemple is a longtime feminist who fully understands that men have historically used sexual violence to subjugate women and that in most countries they however practise. Every bit she sees it, feminism has fought long and difficult to fight rape myths—that if a woman gets raped it's somehow her mistake, that she welcomed it in some way. Merely the same chat needs to happen for men. Past portraying sexual violence against men as aberrant, we foreclose justice and compound the shame. And the chat about men doesn't need to shut down the one near women. "Compassion," she says, "is non a finite resources."
Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/04/male-rape-in-america-a-new-study-reveals-that-men-are-sexually-assaulted-almost-as-often-as-women.html
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