Most rape victims in the United States are men:
https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html
Caution: that’s hard, explicit, distressing reading.
https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html
Caution: that’s hard, explicit, distressing reading.
You wouldn't get that impression reading the news.
This is often demonstrated with the two hypothetical headlines "Dog bites Man" vs "Man bites Dog".
One is expected based on its ubiquity, and so a poor headline, where you want some emotional reaction to hook readers.
I can't see where the suffering of men would be silenced because of their gender.
On the contrary, at last, more and more often men express their suffering, which is great because the "silent strong" man used to be the reference. Men as warriors don't ever complain etc.
There are more and more often in the news men stating their feelings: veterans with PTSD, Johnny Depp courageously telling how he has been abused by his partner, men denouncing being on verge of burning-out at work etc.
As a man, I consider that yes, there is still plenty of men suffering in silence. And that needs to come out. The more men are able to get over the silent strong man figure - John Wayne! - inherited from the past, the more the media will talk about it.
Nobody is silencing the suffering of men ; the men need to reconnect with their feelings and learn to express them. Most women are more able to express their feelings and they are indeed "silenced" - even if less and less so.
An example? The "mental load". In many modern heterosexual couples, the woman is still in charge of the general on-going of the home, and the man goes to work without that load. When he comes home, he waits to be asked or just does the minimum.
If you have ever been in charge of a project at work and your colleagues are only participants, you know very well the difference. Being in charge of the general coordination, ensure that everything is done when required, is quite a load.
Things are improving. Slowly.
Oh, 80% of homicides are of men? How about "men kill xyz thousand women every year?"
I wonder what aspects have gotten worse over the years and how the dynamic has shifted, if at all. Or maybe it doesn't matter this was from 20 years ago? :<
There are therefore around 3 times more people incarcerated in the US than in UK, proportionally.
As rapes are very frequent in the US jails (as this terrible report points out) and most of the jail population are men, then indeed, what can conclude that - statistically speaking - that most rape victims are men.
But if you take apart the population in jail, most rape victims are women.
Of course, one can argue that prisoners are human beings like others: they are. But the gendered statistic on rape is turned upside-down by the totally abnormal proportion of people in jail in the US, when compared to comparable countries, PLUS the totally despicable jail system where rapes are numerous.
Note that rapes are very common as well in jails of comparable countries. I have no information about this, but I can't see why rapes would be more frequent in American jails rather than British jails - all others things being equal. But maybe the US jail system and/or the US jail population may lead to more (or less, why not) rapes: I have no clue about this.
I'm not saying that they are in jail for no reason, but that the US society is ... dysfunctional. That analysis may appear outrageous in the US, but it is something obvious to many other countries.
But from saying "dysfunctional" to point out why it is so, there is a huge leap where political inclinations are bound to express themselves. In this case, these are not biases, because politics is precisely about how we live together in a society. And indeed, people don't live in the same world, in the sense that their interpretative frameworks are so diverse.
That's why I find the formulation of that figure problematic. I would find it less click-bait-y and trolly to say: "Rapes of men in the US jails are incredibly numerous" - maybe adding "to the point of outnumbering the rapes of women".
Why is it problematic? Because it echoes a large incel, masculinust, far-right discourse against feminism. Each time women (and "woke" men, to use their vocabulary) denounce something, there are always troves of righteous men pretending that the issue is true for all sexes alike (since in their views, sex and gender are the same thing).
The formulation "Most rapes victims in the United States are men" is a way of saying that all genders are equally victims of rapes in general. But they are not. In the world, and probably in all countries except the US, rape victims are overwhelmingly women and girls. The US exception is not related to a gender equality but to the abnormal rate of incarceration.
I don't know if there was an intention in the formulation or not. Maybe not, so I'm not at all in an accusatory mode. I'm just saying that this formulation offers ground to misinterpretation.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/prison-population-f... https://www.statista.com/statistics/203718/number-of-prisone...
> The US exception is not related to a gender equality but to the abnormal rate of incarceration.
It’s related to a gender inequality. The US incarceration system has gender inequality built into it, so more incarceration means more inequality.
You could say indigenous people didn’t really have a childhood sexual abuse problem, but an abnormal rate of state-mandated religious schools. Sounds pretty gross, right?
Which is also why prisons are segregated by sex, to avoid women prisoners being sexually assaulted, raped and impregnated by deviant men. If prisons had no such sex segregation, it would overwhelmingly be the women being raped, not the men.
It does make me wonder if penectomy and castration should be the standard punishment for rape, not just incarceration. Otherwise they're just being given access to a new set of potential victims.