Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

I'm not surprised to read this. Any statistics about rape have to be taken with a huge helping of salt, because of all the issues surrounding data collection and self-reporting. However, I have read at least some reasonably reputable sources citing that in over half of all rapes that occur in the US, the victim is male[0].

Even if this is an overstatement, it's clear that the classic "man physically overpowers woman" narrative of rape is false - both because of the gender assumptions and because rape does not always involve physical dominance.

It's kind of sad that sexual assault and rape are oftentimes viewed through the lens of gender-based crimes. In reality, sexual assault and rape have nothing to do with gender, and should be treated as serious problems regardless of the sex and/or gender of both the victim and perpetrator.

By perpetuating a false image of rape/assault, we end up with a broken matched filter[1] for what constitutes rape. As a result, people tell themselves that what they experienced "wasn't really rape" - because the victim is male, or because they were under the influence, or because they were married to the perpetrator, or any other number of reasons. And this is how we end up with victims who stay silent.

[0] This is not the same thing as saying that over half of all rape victims are male!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matched_filter

I am not sure how your [0] can be true. The only scenario I can imagine where it is true, there are a lot of men who are raped repeatedly, but not as many women raped repeatedly, or more individual women victims.

Please clarify what you meant... citation would also be nice.

I believe that is the implication. Think of incarcerated populations.

Even if this is an overstatement, it's clear that the classic "man physically overpowers woman" narrative of rape is false - both because of the gender assumptions and because rape does not always involve physical dominance.

I don't think this is really a classic narrative regarding rape. If anything, a lot of discussion of late has focused explicitly around how that's so often not the case.

It's kind of sad that sexual assault and rape are oftentimes viewed through the lens of gender-based crimes. In reality, sexual assault and rape have nothing to do with gender, and should be treated as serious problems regardless of the sex and/or gender of both the victim and perpetrator.

Sexual assault and rape are almost entirely about gender, because the effects and circumstances surrounding the crime show quite a difference between men and women; there are typically different causes and different issues to face. For example, men have to deal with the fact that they're more likely to be rasped by another man, or that if they're subject to sexual assault by a woman, that they're likely to face a "you're a man, you can't be raped" attitude. These are different challenges from those faced by women.

>men have to deal with the fact that they're more likely to be rasped by another man

Not really.

From a comment below:

One of the studies of the Bureau of Justice data notes that in a certain subset of the data, 46% of the male victims of sexual assault reported a female perpetrator.

Citation: http://jmm.sagepub.com/content/12/3/275.abstract

54% vs 46% is not much of a difference. And then you have this from the article:

"Women were more likely to be abused by fellow female inmates, and men by guards, and many of those guards were female. For example, of juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 percent were boys reporting abuse by a female staff member."

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