Comment on This speaks for itself

• Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I’ll just go ahead and throw out as a starting point that the definitions used by NISVS specifically discount male rape victims and female rapists by essentially defining away anything that a woman is most likely to do when sexually assaulting a man into a subcategory of “other”. This is a common wrinkle in a lot of the stats, and it goes back to some old and toxic ideas - to the point that I can find you a clip from a prominent sexual assault researcher (Mary Koss, many of the survey instruments used descend from her work, she’s also the origin of the “1 in 4” stat that’s oft quoted and coined the term “date rape”, etc) describing a woman drugging a man into compliance in order to have intercourse with him as not “rape” or “sexual assault” but “unwanted contact.”

  There’s a further issue with lifetime survey stats (which is what gets focused on in that link), which is pretty simple and obvious if you look at the data. There’s this weird gap between what previous year numbers look like and what lifetime numbers look like that’s very obviously off, specifically that once you account for weirdness in definitions the previous year numbers are much closer than the lifetime numbers - so either the rates used to be dramatically higher for women and have since equalized for some reason or for some reason men are less likely to report older incidents in the survey - either way previous year numbers being much more similar than lifetime numbers needs some explanation. If you’ve been told time and again that what happened to you doesn’t count as assault, that you must have wanted it because men always do, etc, etc until you internalize the messaging, how do you think that impacts survey reporting long term?

  I personally suffered from this one for a long time, and only literal decades later can wrap my head around not being “lucky” due to what happened to me. If I’d been asked to be a participant in NISVS ten years ago I would have answered very differently than I would now, despite the incident having happened long before that, because I’d mentally filed it away as not an assault because men always want it, at least from a woman so clearly what happened couldn’t/didn’t count, right? An even a casual look around would lead to realizing I’m not remotely unique in this. And yes, I’m implying that lifetime sexual victimization rates in men specifically are massively under-reported because social narratives surrounding the idea are heavily internalized by the men themselves. And I have no idea how you’d fix that because it fundamentally is a mental block on the part of the men themselves, an unwillingness to see themselves as victims or what happened to them as violation.

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