Survivors Manchester excluded from Rape Support Fund (via Toy Soldiers)

via Toy Soldiers

"One of the main barriers male survivors of sexual violence face is a lack of services. Most existing sexual violence services only assist women and girls. Of the services that do assist men and boys, most provide limited counseling and referrals.

"Male survivors need services,  however, even when those organizations are created, they face dismissal by the existing female-only groups...."

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Finding common ground

Just wanted to take time and space to thank @Lancestrian for taking the time over the last five or six days to have a dialogue over Twitter, of all media, about the gendering of rape. Earlier today she posted:

@ConversiveBlog 1) I am coming around to your view on this. It's not possible to accurately determine what proportion of the population are
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 2) perpetrators based on victimhood stats (my revelation of last night) and no research has been done into how many perps
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 3) are female and how many are male. We can't even infer that women don't sexually assault other women because a woman might
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 4) not recognise another women's unwanted contact as being sexually-motivated (man stroking my hair is assumed to be sexual,
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 5) woman stroking my hair isn't). So in the absence of clear evidence like a Lisak and Miller type of study, we simply don't
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 6) know what proportion of women perpetrate sexual assaults and it's unfair to presume that more men are perps than women
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 7) without evidence. Also on reflection, I realise that framing sexual violence as something men do to (usually) women harms
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 8) the feminist goal of eliminating all sexual violence, by encouraging misogynists to see it as a "women's problem" and
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 9) hence ignorable. I would welcome research into the prevalence of female perpetration.
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

Baby steps. But still felt good to find common ground.

Rape is as rape does: Epilogue

In my last post, I discussed the findings "National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey" (NISVS 2010). I compared the figures on rape and sexual violence for men and women over the 12 months previous to the survey, and I promised I'd get back to why I was using the 12-month figures rather than the lifetime figures (which were the figures significantly more emphasized by the CDC in the introduction and press releases and so forth). 

Rape is as rape does, Part 3: "Other Sexual Violence" a.k.a. "Not Rape"

In 2010, the CDC conducted the "National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey" (NISVS 2010) and published the results in 2011.  From the introduction: "This report presents information related to several types of violence that have not previously been measured in a national population based survey, including types of sexual violence other than rape; expressive psychological aggression and coercive control, and control of reproductive or sexual health" [emphasis mine]. Why is this important? Because traditional methods of surveying or studying rape don't include male victims of female rapists (except in the cases of the woman using a surrogate penis to penetrate the man), because that's Not Rape.

Rape is as rape does, Part 2: Lady Rapist 101

So, how does that even work? Men are bigger and stronger than women, on average. Physically, they generally have the upper hand. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but there are certain anatomical realities to penis-in-vagina sex that require the cooperation, and, presumably, the consent of the male. Right?

Rape is as rape does, Part 1: Define "rape"

Thinkprogress.org recently posted a piece discussing the findings of what they call "The Largest International Study On Rape That’s Been Conducted So Far." The study itself was published in The Lancet and was titled, "Prevalence of and factors associated with non-partner rape perpetration: findings from the UN Multi-country Cross-sectional Study on Men and Violence in Asia and the Pacific." Surveys were performed over two years and six countries and 10,000+ men.

But men were only surveyed as perpetrators.

No man was asked if he'd ever been a victim of rape. No woman was asked if she had ever "'forced a [man] who was not your [husband] or [boy]friend at the time to have sex,' or if they had ever 'had sex with a [man] who was too drunk or drugged to indicate whether [he] wanted it'” [genders reversed.].

Men getting raped? Absurd, right? Only happens in prison.  Maybe during wartime. And always by other men. Women don't rape. That's the official narrative, right?

Ladies and gentlemen, it's complete bullshit.