Is Rape Male?
By: J Shing
Tags: Rape, Male Rape, Gender Norms, Male Victims, Sexual Assault

The Neglect of Many Victims of Sexual Assault

Discrimination against women and reinforcing gender roles by patriarchal power structures comes in many forms. One form of oppression that can be interpreted as one of the oldest and most powerful methods of punishing women is rape. The United States Department of Justice defines rape as “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” Historically documented cases of rape date as far back as 900 B.C.E. to Greek mythology. Of course, the term “rape” must have been common to make it into Greek mythology and an old concept. Even if it was a relatively new phenomenon in ancient Greece, that would still classify rape as more than 2000 years old.

Rape against women has been and still is ingrained throughout all civilizations. Any form of sexual assault is a severe form of oppression meant to demoralize, punish, and remove a woman’s agency over her own body. However, there is a hugely misconstrued component to rape culture that people today seem to neglect: who the victims are. In ancient Greek mythology, it was Zeus that rapes the Queen of Sparta, Leda, and Poseidon that rapes Medusa. The general public tend to believe that rape is always where a woman’s body becomes violated by a male figure, but is it always a man who rapes? When it comes to sexual assault, is it possible for gender roles to change places?

Since 1927, the United States Department of Justice defined rape as “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” For nearly 100 years, the definition remained the same until 2012 when the Department changed rape to “the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” Not only did they broaden the sexual acts against women, the justice system included men as victims. Contrary to the presupposition that only women can be raped, many men have more so recently come forward as victims of sexual violence. In 2016, the National Crime Victimization Survey announced that out of all sexual assault victims that year, 38 percent were men. Out of those cases, 68.6 percent reported female perpetrators. In terms of those men who experienced rape, 79 percent reported female perpetrators. Nearly 40 percent of sex crime victims were male, of which 70 percent reported being violated by women. The data here was astonishing, revealing that a huge majority of sexual male sexual assault victims were attacked by women, the complete opposite of the popular belief that these crimes only involve men dominating women.

In her article Is Violence Male? The Law, Gender, and Violence, Lucinda Joy Peach discussed how sexual abuse against women is trivialized and increasingly hard to prove in a court of law. She articulated how the justice system is male-oriented to protect men who abuse women. Gender bias in society’s institutions has made it seem that women were incapable of perpetuating violence, but only being victimized by violence. Peach argues that in the military women were not allowed to hold combat roles, as these positions could only be held by men: the “only gender” that can commit violence.

With these gender binaries in place, cases of sexual assault become much more biased and criminals harder to prosecute. Peach claims “Traditionally, male-dominated juries would do what the battered women did not do, for example, leave long before the abuse reached the stage where the use of deadly force was necessary to repel it.” But as seen before, men are also subject to sexual assault by women. But aren’t women only victims of violence, not agents? This would make men the only perpetrators of violence and never victims. However, this is clearly not the case. When society places gendered assumptions on any gender, these biases not only affect spectators in sexual assault cases, but plant gendered expectations onto victims as well. As much sexual assault cases go unreported by female victims, many go unreported male victims as well. Social pressures maintain the assumption that men are unable to be raped by women and that they can overpower them if in the situation. When raped by a woman, the man is hesitant to report it to anyone, for fear that no one will believe them. Even if the crime makes it to court, gender expectations make it hard to convince a jury that a man has sexually assaulted by a woman.

The bias of the justice system, jury, and society itself all factor in that contribute to the reason why so many sex crimes go unreported, so many rapes do not make it to trial, and so many people guilty of sex crimes remain unpunished. Sexual crimes will continue and possibly worsen if gender essentialism go unchallenged and we continue to place assumptions on people based on their biological categorization. A substantial shift in the way make assumptions based on gender, race, economic status, and other traits is crucial if oppression and discrimination are to be suppressed. On a global scale, intersectional identities need to be embraced to understand that every person is different, but should be treated the same. When we begin stereotyping and falsely placing differences upon groups of people is when we cater towards a future of injustice and repression.