Keith Smith (shown above) was 14 when he was raped by a driver who picked him up after a hockey team meeting. He had hitchhiked home, which is why, for decades, he continued to blame himself for the assault.
While most experts agree women are raped far more often than men, 1.4 percent of men in a recent national survey said they had been raped at some point. The study, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that when rape was defined as oral or anal penetration, one in 71 men said they had been raped or had been the target of attempted rape, usually by a man they knew. (The study did not include men in prison.)
And one in 21 said they had been forced to penetrate an acquaintance or a partner, usually a woman; had been the victim of an attempt to force penetration; or had been made to receive oral sex.
Other estimates have run even higher. A Department of Justice report found that 3 percent of men, or one in 33, had been raped. Some experts believe that one in six men have experienced unwanted sexual contact of some kind as minors.
But for many men, the subject is so discomfiting that it is rarely discussed — virtually taboo, experts say, because of societal notions about masculinity and the idea that men are invulnerable and can take care of themselves.
“We have a cultural blind spot about this,” said David Lisak, a clinical psychologist who has done research on interpersonal violence and sexual abuse and is a founding board member of 1in6, an organization that offers information and services to men who had unwanted or abusive sexual experiences as children.
“We recognize that male children are being abused,” Dr. Lisak said, “but then when boys cross some kind of threshold somewhere in adolescence and become what we perceive to be men, we no longer want to think about it in this way.”
Much of the research on the sexual assault of men has focused on prisons. But men are also raped outside of prison, usually by people they know, including acquaintances and intimate partners, but occasionally by complete strangers. They are raped as part of violent, drunken or drug-induced assaults; war crimes; interrogations; antigay bias crimes; and hazing rites for male clubs and organizations, like fraternities, and in the military.
In one study of 3,337 military veterans applying for disability benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder, 6.5 percent of male combat veterans and 16.5 percent of noncombat veterans reported either in-service or post-service sexual assault. (The rates were far higher for female veterans, 69.0 percent and 86.6 percent respectively.)
A Pentagon report released on Thursday found a 64 percent increase in sexual crimes in the Army since 2006, with rape, sexual assault and forcible sodomy the most frequent violent sex crimes committed last year.
Some studies have reported that the risk of rape is greatest for men who are young, are living in poverty or homeless, or are disabled or mentally ill. The C.D.C. study found that one-quarter of men who had been raped were assaulted before they were 10 , usually by someone they knew.
And young men raised by poor single mothers are especially vulnerable to male predators, said Dr. Zane Gates, an internist who cares for low-income patients on Medicaid at a community health center in Altoona, Pa.
“You’re looking for a male figure in your life desperately, and you’ll give anything for that,” he said.
–From The New York Times, Men Struggle for Rape Awareness
About Tom Matlack
Very true indeed. People have a hard time with awareness of male rape victims partly because the mentality around it is still stuck on “Its something males do to females.” And even when people talk about male vicims its usually almost entirely focused on male perps (probably because they can still fit that within the “Its something males do….” half of their mentality).
I find page 2 of the NYT piece slightly odd – but then the whole piece is beyond odd and quite mixed up!
The whole piece fails to provide any direct signposting to any service or support for men – and the one that has the highest implied connection “Men Can Stop Rape” provides no services – only has a very hard to find web page that directs you away – the core mission of the Organisation is “… preventing men’s violence against women.”.
Why were they even quoted?
The NY times failed to link to the “Men Can Stop Rape” page that even holds a single sign post! That page does not even provide a link to national help lines – DUH!
So – it’s a piece saying how hard it is for male rape victims to get help – be believed – get any support or recognition and there isn’t a single valid signpost to any form of help?
The piece does eventually links to RAINN, but can’t be bothered to link to the page that is headed “Male Sexual Assault”.
I had to check my dictionary to see if “Ironic” is the correct term? Apparently not!
So I googled “worse than Irony” – the best I could find was “it pretends to be sincere.”… and after that it was “Crock Of Shit!”.
OR
You could say that the frickin’ NEW YORK TIMES ran a piece on male rape victims.
And it wasn’t even talking about prisons.
Hmmmmm – I have been looking at their archives – It seems that as a generic US based subject they like to cycle it about once every 20 years.
If it comes up as an issue in war, via the UN, they print on demand. … oh and if any funny non democratic types like Saudi are dealing with it oddly that also gets printed pronto!
So it would seem that is the end of the issue until 2032 – well for the US anyway.
Men selected for the survey represented about 1.7% of the total
population of men seeking compensation for PTSD between 1994 and 1998. Selected women
represented 54% of the total female population.
Thank you for this piece. One of my dear friends was raped as very young man. It has been hell for him to get over it.
One of my best friends was raped by three men in the LA County jail when he was 18. He was a Canadian boy visiting California. Him and his friend ran out of money in LA and he was busted for stealing some food out of a supermarket; they were hungry. He spent two weeks in the county jail before his dad managed to fly down from Edmonton and bail him out. He remembers vividly how the guard dunked doughnuts in his coffee and watched while the three much older and bigger men sodomized him repeatedly and also forced him to perform fellatio on them. My friend has never fully recovered from this incident, he is now 55.
For years, my friend told me that he had watched someone else get raped while he was in the jail; making himself a third person observer instead of the victim (totally understandable, I would want to escape my body in that circumstance also). It was only recently that he admitted to me that it had been him that was raped and that he has been in therapy for years because of it. In this case, I hardly think the punishment fits the crime. Why anyone would put a teenage boy with no criminal record in a cell with three hardened criminals is beyond me. And for the guard to just sit there and watch the abuse and not intervene to stop the rape is just plain disgusting.
My friend has struggled with alcoholism for years. I don’t think any amount of drink will ever wash those memories away.
I’m so so sorry. I know there isn’t anything I can say to help. It’s abominable, it’s unjust, it’s evil.