Rape

[fideldyfee]

I hope this is not offensive to anyone but i am just wondering if it is possible for a man to be raped by a woman? (and no, im not considering it!)

[Drusilla]

Sorry kempie, I didn't realise hypocrisy was a male prerogative. I really must learn my place and be quiet.

Of course, there are false allegations and the women who do so should be prosecuted for perjury. There are also numerous men walking the streets who should have been convicted for rape, but never got to trial because the women involved were too traumatised to endure the prosecution, or walked on a legally manufactured technicality.

[kempie]

Make all the trite remarks you like, however I cannot abide hypocrisy from anybody.

It appears to be you, and you alone, who is making every statement a gender issue.

[undercovers]

Just to reemphasis only a man can commit rape. This is because the offence requires penetration with a penis (this includes a surgically created penis). If a women forces a man to engage in sexual intercourse against his will this can amount to a sexual assault (sexual offences Act 2003 s.3) or the offence of causing another person to perform a sexual act without consent (Sexual Offence Act 2003, S.4) but will not be rape. For this reason the discussion here regarding whether men are raped by women as often as women are raped by men is clearly impossible to judge as, in the eyes of the law, a women cannot rape a man � so any attempt to compare figures available freely is not going to provide a fruitful answer. Research into this area is clearly possible but unfortunately it is not possible for us!!

May I point you all to the home office website, specifically http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/100years.xls which provides some stats on a range of crime � scroll along to the right to find the sexual offences we are discussing.
Here you will see that in 2003/04 there were 12354 incidents of males raping females obviously there can be no figures for the reverse situation. Unfortunately this can only represent the tip of the iceberg when it come to the actual occurrence of rapes that take place when it is compared with the 2000 British Crime Survey that estimated that 61,000 women had been victims of rape in the pervious 12 months (home office research study no. 237), this figure supports other smaller scale surveys that show that only between 10 and 25 percent of rapes are reported to the police.

[undercovers]

Now if as argued the level of sexual assaults BY women ON men is in the same region then the level of offending is huge! I find this situation impossible to believe based on my understandings of the crime and the motivating forces behind which I judge as being essentially masculine in nature � I�m sorry spaced but I feel you must be misremembering the article that you read� though I too would be really interested to see any source info.
(Where not directly quoting reference has been made to Clarkson & Keating 2003, Criminal Law and Herring 2004, Criminal Law Test, Cases and Materials)

Hope this helps, Undercovers

[Drusilla]

Rape is a gender issue, Kempie. That's the whole point!

However, I do accept I've let rip in a manner I am not prone to indulge on this site and for that I do apologise to you, nox, spaced and even fideldyfee, whose question we hijacked.

[noxlumos]

Although I can't find a site solely devoted to male rape by women with reliable statistics here's a site that has some very interesting findings.

"As a specific finding, 4% of the women and 3% of the men reported anal or oral sexual victimization by force."

When you take into account the likelihood that men will not report such things because of the problems encountered here (disbelief, ridicule etc) then using conservative judgement you can see that in all likelihood stats are going to be virtually comparable with rape and sexual assault.

http://www.lbduk.org/references_examining_men_as_vict.ht m />

[kempie]

Legally, as undercovers has gone to great pains to point out, rape IS gender specific.

That is why my references were to "rape" (i.e. to include Assault by Penetration) by a female.

I just think it odd that somebody who admitted to ignorance of the subject (or at least limited awareness) at 15:05 speaks with such authority by 17:09, to the extent that other views are "obviously" and "clearly" incorrect.

I am not suggesting there is a 50/50 correlation between numbers of female rape and male "rape", I just ask you to be as open-minded about the possible scale of the problem as you were 5� hours ago.

[Drusilla]

I did some research kempie and found no evidence to support the 50/50 theory.

I've never suggested men are not raped and accept the number of men raped is much higher than I initially believed.

It is an horrific crime, whether inflicted upon a man, or a woman.

My argument has consistently been that the majority of rapes committed against men were committed by other men and I am suspicious of claims that condemn women when there is clearly little evidence to do so.

[kempie]

If Google says so it must be true.

[noxlumos]

Drusilla, We can all make statistics say anything we want to. At the end of the day what we were trying to say is you seem hellbent on making grotesque sexual assault against people an almost exclusively male crime, when clearly it isn't, that's the reason I said numbers don't matter, because it just seemed so trivialised to you when a man was a victim of a woman.

[Drusilla]

Well, at least google has given some evidence and facts. I might have been swayed by your argument if you had found any verifiable evidence on the Internet.

[Drusilla]

The question nox was about rape. You seem hellbent on watering it down to sexual assault. What next, nagging?

[noxlumos]

Well since men "can't" be raped by women according to you, we just have to make do with the "watered down" terminology of sexual assault.Carry on in your deluded little world and pretend that only women are the victims, clearly they are the only ones that matter to you.

[undercovers]

i haven't taken it that Drusilla is suggesting only women are victims of this form of assault (neither am i by the way)- rather that females are much more likely to be victims of male attack rather than men being the victims of female attack, i am afraid i still feel that the dynamics of the crime are distinctly masculine in nature and thus majority victim gender will be skewed in this respect towards more females. Certainly i am having considerable trouble finding academic writers or case law that is changing my opinion

i realise of course that i am adding nothing to this discussion other than repeating my opinion but I have been very interested by the discussion... so good question fideldyfee - bet you never though you'd get such i lively debate going did ya

[Greedyfly]

Of course.

I guess you dont hear about it in the media, that could be for many reasons though. I believe this can happen - Rape happens through many different methods, drugs, drink, force etc... Women have always been percieved as being weaker than men, and maybe thats true but it seems to me when you read the papers watch the news not all rape cases are through brute force. I do also believe that these cases are not often reported which also happens with battery cases, some men are just too ashamed/embarrased as are women often too.

[Drusilla]

My arguments have all been based upon the same principle that women do not rape men in equal numbers to men raping women.

I still believe I am correct in this and no no evidence has been made available to suggest otherwise.

The question of sexual assault by women is a completely different matter and on that issue, I will accept the numbers of men so abused by women will be considerably higher, frighteningly so, but that was never the question being argued.

Whether you believe I live in some kind of feminist fantasy world is of no concern to me and totally irrelevent to any argument I have made, which has been based based on verifiable fact.

[kempie]

The crux of the issue is nobody should use definitive terms such as "evidence" and "facts" when we do not know the true number of cases involving the "rape" of males. We don't know the true figure for female rape either and this is far more likely to be reported.

I will certainly concede that the number of reported rape of females far outweigh any male equivalent but since neither of these is an accurate figure, it seems a somewhat precarious standpoint to cite the statistics as gospel.

[Drusilla]

As a Humanist I would dispute the term, the gospel truth. :-)

[kempie]

Didn't mean to offend any religious or spiritual sensibilities.

[spaced]

what have I started!?!