Feminists often complain, with considerable justification, that Men’s Rights Activists try to turn every conversation about women’s issues into a game of “what about the men?” You’re talking about female rape victims — well, what about the male rape victims?
The trouble with this strategy, from the point of view of the Men’s Rights Activists anyway, is that this little “gotcha” is much less of a “gotcha” then they’d like it to be.
In the case of rape, for example, feminists are well aware that men are raped as well: the “Don’t Be That Guy” ad campaign, which sent so many MRAs into hysterics, focused on male victims as well as female ones. The emergency room rape advocate organization that a friend of mine volunteers for provides advocacy for victims regardless of gender.
So many MRAs have started playing another game: trying to twist the conversation around in order to cast women as the villains. Rape is a bit tough for them here, since the overwhelming majority of rapists are male. So MRAs talk about the alleged epidemic of female false accusers instead. Or they change the topic entirely and make dead baby jokes (see my post yesterday).
Recently, MRAs have tried a new strategy, seizing on data from The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, a massive study conducted in 2010 under the aegis of the Centers for Disease Control, to claim that “40% of rapists are women.”
This is a claim repeated by numerous MRAs on numerous websites; see, for example, this post by A Voice for Men’s Typhonblue on the blog GendErratic. Here’s the same claim made into an “infographic” for the Men’s Rights subreddit.
Trouble is, this claim is flat-out false, based on an incorrect understanding of the NISVS data. But you don’t have to take my word for it: the NISVS researchers themselves say the MRA “interpretation” of their data is based on bad math. It’s not just a question of different definitions of rape: the MRA claims are untenable even if you include men who were “made to penetrate” women as victims of rape (as the MRAs do) rather than as victims of “sexual violence other than rape” (as the NISVS does).
I wrote to the NISVS for clarification of this matter recently, and got back a detailed analysis, straight from the horse’s mouth, of where the MRA arguments went wrong. This is long, and a bit technical, but it’s also pretty definitive, so it’s worth quoting in detail. (I’ve bolded some of the text below for emphasis, and broken some of the larger walls of text into shorter paragraphs.)
It appears that the math used to derive an estimated percentage of female rapists … is flawed. First, we will summarize the assertion and what we perceive to be the basis for the assertion.
According to the web links, the “40% of rapists were women” was derived from these two steps:
1) Combining the estimated number of female rape victims with the estimated number of being-made-to-penetrate male victims in the 12 months prior to the survey to conclude that about 50% of the rape or being-made-to-penetrate victims were males;
2) Multiplying the estimated percentage (79%) of male being-made-to-penetrate victims who reported having had female perpetrators in these victims’ lifetime with the 50% obtained in step 1 to claim that 40% of perpetrators of rape or being-made-to-penetrate were women.
None of these calculations should be used nor can these conclusions be correctly drawn from these calculations.
First the researchers clarify the issue of definition:
To explain, in NISVS we define rape as “any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes times when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.”
We defined sexual violence other than rape to include being made to penetrate someone else, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and non-contact unwanted sexual experiences. Made to penetrate is defined as including “times when the victim was made to, or there was an attempt to make them, sexually penetrate someone without the victim’s consent because the victim was physically forced (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threatened with physical harm, or when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.”
The difference between “rape” and “being made to penetrate” is that in the definition of rape the victim is penetrated; “made to penetrate” by definition refers to cases where the victim penetrated someone else.
While there are multiple definitions of rape and sexual violence used in the field, CDC, with the help of experts in the field, has developed these specific definitions of rape and other forms of sexual violence (such as made to penetrate, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and non-contact unwanted sexual experiences). We use these definitions to help guide our analytical decisions.
Now the researchers get into the details of the math:
Regarding the specific assertion in question, several aspects of mistreatments of the data and the published estimates occurred in the above derivation:
A. While the percentage of female rape victims and the percentage of male being-made-to-penetrate victims were inferred from the past 12-month estimates by combining two forms of violence, the percentage of perpetrator by sex was taken from reported estimates for males for lifetime (a misuse of the percentage of male victims who reported only female perpetrators in their lifetime being made to penetrate victimization). This mismatch of timeframes is incorrect because the past 12-month victimization cannot be stretched to equate with lifetime victimization. In fact, Table 2.1 and 2.2 of the NISVS 2010 Summary Report clearly report that lifetime rape victimization of females (estimated at 21,840,000) is about 4 times the number of lifetime being made-to-penetrate of males (estimated at 5,451,000).
B. An arithmetic confusion appears when multiplying the two percentages together to conclude that the product is a percentage of all the “rapists”, an undefined perpetrator population. Multiplying the percentage of male victims (as derived in step 1) above) to the percentage of male victims who had female perpetrators cannot give a percentage of perpetrators mathematically because to get a percentage of female rape perpetrators, one must have the total rape perpetrators (the denominator), and the number of female perpetrators of this specific violence (the numerator). Here, neither the numerator nor the denominator was available.
C. Data collected and analyzed for the NISVS 2010 have a “one-to-multiple” structure (where the “one” refers to one victim and the “multiple” refers to multiple perpetrators). While not collected, it is conceivable that any perpetrator could have multiple victims. These multiplicities hinder any attempt to get a percentage of perpetrators such as the one described in steps 1) and 2), and nullify the reverse calculation for obtaining a percent of perpetrators.
For example, consider an example in which a girl has eight red apples while a boy has two green apples. Here, 50% of the children are boys and another 50% are girls. It is not valid to multiply 50% (boy) with 100% (boy’s green apples) to conclude that “50% of all the apples combined are green”. It is clear that only 20% of all the apples are green (two out of 10 apples) when one combines the red and green apples together. Part of the mistake in the deriving of the “50%” stems from a negligence to take into account the inherent multiplicity: a child can have multiple apples (just as a victim can have multiple perpetrators).
D. As the study population is U.S. adults in non-institutional settings, the sample was designed to be representative of the study population, not the perpetrator population (therefore no sampling or weighting is done for the undefined universe of perpetrators). Hence, while the data can be analyzed to make statistical inferences about the victimization of U.S. adults residing in non-institutional settings, the NISVS data are incapable of lending support to any national estimates of the perpetrator population, let alone estimates of perpetrators of a specific form of violence (say, rape or being-made-to-penetrate).
E. Combining the estimated past 12-month female rape victims with the estimated past 12-month being-made-to-penetrate male victims cannot give an accurate number of all victims who were either raped or being-made-to-penetrate, even if this combination is consistent with CDC’s definition.
Besides a disagreement with the definitions of the various forms of violence given in the NISVS 2010 Summary Report, this approach of combining the 12-month estimated number of female rape victims with the 12-month estimated number of male victims misses victims in the cells where reliable estimates were not reported due to small cell counts failing to meet statistical reliability criteria. For any combined form of violence, the correct analytical approach for obtaining a national estimate is to start at the raw data level of analysis, if such a creation of a combined construct is established.
So you’re going to need to go back to the drawing board, MRAs.
What is especially distressing here is that the NISVS data could have been the starting point for a serious discussion of male victims of sexual assault by women, which is a real and often overlooked issue. Unfortunately, MRAs have once again poisoned the well by misusing data in an attempt to exaggerate the purported villainy of women and score cheap rhetorical points.
NOTE: A regular in the AgainstMensRights subreddit approached the NISVS researchers with this same question some months back. Unfortunately, the statement they got back from the NISVS contained an incorrect number. The statement I’m quoting here corrects this number and adds more context.
I can provide contact info for the NISVS representative who got back to me on this to any serious (non-troll) person who requests it.
@Argenti, yes exactly, there are so many shades of verbal coercion/being tricked (major trigger warning here):
– of course I’m interested in being your partner [doesn’t reply to phone calls, etc after sex]
– you’d sleep with me if you really loved me
– I’ve taken you out/paid for dinner/paid your bills/something to do with money and now you owe me
– if you don’t sleep with me then I’ll tell everyone [something horrible]
– if you don’t sleep with me then I’ll [physical threat here]
I think these statements are qualitatively different. And I’m not sure how that the male emotional experience of each type is exactly the same as the female experience. So even if males and females experienced *exactly the same statement in exactly the same type of relationship*, I don’t know that they would both have *exactly the same* emotional and cognitive responses. I haven’t seen any evidence on this.
I hate to rag on people for grammar when the problem is typos and autocorrect, but what the fuck does this mean?
Little watt of brilliance:
We do realise that maths is not your strong point. However:
– some males are raped by other males
– some female perpetrators have female victims.
Go and refresh your knowledge of Venn diagrams, here’s a link to make it easier for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram
So your AND (it must be important, it’s in all caps) shows that you’re not interested in having the entire field of study examined for selectivity, but only a small subportion. Because you clearly know nothing about research, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you don’t know how research questions are constrained by things like researcher interest/expertise, funding, and time. Given the fact that fields like psychiatry were heavily dominated by males for decades, blaming females for not studying male sexual assault is ignoring the elephant in the room. Why don’t you criticise the males for not undertaking research earlier?
FFS what evidence? You have copied and pasted research summaries from another website as though you have found the holy grail of evidence. Many of those studies don’t even appear to be about rape, so they’re *irrelevant to your statement* as Argenti has already pointed out.
But no, you’re not educating yourself by the help you’re being given. You’re an idiot, and worst of all you want to remain an idiot.
“worst of all you want to remain an idiot”
Yeah, this is where my patience runs thin. For the honestly interested I’m always willing to answer questions and poke data and such, for those who somehow manage to make a study showing that 70% of men suffered from things including harassment relevant to a discussion of rape…well, I have serial killer documentaries to watch and fruit to ninja and such.
Kiwi Girl — yeah, a lie like “I want a relationship” is a world away from emotional manipulation via threats. My “favorite” was always how saying no to sex caused a tirade about how no one cares and blah blah blah I might as well kill myself. That =/= shit like “of course I want a relationship”.
@Argenti: that was horrid, unnecessary, and I’m really sorry you went through that.
I found this report just now: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/181867.pdf
***trigger warning***
On page v:
The statistics they found upon which they based this recommendation:
The next part of the report is frustrating because it only reports overall victimisation (so it includes physical assault and stalking as well as rape) and no rape proportions are reported. So, with respect to victimisation:
And the report conclusion on victimisation:
My pharm student is made of awesomeness. So, those studies? (This will be in chunks, cuz iPad)
Aizeman & Kelley, 1988 – 14% of men (and 29% of women) reported they had been forced to have intercourse against their will — maybe, it’s in a book with no real citation, but the chapter seems to be one study after another putting the rate of male sexual assault at about half of that for females.
In short, that citation isn’t nearly enough to figure out wtf the methodology was, but it disproves the point about the male and female rape rates being the same, so I guess we can check it off his list of studies.
Two more off the list —
Struckman-Johnson and Struckman-Johnson (1998) – 43% of college men reported experiencing a coercive incident, of which 36% reported unwanted touch and 27% reported being coerced into sexual intercourse.
Is the book linked above, probably.
Sorensen, Stein, Siegel, Golding and Burnam (1987) Lifetime prevalence rate of 9.4% and an adult prevalence rate of 7.2% for men’s sexual victimization (male self-reports).
My pharm student can’t access it, which is sorta sucky, but that was the one on the list for my own curiousity.
Larimer, Lydum, Anderson and Turner (1999) 20.7% of male respondents had been the recipients of unwanted sexual contact in the year prior to the survey. Verbal pressure was experienced by 7.9%, physical force by 0.6% and intoxication through alcohol or drugs by 3.6%.
1) said respondents were all frat members (and their female counterparts sorority members)
2) 20.7% = 34 men, versus 36 women, kinda a small sample size
3) “The present study compared prevalence rates of unwanted sexual contact between men and women in a college Greek system sample. ”
4) they were studying drinking behavior primarily
Interesting, but not generalizable outside college frat houses. (Unsurprisingly, heavy drinking does increase sexual assault, gender is more or less irrelevant)
I was given that oh so reliable list of ‘sources’ by an MRA over on another site. He thought they’d prove his claim that 50% of all perpetrators of rape were women, along with the CDC report of course. It seems arsehole MRAs have that list bookmarked.
I couldn’t understand what littleclod was endeavouring to say either. I’m very concerned and most surprised the CDC would not consider the whims of an MRA important enough to stop everything they are doing. Won’t somebody think of the men? Misandry! Misandry everywhere I tell you! Oh lord the misandry, and other such made-up words.
@Argenti, I’ve been watching serial killer docs too, did you see the one about
Peewee Gaskins? He was quite the prize. Even managed to kill someone on death row.
Argenti, I can access the abstract for
Sorenson, S.B., Stein, J.A., Siegel, J.M., Golding, J.M., Burnam, M.A. (1987) The prevalence of adult sexual assault. The Los Angeles Epidemiologic Catchment Area project. American Journal of Epidemiology 126 (6) , pp. 1154-1164
While it’s hard to completely understand methodology from an abstract, “has anyone ever tried to pressure…you” covers a very wide range of coercive techniques. It appears *from the abstract* that the definition of assault included coercion in the absence of physical contact. I can’t substantiate the percentages from the abstract.
A point to note: what was the search criteria for these studies? I doubt that what was reported was a systematic review. Therefore, we have no idea what type of bias could have been introduced by the search method.
It’s always a special kind of stupid when they deny what they type. As if those words disappear the moment they hit “post,” and no one can go back and actually read what thy wrote.
Muehlenhard and Cook (1988) 23.8% of male respondents had engaged in unwanted sexual activity as a result of threat or physical force, and 26.8% reported unwanted sexual contact as a result of verbal pressure. For unwanted intercourse, the prevalence rates were 6.5% for physical force and 13.4% for verbal pressure.
1) unwanted includes didn’t want to but did it to be popular, I’m not past the abstract and can tell this is going to be useless
2) men were more likely to engage in unwanted intercourse because there was nothing else to do (and a bunch of other reasons that have fuck all to do with rape)
3) men were more likely to have morning after regrets
4) most of the reasons men engaged in unwanted intercourse were related to *drum role* sex role expectations! You know, those things feminists are against?
So, 25 years ago men were rather likely to engage in unwanted intercourse to fulfill sex roles, maintain/gain popularity, shit like that. Remind me how this is remotely relevant to men being raped in the 21st century?
Kiwi Girl — no fucking clue where he got the list from, but so far he’s 0 for 4.
@Argenti: http://manboobz.com/2013/10/29/cdc-mra-claims-that-40-of-rapists-are-women-are-based-on-bad-math-and-misuse-of-our-data/comment-page-11/#comment-403981
🙂
No one here is ignoring those figures, but without easy access to the cited studies (which hopefully is no longer an issue) people can’t really say much about them.
Last one I have full text for —
Russell and Oswald (2002) 44% of college men in their sample reported being subjected to a sexually coercive tactic.
1) well, this one could be relevant, let’s find out…
2) never mind, it’s actually a study of how love style interacts with sexual coercion
2b) among 173 college men at one Midwestern college — small sample size, single location, not generalizable
3) just under half of the men had experienced some form of either verbal or physical aggression, leading to some form of sex act (no mention is made of what acts occurred) — this includes coercion via saying things she didn’t mean (which men did at 150% the rate of women)
4) “Consistent with previous research, the current study clearly indicates that men use coercive techniques in intimate relationships (Copenhaver & Grauerholtz, 1991; Hogben et al., 1995; Poppen & Segal, 1988). In addition, consistent with previous research, the current data demon- strate that men report engaging in verbally coercive strategies and less violent forms of physical violence more than the more physically violent behaviors (e.g., Craig et al., 1989; O’Sullivan et al., 1998; Spitzberg, 1999). ”
5) men were more likely to engage in some sort of sex act because they felt it was useless to stop as their partner was too aroused than they were to report having put their partner in such position
“The current results need to be replicated with various populations and related to other ideological aspects of both victimization and usage of sexu- ally coercive strategies.”
Sound familiar? Like, idk, my having said a bazillion times MAOR STUDIES PLZ
“@Argenti, I’ve been watching serial killer docs too, did you see the one about
Peewee Gaskins? He was quite the prize. Even managed to kill someone on death row.”
I did! He was a real “winner”.
Kiwi Girl — yeah but who compiled the list in the first place, and with what criteria? Cuz a metric fuck ton of those have nada to do with how many male rape victims there are (in fact, it would appear that 0 manage that)
Source of list. I think he gave it above. I’ve been wading through the comments. But it’s time to get back to my quinoa patties!
This thread at Ally Fogg’s place?
auggz, very well said. Regardless of whether the rate of male victimization is equal to the rate of female victimization, any understanding of sexual violence without an accompanying analysis of power (whether patriarchy or matriarchy is presupposed) is inherently flawed. Of course, that women are more likely to be victimized is indicative of institutionalized misogyny, but it need not be the only indication.
More info about female coersion from Sisko and Figueredo quoted from the aforementioned thread:
To be fair, Argenti, I can imagine a scenario in which someone is coerced into a sexual act because of a form of manipulation like “I’ll make you popular.” It’s probably a rare occurrence, but it certainly is a thing. (Then again, maybe you know better about the survey since only you have access to it.)
Ally — I’ll email you the PDF if you want? But that, along with a bunch of the other reasons for unwanted sex acts, were things he thought, not things she said (things she said were lumped under forms of verbal coercion). So we’re talking *gasp* toxic masculinity here, and for most of the reasons for unwanted sex actually — they didn’t really want to engage in sex acts, but felt they should, mostly for reasons relating to men being seen as always up for sex (that stereotype is, iirc, explicitly brought up)
So yeah, I can see that as a form of verbal manipulation, but that wasn’t what I’d meant.
Lol, I’ve been doing karaoke (I’m not as horrid as I thought, if I stick to make vocalists with higher ranges, which is nicely androgynous I guess) — Dashboard Confessional’s Hands Down includes a bit about stupid questions like “did you get some?”. That sort of thing is what was meant there, that a guy saying no to that will be seen VERY differently than a girl saying no (also, that one is from the 80s, the idea of a woman saying yes to sexytimes was still rather foreign)
Also, I meant exactly what I said about morning after regrets — more men said they decided after they’d done it that they didn’t really want to. But women “cry rape” for that reason all the time? Umm, guys? Y’all have more regrets than women do apparently…
Ah, gotcha. No need to send me the PDF. 🙂
So let’s consider this nitpicking by the CDC then.
Most of it seems based on “you cannot conclude anything about perpetrators because we spoke of victims”, except the mixing lifetime and 12 month stats (more on that later). Fine, so instead of “40% of rapes are women raping men” we can say “of those who were raped, 40% were men who were raped by women”. GEE, WHAT A HUGE DIFFERENCE THAT MAKES! LOL Seems to me this is dumb nitpicking.
And now about mixing the lifetime and 12 month data. No kidding, obviously that analysis assumes the 12 month rate of “made to penetrates” being by females is the same as the lifetime rate of 80%. Is there any reason to think it’s not? Consider the following;
“Results showed that the relative status of women at each site predicted significant differences in levels of sexual victimization for men, in that the greater the status of women, the higher the level of forced sex against men.” Source: the Hines study at http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID45-PR45.pdf
If anything this suggests the rate of females raping males IS INCREASING as time passes and women gain more status. Suggesting that the 12 month percent of “made to penetrate”s perpetrated by females is AT LEAST as high as the lifetime rate (80%), and probably higher.
In conclusion, yes, you can nitpick the numbers, so just alter the statement a little and the one point about mixing lifetime and 12 month data is no big deal.