- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
The fact is that female-on-male rape and/or sexual molestation is consistently ignored, downplayed, and even turned into a joke in this society - no matter what the age of those involved.
Yet the psychological effect can be devastating for the male victim - with the difference being that the male victim is less likely to be able to find help in dealing with the aftereffects of their trauma, assuming they are able to overcome cultural conditioning (shame and confusion) to report the crime or seek help in the first place. The odds are very high that they'll be told that they should be grateful for the experience!
Pregnancy isn't possible for males, so of course that particular danger doesn't exist for male victims of female rapists. But of course the female could become pregnant, which in some cases has serious lifetime ramifications for the male victim. In any case, if the risk of pregnancy was the sole criteria of the damage that rape causes, infertile women would have no cause to complain about being raped. Heck, they should probably just be grateful that they got laid! Right?
That's the response that most male victims face if they manage to work up the courage to ask for help.
Note that just like female victims, male victims can be exposed to STDs as a result of rape. And they get even less support from society than female victims do. I doubt that there's a single male rape victim who doesn't feel as if he's the only one in the world to have gone through that experience.
We don't know how many male victims of female rapists there are, since the crime is even more under-reported than male-on-female rape. I'm not aware of any extensive studies on the topic. But I suspect that the problem is a lot more widespread than most people suspect.
