Letters to the Editor
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Actually
I was blaming all of us for the attitudes that lead to sexual assaults, not just men. I was also very careful to use the term "abuser" precisely because women can also commit this type of crime (against girls as well as boys, I might add).
And given that a huge proportion of the men who I see in therapy were molested as children, have told no one else about it their entire lives, and continue to suffer serious consequences as a result, I agree completely that it is a huge issue deserving way more attention. Our culture is definitely complicit in hiding men's traumas -- it is one of the great injustices that gender role constiction does to males.
However, the legal issue here hinges on the adult/sexual clothing that the girl was wearing, and I have never heard of a case involving a male victim where his clothing factored into the determination of guilt or the harshness of sentencing. So the cultural criticism I was suggesting about the fashion industry doesn't seem to me to be applicable, or at least not the same. The activism that needs to be done to respond to these two problems does not seem to me to be identical, either: for male victims, what is needed is more awareness raising and advocating for greater sentencing parity. For female victims, it has to do with changing attitudes about what it means to dress "provocatively" and finding ways to encourage our culture to stop sexualizing little girls.