Male Rape Victims: Men Struggle for Rape Awareness

It is time to retire the practice of making jokes about men being subjected to rape in prison.

Rape is wrong and a horrible crime. It doesn't matter if the person being raped is male or female, gay, adult or child, straight, lesbian or trans. It is a monstrous violation of a person's being and should never ever be wished upon another person.

The recent rewriting of the rape laws should expand the definition of rape to include forms of rape that were previously classified as "sexual assault", a charge with a history of being treated less seriously than rape.

From The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/health/as-victims-men-struggle-for-rape-awareness.html?_r=4

By RONI CARYN RABIN

Published: January 23, 2012

Keith Smith 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.

When the driver barreled past Hartley’s Pork Pies on the outskirts of Providence, R.I., where Mr. Smith had asked to be dropped off, and then past a firehouse, he knew something was wrong.

“I tried to open the car door, but he had rigged the lock,” said Mr. Smith, of East Windsor, N.J., now 52. Still, he said, “I had no idea it was going to be a sexual assault.”

Even today, years after the disclosure of the still-unfolding child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and the arrest of a former Pennsylvania State University assistant football coach accused of sexually abusing boys, rape is widely thought of as a crime against women.

Until just a few weeks ago, when the federal government expanded its definition of rape to include a wider range of sexual assaults, national crime statistics on rape included only assaults against women and girls committed by men under a narrow set of circumstances. Now they will also include male victims.

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.)

Continue reading at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/health/as-victims-men-struggle-for-rape-awareness.html?_r=4