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Raped by her, more common than you think…

January 6, 2014
By

rape

NCFM NOTE: Please thank CNN for running stories such as this one. We need to start believing the truth instead of what we were indoctrinated to believe, most of which just ain’t so…

Against his will: Female-on-male rape

By Sarah LeTrent, CNN

updated 10:52 AM EDT, Thu October 10, 2013

“Go back to sleep.

Groggy from a night of drinking, that’s precisely what James Landrith did.

The next morning, Landrith — who was 19 at the time — woke up in a bed that he quickly realized was not his own. As his haze lifted, he recognized the woman who ordered him to sleep the night before as a friend of a friend.

He remembered she asked for a ride home after their mutual friendleft the nightclub where they’d been partying. He remembered the woman was pregnant and bought him drinks as a thank you.

He remembered feeling disoriented, and her suggesting a motel room to sleep it off. He even remembered lying down with his pants on, uncomfortable taking them off in front of a stranger, only to awaken later and find the woman straddling him. What he didn’t remember was saying “yes.”

The morning after, that familiar voice told him that he could hurt the baby if he put up a fight. Then, he says, she forced herself on him again. A few minutes later it was over. One night in a motel twin bed turned into years of self-examination.

It took some time, and the help of a therapist, to get there: “I was finally able to call it what it was,” he says

Landrith had been raped

That was 1990. Since then, Landrith — a former Marine based at Camp Lejeune — has spoken out on behalf of sexual assault victims, in particular men who were victimized by women. He didn’t seek prosecution of his alleged rapist, but he wants other victims to feel free to talk about sexual assault and pursue justice without shame.

“I want people to understand that it’s not about how physically strong you are,” he says. “We [men] are conditioned to believe that we cannot be victimized in such a way.”

According to a 2010 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men in the United States have been raped. The actual number is likely higher, experts say, as incidents of sexual violence are severely underreported in the United States — particularly among male victims.

Experts say any sexual assault victim requires extensive emotional and psychological healing after the incident, but male survivors have a harder time putting words to what happened.

In 2012, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report made a significant stride by redefining rape as: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

The prior definition — “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will” — hadn’t been changed since 1927, and sexual assault awareness groups say it alienated victims that didn’t fit the mold

“Often, male survivors may be less likely to identify what happened to them as abuse or assault because of the general notion that men always want sex,” says Jennifer Marsh, the vice president for Victim Services at RAINN, an anti-sexual violence organization.

“Males have the added burden of facing a society that doesn’t believe rape can happen to them … at all,” says psychotherapist Elizabeth Donovan.

She says gender roles dictate that males are expected to be strong and self-reliant — men are viewed as those who seek sexual conquests instead of those who “fend them off.”

The concept of female-on-male sexual assault has recently gained traction on the Web via the ever-provocative entertainer Chris Brown. Brown recently revealed shocking details to Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian about his first sexual encounter.

“He lost his virginity when he was 8 years old, to a local girl who was 14 or 15. Seriously? ‘Yeah, really. Uh-huh.’ He grins and chuckles. ‘It’s different in the country.’ ”

Tom Hawking of FlavorWire is one of many writers who took umbrage with this particular anecdote, asking in an article, “Why Is No One Talking About the Fact That Chris Brown Was Raped?

Trauma recovery counselor Stephanie Baird says men who experience sexual attention as children, as Brown did, often explain it to themselves as “I’m a stud, I got laid by …”

“They do this in order to feel as if they had some power and say,” she says.

In addition to this macho posturing, there’s also the hot-for-teacher or -babysitter complex that is a popular motif in modern American culture.

“Because of the culture of ‘Mrs. Robinson’ it can be much more difficult for a male to even recognize that the action is abusive or without consent,” Baird says.

Consent, she says, means “being of age, mind, sound body to make an informed decision about whether one would like to become sexually intimate with the other person.” Children cannot consent.

The chatter over Brown comes in tandem with recent research published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics that says nearly 1 in 10 youths between 14 and 21 years old have reported perpetrating some type of sexual violence in their lifetime.

The study also found that males and females carried out sexual violence at strikingly similar rates after the age of 18 — 52% of males and 48% of females. The study classified sexual violence into a few categories: foresexual or presexual contact (kissing, touching, etc. against their will), coercive sex, attempted rape, and completed rape. Women were more likely to instigate unwanted foresexual contact.

For male sexual assault victims of any age, convincing others that they’ve been preyed upon is difficult as well. Experts say the general disparity in physical strength comes into play — can’t a man fight off a woman?

“It’s a tough call; people think men can’t be raped and they don’t understand that in the confusion no still means no,” says Curtis St. John, a representative for MaleSurvivor, a national support group for male sexual victimization.

Further muddying the water is the fact that some men can perform sexually, even including orgasm, and still be raped.

In an article in the Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine, Roy J. Levin and Willy Van Berlo found that even in men who have not consented to sex, slight stimulation of the genitals or an increase in stress can create erections “even though no specific sexual stimulation is present.”

” ‘Were you aroused?’ ” is a question posed to male victims, St. John says. “You don’t hear it with female rape victims. It’s an interesting question that men get asked.”

Long-term effects of being sexually assaulted can include post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance abuse, avoidance of intimacy or the stark opposite — hyper-sexuality, says St. John.

“Some men feel a need to prove their masculinity by becoming hyper-masculine,” Donovan says.

As for coping, Marsh at RAINN says it’s never too late to reach out for help. But with the stigma attached, survivors may not feel comfortable talking to their friends and family because the victims themselves haven’t defined their experience as assault.

For Landrith, it starts with confronting rape for what it is and sharing experiences.

“Whenever you talk about male survivors, women have it statistically worse, but it’s not a competition — and we each need our time to talk about it,” he says.

national coalition for menMen often get laughed at when they tell others they are rape victims.

There’s nothing  funny about rape, not even if you are a male victim.

 http://www.malesurvivor.org/survivors.html

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One Response to Raped by her, more common than you think…

  1. Bob on February 9, 2014 at 12:37 PM

    I’m glad this raises public awareness of male rape victims of female rapists, but there are glaring problems with the article. The article grossly misrepresents the 2010 CDC National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey results. The CDC study would call what happened to Landrith “made to penetrate” and considered it “other sexual violence,” not rape. In other words, while writer seems to think that men like Landrith are victims of rape, the study she cites does not. Look at pages 17-19 and 24 of the 124 page Full Report (freely available on the CDC website: http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a.pdf ).

    The study does estimate “1 in 71” or 1.4% of American men (1,581,000) have been raped in their lifetime (the study doesn’t include the current prison population). However, not included in the “1 in 71” are an additional estimated 4.8% of American men (5,451,000) who have been “made to penetrate” in their lifetime! Notice how similar the definitions of “made to penetrate” and “rape” are. The study even found the number of male victims of “made to penetrate” in a 12-month period (estimated 1.1% of population, 1,267,000 victims) was very similar to the number of female victims of “rape” in the same 12-month period (estimated 1.1%, 1,270,000 victims). The 12-month figure is more accurate, since there is less time to forget or misremember (for example, as Chris Brown may have). On page 24, the report states 79.2% of male “made to penetrate” victims had only female perpetrators. Whether this percentage applies to both lifetime and 12-month statistics and whether the remaining 20.8% of male victims had only male perpetrators or both male and female perpetrators is unclear. This could possibly mean over 1 million male victims of “made to penetrate” with female perpetrators per year. This should have been the statistic the writer cited.

    The writer further confuses matters by citing the new FBI definition for rape: “In 2012, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report made a significant stride by redefining rape as: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” Again the writer doesn’t seem to realize that under this definition Landrith would still not be considered a rape victim by the FBI. This is because, as with the CDC, the FBI definition does not consider being forced to penetrate as rape.

    LeTrent somewhat acknowledged her mistake with the CDC study when it was pointed out to her on twitter (https://twitter.com/SarahLeTrent/status/388749139326271488). However, the CNN article remained unchanged. So, I did write CNN. Not to thank them, but to point out (whether intentional or unintentional) the incredible hypocrisy of trying to raise public awareness of the male rape victims of female rapists, by citing the wrong data from a study that doesn’t even consider them rape victims. That was back in October. I haven’t heard back from them and I haven’t noticed any retractions or changes in the article since. If CNN wants to help the male rape victims of female rapists they should get their story straight and start asking major government agencies why they are trying to hide these rape victims with semantic slight-of-hand.

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