Rachel Cohen questions why the national conversation has come to focus specifically on college campuses:
There is an indisputable and often cyclical connection between poverty and sexual violence. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that individuals with household incomes under $7,500 are twice as likely as those in the general population to become victims of sexual assault. Ninety-two percent of homeless mothers experience severe physical and/or sexual assault at some point in their lives. Sexual assault is hardly a problem limited to university campuses.
Twenty percent of college women being sexually assaulted is unacceptable. But other groups are at even greater risk. Immigrants, refugees, migrants, those suffering from addictions, minorities, LGBTQ individuals, sex workers, prisoners, the homeless, and the impoverished all experience high rates of sexual assault. And, unlike college students, these groups very often lack the knowledge, credibility, resources, and federal protections to do anything about their attacks.
And Hanna Rosin doesn’t want the conversation to ignore male victims:
Last year the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men.
The number seemed so high that it prompted researcher Lara Stemple to call the Bureau of Justice Statistics to see if it maybe it had made a mistake, or changed its terminology. After all, in years past men had accounted for somewhere between 5 and 14 percent of rape and sexual violence victims. But no, it wasn’t a mistake, officials told her, although they couldn’t explain the rise beyond guessing that maybe it had something to do with the publicity surrounding former football coach Jerry Sandusky and the Penn State sex abuse scandal. Stemple, who works with the Health and Human Rights Project at UCLA, had often wondered whether incidents of sexual violence against men were under-reported. …
So why are men suddenly showing up as victims? Every comedian has a prison rape joke and prosecutions of sexual crimes against men are still rare. But gender norms are shaking loose in a way that allows men to identify themselves—if the survey is sensitive and specific enough—as vulnerable. A recent analysis of BJS data, for example, turned up that 46 percent of male victims reported a female perpetrator.
The final outrage in Stemple and Meyer’s paper involves inmates, who aren’t counted in the general statistics at all.
The Dish 