Читать книгу The Telling - Zoe Zolbrod - Страница 16

RESEARCH SHOWS: NOT JUST GIRLS

My attitudes about rape were based both on my personal experience with sexual assault and on the common assumption that when it came to sex crimes, the word victim was just about synonymous with the word girl or woman. As girls, the risk of sexual violence and violation was given as the reason for so many of the rules we were supposed to follow—how we should dress and act, where we should go and how we should get there, what kinds of jobs and places and people we should avoid and allow ourselves to be protected from. The risk of becoming a victim was one of the defining features that separated our gender from the other, a big part of what made us girls and them boys. In fact, so pervasive was this view that until 2012, many law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, defined for data purposes “forcible rape” as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” There was no way, by some official measures, that men could even be considered rape victims.

But although girls and women are more likely to be victims of sex crimes than boys and men are (and trans people have the highest rates of victimizations) no one is safe because of their gender. Men are of much higher risk than common knowledge supposes.

According to the CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, the largest one of its kind, one in six men have experienced abusive sexual experiences before age eighteen.

According to Bureau of Justice statistics, about nine percent of all victims of rape and sexual assault over the age of twelve are male. It’s likely these numbers are very low. For one thing, they were gathered from patients getting physical examinations through an HMO and from household surveys, respectively. Thus they exclude inmates, who are vulnerable to sexual assault while incarcerated, and who are reportedly more likely to have suffered physical and sexual childhood abuse in their past than those in the general population.

In addition, research shows that men and boys may also be less likely than girls and women to recognize themselves as having been sexually abused or assaulted in the first place—reflecting our cultural and in some cases, legal, resistance to seeing males as victims. In one study, fewer than a fifth of men with documented histories of sexual abuse identified themselves as having been abused. In contrast, almost two-thirds of women with similar histories identify themselves that way. Needless to say, people who don’t identify themselves as victims are less likely to get help to understand and ameliorate the consequences.

Even men who acknowledge to themselves that they’ve experienced sexual violence might be reluctant to speak of it to anyone. Our culture assumes male sexual insatiability and sees the ability to protect oneself as a core element of manhood—making men even more likely than women, who also experience reservations about disclosing, to be ashamed by victimhood, or to be fearful they won’t be believed.

In 2014, the National Crime Victimization Survey found that as many as thirty-eight percent of incidents of sexual violence were committed against men. In just under half of these incidents, a woman was the violator.

The impulse many of us have to refuse to let our daughter do something we’d let a son do is not as rational as it may appear. Girls and women are more vulnerable, but not that much more vulnerable. What does it do to our conceptions of ourselves if we absorb that knowledge, and act on it?

In preschool, my best friend was a boy. We devised elaborate SM-themed fantasies involving our teachers, especially the prettiest one—already, I’d intuited that the prettiest one is whom the story will happen to. In our imaginings, we imprisoned, humiliated, and tortured this teacher in every way we could conceive of. Sometimes she played along, sitting on a child-sized chair and pretending to cry while we piled the cardboard bricks around her. We invented this game around the time my own abuse began, during my last year of preschool before kindergarten, but I can’t be sure exactly which game came first—the one Toshi devised or the one I did.