[Content Warning: Sexual Violence]
This one’s not going to be funny.
I’m going to steal something someone else said: There are a million statistics about the victims of sexual violence that are so often repeated that they’re hard to ignore. If you go to any reasonably sized party and lament that one in four women experience severe sexual violence in their lifetime1, so, statistically, some women in that party will or have already been victims of sexual violence, you will get many grim faces nodding their heads in sad agreement. However, if you take the next logical step extrapolating from this and say that, statistically, someone at that party will or has already been a perpetrator of sexual violence you will get a torrent of #notallmen.
In an effort to figure out a more satisfactory answer to the question “who rapes people?” than just “rapists” I decided to find out who is responsible for a quarter of all women in America experiencing sexual violence.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, yet still disappointing, it is much harder to find statistics about the perpetrators of sexual violence than about the victims. The same cultural conditions that require every conversation about violence against women to start with a reassuring #notallmen appear to have somewhat stifled the amount of interest in gathering information about the perpetrators of sexual violence. And yes, Todd, obviously, not all men are rapists. However, 98% of rapists are men2.
Additionally, the definitions of rape/assault/abuse are not only changing but are often used to obfuscate the problem. Hell, it wasn’t until 1993 that marital rape became a crime in all 50 states3. Especially relevant because 25% of rapes are committed by a current or former spouse/partner4. In total, seven out of ten are committed by someone that the victim knew5. Despite this, rapes that are committed by a perpetrator known to the victim are often met with greater skepticism and are treated as less severe by authorities.
So, just how many men commit sexual violence? Hard to pin down exactly. According to one study, 9% of college age men admit to acts meeting the legal definition of rape6. This number is a fine starting point but doesn’t tell the whole story. As mentioned above, the legal definition of rape is problematic and inconsistent at best. Furthermore, asking just college age men ignores the fact that 50% of rapists are over 307. And the most glaring issue with taking this number at face value is that it relies on participants of the study admitting to the already dubious legal standards of rape.
Sex offenders are experts at rationalizing, justifying, and minimizing their behavior. 84% of the college-aged men who admit to actions constituting the legal definition of rape don’t consider their actions illegal8. A different study of 99 convicted male sex offenders showed that the courts documented 136 victims for this group of men. Later, during treatment, they eventually confessed to 959 victims between them9.
While this is all truly horrifying, we are just at the tip of the iceberg. Similar studies on male sexual coercion have shown that 23% of college men admitted to getting a date drunk or high to engage in sexual intercourse and the same percent of college women reported a date getting them drunk or stoned and engaging in unwanted sex10 – and the fact that our language allows “rape” and “unwanted sex” to be viewed as two different categories is a huge fucking problem.
It’s such a fundamental problem that it has proven impossible (for me, at least) to find out just how many people commit acts of sexual violence. Most of the studies I’ve found on the matter are surveys of college-aged men and women, which obviously ignores everyone before, after, and outside of college. Many other studies available on the subject are surveys of already convicted sexual predators and considering that anywhere between 64% to 96% of all rapes are never reported to authorities and only the very small minority of those result in the successful prosecution of the perpetrator11, this doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the groping, harassment, and assaults that occur on a daily basis but don’t fit narrow legal definitions.
Simply put, the number of men who commit acts of sexual violence, while less than the women who experience sexual violence, is far more than anyone wants to think about. This, of course, leads to nothing actually being done about the problem. One of those studies done that prove the obvious showed that men are more likely to commit sexual violence in communities where sexual violence goes unpunished12. Considering Bill Cosby can admit to raping people and still get a mistrial13, it’s not too much of a stretch to call America a community where sexual violence goes unpunished.
I guess that’s the take away, here. With repeat offenses being incredibly common among both convicted and undetected rapists (on average, 5.8 completed or attempted rapes per rapist)14, even a few more perpetrators being convicted and receiving treatment could make a difference to a huge number of women.
Oh, and in the time it took you to read this, about three Americans were sexually assaulted15.