FBI Definition Of Rape To Include Male Victims

By Good German on January 7, 2012 in News 25

The Associated Press reports (via the Washington Post):

The Obama administration on Friday expanded the FBI’s more than eight-decade-old definition of rape to count men as victims for the first time and to drop the requirement that victims must have physically resisted their attackers.

The new definition will increase the number of people counted as rape victims in FBI statistics, but it will not change federal or state laws or alter charges or prosecutions. It’s an important shift because lawmakers and policymakers use crime statistics to allocate money and other resources for prevention and victim assistance.

The White House said the change was not motivated by the recent Penn State child sex-abuse scandal. Indeed, the expanded definition has been long awaited as many states and research groups made similar changes in their definitions of rape over recent decades.

Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett called the change a “very, very important step.” The issue got top-level White House attention starting last July, when Vice President Joe Biden raised it at a Cabinet meeting.

Biden, author of the Violence Against Women Act when he was in the Senate, said the new definition is a victory for women and men “whose suffering has gone unaccounted for over 80 years.” Calling rape a “devastating crime,” the vice president said, “We can’t solve it unless we know the full extent of it.”…

Nearly 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men in the U.S. have been raped at some time in their lives, according to a 2010 survey by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which used a broader definition.

Those figures were what framed much of the discussion, said Lynn Rosenthal, the White House adviser on violence against women.

1 in 71? Somehow I suspect that’s inaccurate. Read more here.

FBI, Law, Male Rape, Rape

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Herbivoracle

Wow. They actually did something right for a change. Good job, guys. Even though it happens more to women, men do suffer rape sometimes too (usually by other men, sometimes by women wielding Viagra). And just because you don’t resist does NOT mean that it’s consensual. There are many different circumstances where resistance could be impossible.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=626915199 ‘Raven Evermore

this cannot be right, they are throwing a mild victory at us while doing something else, whats in the workings that they want our attention diverted from>
Gergith

I wish I didn’t see your point… And that it wasn’t a good one :p I guess not!
Nunzio X

Perhaps they should expand the definition further to include “citizens who used to have a inviolate Bill Of Rights, but no longer do.”
Anonymous

The very real problem here now is that anyone who’s ever been involved in the old “No honey, I’m too tired… Oh, alright, you’ve pursued me! : )” scenario with a long term partner/spouse/mother of their children scenario OR someone you’ve been dating for 2 weeks is now technically involved in a rape.

Who *hasn’t* slept with someone who then turned out after the deed to be either a paranoid fantasist and/or have a less-than-perfect relationship with the truth.

Everyone I know has had at least one ill-advised lay in their past who turned out to be slightly crazy.

This is an empty gesture that has zero upside in terms of prosectuing the guilty and will actually make it harder to convict actual rapists.

Not to mention the implications of role-play, which I’m not even going to get started on…

Have your safety words memorised and at the ready.
Andrew

You sound defensive.
Anonymous

I’m sure I do – anything that places the burden of proof resting squarely on the act of making an accusation rather than evidence makes me inherently nervous, as do the Stalinist implications if cases ever start to get tried in that way.

Thankfully, this memo to the FBI is more based and intended to help *count* and enumerate instances of rape, to gather information about the scale of the problem, rather than prosecute them, which is unequivically a good thing.

But until and unless the successful conviction rates on known violent sex offenders goes up, this thing will remain just that a memo to grab some headlines in an election year intended to make it LOOK as if you’re doing something about protecting rape victims and potential rape victims in place of ACTUALLY doing something to protect them like, say, locking up a few more perps.
http://buzzcoastin.posterous.com BuzzCoastin

i’m waiting for the definition to include
the rape of privacy and the bill of rights
i’d like to see the federal bureau of instigation
keep statistics on those rapes
especially they ones the commit
http://buzzcoastin.posterous.com BuzzCoastin

i’m waiting for the definition to include
the rape of privacy and the bill of rights
i’d like to see the federal bureau of instigation
keep statistics on those rapes
especially they ones the commit
Andrew

Odd… It seems like in your second paragraph you’re saying it’s good that there won’t be more prosecutions because of this change, yet in your third paragraph you’re criticizing the change because it won’t result in more prosecutions. While in the first three paragraphs of your first comment you both criticize it because it might cause more prosecutions, and in the fourth because it will cause fewer prosecutions.

I know a lot of men who haven’t slept with people who might accuse them of rape, by the way.
Bob

which is crazy because u sound like an ass the whole way through your break down of them
Bob

” I know a lot of men who haven’t slept with people who might accuse them of rape,” i can not but into words how dumb this sounds.
Bob

really this is probably one of the most retarded, might offend you, statements i have ever seen.
Tuna Ghost

That’s what disturbs me about comments like Spike’s, it is uncomfortably close to “c’mon, who hasn’t done something that could be called rape???”, which is not a sentiment that needs to be spread around.
Tuna Ghost

wow, three aggressive posts, thank god you’re not defensive or anything
Anonymous

I think that entirely encapsulates what my point here is. The “Only Yes means Yes, No always means No” model is a good slogan, but it has absolutely nothing to do with reality – most consent when it’s given is non-verbal and/or assumed… If it’s a spontaneous, spur of the moment thing with someone you trust (or believe you can trust), who verbalises it? The only reason to do so would be if you suspected that you might be doing something wrong, in which case, if you have to ask…
Anonymous

I think that entirely encapsulates what my point here is. The “Only Yes means Yes, No always means No” model is a good slogan, but it has absolutely nothing to do with reality – most consent when it’s given is non-verbal and/or assumed… If it’s a spontaneous, spur of the moment thing with someone you trust (or believe you can trust), who verbalises it? The only reason to do so would be if you suspected that you might be doing something wrong, in which case, if you have to ask…
Anonymous

No, we need to have an honest and mature debate about what constitutes consent and what that actually means, rather than just pretending that everyone verbally asks permission before getting down.

My point about everyone having sexual skeletons in their closet is not that the encounter might be borderline non-consensual, (I’m not saying that at all) it’s that everyone has at least one ex/one-night stand that they regret and shudder at the thought of when reminded of it, enough to provoke a “Man, what was I *thinking* reaction… They were *crazy*!”

What I’m trying to emphasise here is that if you can shift the responsibility for questionable affairs/relationships/one-night stands away from yourself by claiming long AFTER the fact that it was non-consensual (even if you verbally consented at the time), a lot of people will take that option to shift the blame away from themselves and the consciences, which is ultimately extremely damaging from the point of view of helping victims of REAL assaults, trivialising their own experiences and cheapening the seriousness of real and violent offenders walking the streets.

That’s a development that’s harmful to the cause of victims of sexual violence, not helpful.
Andrew

I sound like an ass, and you sound like an idiot.
Andrew

What’s “retarded” about it?
Monkey See Monkey Do

People also freeze up from fear and shock when being raped, thus disabling them from resisting. So yeh, anyone who was educated on the subject would understand that (you would have to be a bit retarded not too ie: testosterone fuelled cave men types). I guess a person with an aggressive sex drive and aggressive dominating (dickhead) personality will probably get themselves into a sexual situation which could more likely lead to rape. I would also like too add that if you look at the statistics, its clear men do most of the raping (even on eachother) but women in developed western countries have the highest rate of rape in the world. coincidentally its also where women get more rights so they may also get more oppurtunities to dominate others. especially in our dog eat dog society.
http://hormeticminds.blogspot.com/ Chaorder Gradient

As spike said its not about everyone actually doing devious things, but the false positives. Some people still have grand delusions of the purity of women’s actions, and consider the possibility of a false accusation laughable(about as laughable as the possibility of a man getting raped). There are situations when people have intimate encounters with these particularly devious women, without necessarily knowing so until after the fact.
http://hormeticminds.blogspot.com/ Chaorder Gradient

And that kinda thing just ruins the mood
Anonymous

Well, quite. It’s a classic case of people formulating laws or policy for *other* people, rather than imaging it might also apply themselves.

The whole attitude is “of course, that could never happen to me… I’m far too important/sensible to ever get myself into such a compromising situation…”

But as we all know from (most recently) things like the Anthony Weiner and Herman Cain cases, politicians and people in the public eye are the ones most susceptible to sexual blackmail. And they *always* get caught, because even when the encounters are consensual (I’m making no judgement in the above two examples, by the way), there are literally dozens of people waving wads of cash at their supposed parters to publicise or manufacture a political sex scandal.

That kind of thing is a poison on our political institutions, how much worse could it get if people are allowed to withdraw consent after the fact? Herman Cain certainly would be in jail by now (no bad thing in my view) and Weiner at the very least would be electronically tagged and prevented from going with 15 yards of a computer.
Egalitarian

The “1 in 71″ stat is misleading. It comes from the latest CDC survey, which defines rape as the attacker penetrating the victim; this excludes women who use their vagina to rape a man (rape by envelopment) which is counted as “made to penetrate”. The same survey says “1 in 21 men (4.8%) reported that they were made to penetrate someone else,” far more than 1 in 71. Also, the study says that 79.2% of male victims of “made to penetrate” reported only female perpetrators, meaning they were raped by a woman.