Is the US the only country where men are raped more often than women? That's the claim in this
n+1 piece, which is well worth a read.
In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That's 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.
Those numbers are not quite correct, but they are nonetheless horrifying. First of all, "sexual assault" is not always the same as "rape" and includes a variety of behaviour that wouldn't meet the legal standard for rape. So it's not clear that there are actually more rapes of men than women, or more rapes of prisoners than non-prisoners. Also, the number I found through the Department of Justice (DOJ) was 88,500 victims of sexual victimisation. This
New York Review of Books article says that the DOJ revised those findings, getting to 216,000. According to
Rainn, there are 213,000 victims of sexual assault in the US every year. More than 9/10ths of those victims are women and girls. The numbers Rainn uses come from the DOJ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS, though, is clear that its methodology for gathering sexual assault stats is pretty limited, and probably doesn't present a 100% accurate picture of what victims experience. The NCVS also doesn't seem to include prisoners (at least as far as I can tell), but would include people who were sexually assaulted in prison within the past year, but were out of prison at the time the NCVS was taken. So there's likely some overlap, although very small, between the two surveys.
"Inmates" also does not translate to "men". There are a whole lot of women in jail, and female prisoners
are twice as likely to experience inmate-on-inmate sexual assault (male inmates are slightly more likely to experience assault at the hands of prison staff). So again, not so obvious that more men than women experience sexual assault. It also looks like the NCVS statistics, which include "rape and sexual assault," are not calculated in quite the same way as the prison "sexual victimisation" statistics – that is, different kinds of behaviours are included in the prison survey that don't appear to be included in the NCVS.
For example, from the New York Review of Books:
The department divides sexual abuse in detention into four categories. Most straightforward, and most common, is rape by force or the threat of force. An estimated 69,800 inmates suffered this in 2008. The second category, "nonconsensual sexual acts involving pressure", includes 36,100 inmates coerced by such means as blackmail, offers of protection and demanded payment of a jailhouse "debt". This is still rape by any reasonable standard.
An estimated 65,700 inmates, including 6,800 juveniles, had sex with staff "willingly". But it is illegal in all 50 states for corrections staff to have any sexual contact with inmates. Since staff can inflict punishments including behavioural reports that may extend the time people serve, solitary confinement, loss of even the most basic privileges such as showering and (legally or not) violence, it is often impossible for inmates to say no. Finally, the department estimates that there were 45,000 victims of "abusive sexual contacts" in 2008: unwanted touching by another inmate "of the inmate's buttocks, thigh, penis, breasts, or vagina in a sexual way". Overall, most victims were abused not by other inmates but, like Jan, by corrections staff: agents of our government, paid with our taxes, whose job it is to keep inmates safe.
So, for the record, I think that coercive sexual acts should be included in sexual assault statistics. I think acts like unwanted touching should be included in the stats. Blackmailing, pressuring or bribing someone into sex makes sex non-consensual, and that should be reflected in our understanding of sexual assault. Ditto for "willing" sexual interactions between people whose power differentials make consent an impossibility. But I don't think the NCVS numbers reflect those kinds of assaults, and so we're sort of comparing apples and oranges here. And I don't think it's possible to conclude from these numbers that the US is "the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women."