New “Ebony” Article: Stop Telling Women How to Not Get Raped

We’re going back to our roots with several posts here; this blog originally launched as a resource for female rape survivors. We’ll continue to offer that and much more.

It is so refreshing to see this article title! Granted, we don’t even reach five comments before someone starts trolling, but people were able to keep the comments focused for that first page. I didn’t read comments beyond that.

If you are a male rape survivor reading this, you are not alone and not left out. Read this past blog post specifically for you (and there are others).

Teenage Girls as Sex Offenders

Although there’s very little literature and research on this group (girls 13-17), they do exist. Key differences from other groups:

• They aren’t pedophiles, strictly speaking; their sexual attraction is widely variable and sexual activity/offenses may include different ages, from children to adults.
• They typically have a more severe (and of longer duration) history of having been sexually abused themselves than comparable male offenders.

Beyond that, we can only speculate. Current limited research points in certain directions, but we can’t be sure until more and larger studies are done, and so far, that hasn’t happened. That’s one of the things this important paper calls for.

What To Do If You Suspect Your Significant Other/Family Member of Sexually Abusing a Child, Part IV

My Child is Safe Now — How Do We Deal With the Aftermath?

This is the final post in this series on child sexual assault.  Here we’ll talk about what to do for recovery — your child’s treatment, your own processing of the events, and some of the logistics.

I mostly use “them” and “they” when talking about a child because it’s awkward to read “him/her” over and over again. I also tend to use “he” when talking about the abuser, not because women don’t abuse, but simply based on statistics. If you are a male victim of a female abuser, switch these pronouns around and the information will still be accurate.

(Last, and still least: I’m often a fan of readability over grammar. There will sometimes be dangling participles and such, and we will leave them in peace.)

The legal system

Talk to police and social services about whatever legal actions they are taking against the abuser. If you have access to a lawyer — either formally or informally — call them up and ask for a consultation. Having access to a child services lawyer is especially valuable for answering questions, and it’s good to have someone on your team who’s focused on your child.

Police will focus on catching the molester, and the legal system will focus on prosecuting the molester, which is how it ought to be — we want the molester caught and prosecuted. That does mean that the lawyer may be the only part of the legal system whose primary focus and goal is looking out for your child. Ask about the legal process. Ask all your questions.

Child Protective Services (CPS) may be involved if it is determined your child may still be in danger — for example, if the abuser is Mom’s boyfriend, or is a family member, or is someone who lives in the same house with the child. If the abuser lives elsewhere, though, and CPS is confident you will protect your child, they may be involved very little.

A child’s therapy

We discussed in the previous post how to choose a good therapist for our children. Once in counseling, your child (and you, as you may also need and want counseling to work through this experience) will be working through feelings like guilt, fear, feelings of betrayal, lack of trust, being too much into sex too early, body image problems, and more.

Continue to believe and support your child in this. Sessions with the therapist and your child will be confidential so that your child can feel safe expressing anything they may be feeling. Respect this confidentiality in the interest of helping your child work through what happened to them. Do ask questions, gently, to make sure nothing is amiss in the therapist-patient relationship, but don’t push your child to tell you details from therapy.

Rebuilding boundaries

A child who has been sexually abused has had their personal boundaries violated, by force and/or by adult manipulation. These healthy boundaries need to be rebuilt, and you play the largest role in that.

Give your child emotional and physical privacy. Keep the lines of communication open by conversing with your child, but don’t press them. Give your child the right to say Yes or No to what they want and don’t want, what they like and don’t like. Give your child choices about what to wear and what to do, and remember that they have a sovereign right to think what they think.

Encourage your child to make plans and carry them out and to take action on what they want rather than waiting for it or waiting for others to give it to them. (These are all good skills for any child — much more so for a child who has been molested.)

Safety skills for children

Teach your child:

• …That people in general don’t have a right to touch the child’s private parts (teach what those are) without their permission.
• …How to say No to an adult, and assure the child you’ll support them when they set this personal boundary. If they think they’ll get in trouble for saying No to an adult, they likely won’t, and they’ll be back where they started with the molester (adults have control of my body and I don’t).
  • I can remember being chided for not wanting adults to hug me or kiss me, and the message was very clear: That adults’ social needs took precedence over my bodily sovereignty. That if an adult felt like touching me, they had the right to touch me at will, and I had no rights over my body at that moment.
  • Understand, these were very normal social values at the time, but it also helps explain why I put up no resistance when I was molested in childhood. I had learned that children don’t have rights to their bodies when adults want to touch them. Teach your child differently.
• …To trust their instincts.Children often sense when something is not quite right. They don’t know what’s wrong or how to explain it, but they may feel hesitant, uncomfortable, or fearful. Encourage them to pay attention to these feelings. There’s no reason to force them into the company of people who twang their instincts and make them worry, at some level, about their safety.
  • I can say from my own experience that when my family put me in the company of people I was uncomfortable with, I felt twice as scared — I thought they were not looking out for my safety and that I was on my own. This is a very scary prospect for someone in the single digits in age who already feels powerless in the world of adults.
  • We don’t want our children to be crippled by a naturally shy personality, either, so pay attention, talk to your child, and find out what’s really going on inside them. If they trust us, they’ll tell us.
• …General safety rules. Don’t answer the door when home alone. How to answer the telephone. How to call 911 and tell the operator their home address, phone number, and parents’ names (and workplaces).
• …Whom to go to for safety. Is there a neighbor or close friend who’s safe? List those people and their phone numbers by the phone as a support system for your child in times of need.
• …How to take action if someone approaches them in an uncomfortable way. They can run, scream, yell “This is not my mom!”, any number of options. Assure your child of your support in doing this.
• …To know that some people will do nice things only for the purpose of getting the child to trust themand go with them. Have practice conversations with your child as a way of communicating to them some of the things that predators might say:
  • “Your mom got hurt, she’s in the hospital, and she sent me to come pick you up.”
  • “Your dad is running late today at work and asked me to come get you.”
  • “I’m [other child]’s dad and we just forgot to invite you to the party this afternoon. Come on, you can still come.” And so on.
• …To have a safe wordthat’s private between your child and you as parent(s). You can also have a safe word with friends who are authorized to pick your child up from school, and this “approved list” and safe word can be arranged with the school.
  • If someone shows up to pick up your child and doesn’t know the safe word, even if it’s someone you or your child knows, teach your child to absolutely refuse to go with them.

Molesters make excuses…

…It’s a law of nature. If the molester is a family member, a friend, or someone living in your home, the excuses will begin immediately. They may include, but are not limited to:

• I was drunk (or high).
• She came after me, not the other way around.
• I was abused as a child.
• I just did it, before I even knew what I was doing. I’ll never do it again, I promise.
• I was only trying to show him what to watch out for.
• What am I supposed to do? You never want any!
• Look, we’re family. You’re not going to turn me in, are you? I’m your [brother, father, husband, fiancée…]!
• What, you believe the word of a kid over your own [brother, etc.]?

No matter what the child did, no matter any other factors, molesting a child is entirely the molester’s fault. Blame for molesting the child can’t be laid at the child’s feet, the non-abusive parent’s feet, or bad circumstances of the molester’s childhood. Guess whose mind made the decision and whose hands carried it out. That’s where the blame lies. (Incidentally, this also applies to the rape of adults.)

If the molester is your spouse, family member, friend, or fellow church member, it may feel overwhelming to actually hold that person responsible. Historically, people have thrown their children under the bus (figuratively speaking) and let the adult go in order to save his marriage, his career, his ministry, or whatever. Today we as parents know we have a higher responsibility to our children.

This is where you as a parent may feel the need for a therapist and/or support group to help you get through this extremely hard time. Keep in mind that whatever you do or don’t do, your child is watching and will remember and be grateful for your protection and love in a time of intense vulnerability, betrayal, and need.

Abusers don’t molest once and then quit

The average child molester has molested dozens of children over a period of years before being caught — and that’s just the ones who get caught. Sexual attraction to children is a totally separate thing than a normal sexual attraction to adults. People don’t go back and forth between them.

The molester will tell you otherwise, but based on what we know from sky-high recidivism rates (the rate at which a criminal coming out of the legal system commits the same criminal act again) and from therapists who treat offenders, this attraction doesn’t change, and it seems to be very difficult for offenders to stop offending. In an overwhelming majority of cases, they re-offend.

“I don’t know what happened” (yes, they do, they did it on purpose) — “and it’ll never happen again” (yes, chances are excellent that it’ll happen again, and equally excellent that it has happened before too).

Child molesters interviewed in prison have told their interviewers what they’re looking for when they’re out trolling for children, and how they prepared the children to not protest or resist being molested:

• Ready availability — a child they already know or have access to.
• Emotional need. They looked for children who had been taught to be compliant to adults, and children who were emotionally needy.
• Establish a relationship. The predator took time to get to know the child, bought presents, listened and showed caring behavior.
  • At the same time, the abuser emotionally manipulated and set up the child by subtly encouraging trust in himself and distrust in the child’s parents and other adults.
  • This way, if the child ever protested, the abuser had an array of strategies: He blamed the child. Or he told the child that if anyone found out, he’d go to jail, or that the child would lose her family, or that everyone would blame the child.
• Condition a child to touch. With the caring relationship in place, the predator would start touching the child, first in innocent ways, then gradually sexually. This included wrestling, tickling, hugging, stroking the child’s back, etc.
  • Because of the friendship, when touching turns sexual, it’s confusing to the child. This is someone who cares about them, so it must be right, right?
• Get the child alone. It’s obvious why the abuser would want to do this.

Resources

• “How to Survive the Sexual Abuse of Your Child,” by Christine Larson, MSW, and Anne Zaro, MSW, through the Spokane Sexual Assault Center in Spokane, Washington. This little booklet is worth its weight in gold. It covers everything we’ve covered here and much more.
• “Especially for Parents,” a booklet developed by DeAnn Yamamoto-Nading, MA, and King County Sexual Assault Resource Center staff, available through the King County Sexual Assault Center in Renton, Washington.
• “Just in Case: Parental guidelines in finding professional help in case your child is missing or the victim of sexual exploitation,” a brochure from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
• Your Body Belongs to You, by Cornelia Spelman.
• My Very Own Book About Me! Personal Safety Book, by Jo Stowell, MA, MED, and Mary Dietzel, RN, MSW, available through the Sexual Assault and Family Trauma (SAFeT) Response Center or Amazon. List of other resources and a parents’ guide included.
• Office of Crime Victims Advocacy (OVC).
• Washington Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs (WCSAP). Check your state for a similar coalition website, which will list most or all of your state’s sexual assault resources (offices, support, literature, public policy efforts, etc.). Check to see if they have a catalog of child safety/child sexual abuse items that you can browse through and purchase materials from.
• “Reducing the Risk for Children in Our Care,” a brochure by the Sexual Assault and Family Trauma (SAFeT) Response Center.
• “Just in case: Guidelines in case you are considering daycare,” a brochure by the Office of Crime Victims Advocacy.
• Protecting the Gift, by Gavin de Becker. Also available as audio cassette/audiobook set.

What To Do If You Suspect Your Significant Other/Family Member of Sexually Abusing a Child: Part III

When and How Should I Intervene?

You may remember the final tip in yesterday’s post:

If your child confides in you that he/she has experienced any type of sexual or physical assault, call the police and take your child away from the care center. Don’t discuss anything with the center at this time; law enforcement can give you some guidance there. Report the information to social services and take your child to the pediatrician for an exam and checkup.

Don’t let all this activity scare your child, and don’t blame your child. Thank the child for telling you, and take action. Explain as much as you can of what you’re doing that’s appropriate , telling your child that you’re protecting him/her and other little children. For a child to confide scary information like this to any adult is a brave and courageous act, particularly if the child was threatened in some way.

In this post we’ll talk about watching your child for signs of abuse and getting professional help for your child.

Signs of Sexual Abuse in Children

Here is the shocking truth. Percentage of sexually abused children who knew their abuser: 90. Child sexual abuse is overwhelmingly perpetrated by people who already know the child, such as family members, church members, school staff, Scout leaders, and so on. So it’s very likely that if your child ever comes to you with a story of abuse, it will be about someone you know. Be prepared for that.

These signs can’t be taken as guarantees that sexual abuse has occurred, but when several of these signs appear as a cluster, that’s a red flag. (Because a child could display even just one sign, keep the lines of communication open with your child all the time. Ask questions if you see a new behavior. Discuss various situations with your child.) Some of these behaviors can appear in children who are just being children, so know your child. Watch for a child who:

• Can describe sexual activity in specific terms.
• Has nothing to gain and much to lose by accusing someone falsely (this is just about every victim).
• Continues to say “dirty” words or jokes even after experiencing consequences over time.
• Clothing issues — refusing to wear any, public exposure, or dressing in too much clothing all the time.
• Hates his/her body or sexual organs.
• Forces peers to “play doctor” and remove clothes, touches them, forces them to touch or look at genitals.
• Is very negative about sex, “making babies,” or babies.
• Violates others’ sexual and personal privacy by routinely barging into bathrooms or bedrooms and refusing to stop doing so.
• Sexually assaults other children.

This is not an exhaustive list, but gives you an idea of the types of things children may do after being sexually assaulted in some way.

Getting Professional Help For Your Child

Let’s say you’ve discovered — heaven forbid — that your child has been abused. How do you find the right therapist? Social services can probably give you several references to therapists. The Internet, the local phone book, other parents — there are many resources. Once you have a list of possibilities in hand, here are some ways you can screen therapists to find the right one for your child and his/her situation.

• Ask about the therapist’s training.
• Sit down with the therapist and your child to discuss possible treatment. While there, observe the interpersonal connection between the therapist and your child. Is your child intimidated by the therapist? Does the therapist genuinely like your child?
• Ask the therapist up front who is to blame for the assault. Child sexual assault, like any other attack, is solely the responsibility of the attacker; if the therapist expresses any “gray area” about blame and responsibility, such as placing part of the blame on the child, find another therapist.
• Ask how many survivors or how long the therapist has worked with child sexual assault survivors.
• Ask about regular communications from the therapist to you, and watch the therapist’s reaction. A good therapist will of course have a plan for regular reports and opportunities to ask questions. The process should be open and healthy.
• Ask how the therapist views your child’s sexual assault. The answer needs to make it clear to you that the therapist takes the assault seriously and considers it a main therapeutic topic, not a minor or side topic. “The abuse is just a symptom of an unhealthy family system, and we’ll focus primarily on the family system, not the abuse” is not a therapist who is going to focus on your child’s being attacked and on his/her suffering and healing from the attack(s).
• Does the therapist partner with you in helping your child?
• Does the therapist treat you and your child with respect in general?

Many therapists have a sliding scale of fees to help clients of varying incomes.

What To Do If You Suspect Your Significant Other/Family Member of Sexually Abusing a Child: Part II

How Can I Work to Help Prevent Sexual Abuse of My Child?

We can’t absolutely guarantee our children’s safety unless we’re personally with our children 24/7, and maybe not even then. So these suggestions are not ironclad — but they’ll help us keep our children safe in general.

Please note: This information, while general, applies to your significant other/family member as well. Whatever screening and teaching you would normally do goes double for any family members who come in contact with your child, since — unfortunately — most sexual abuse happens within families.

Home Life: Foundation for Safety

• Be a safe person for your child to confide scary secrets to. Maintain self-control, especially when disciplining. Discipline will teach a child how the real world works, but anger will teach a child that the angry person is not a safe person. Children aren’t stupid and will close out an angry or out-of-control adult. This includes anger, screaming, crying, exaggerated shock/disbelief, or doubt of the child’s word when the child is being serious.
• Treat your child’s concerns with respect. If we laugh at a child’s fears, minimize a child’s experience (“Oh, that’s no big deal”), or discredit a child’s feelings (“You’re not really angry” or “You shouldn’t be scared”), the child probably won’t confide more serious things to us for fear of being dismissed or embarrassed.
• Proactively talk to your child about dangers and how to be careful. Be certain to add that anything bad that someone does is not your child’s fault in any way, and that he/she can tell you anything that happens and count on your support, your love, and your protection. Safety measures will help, but a child simply can’t go up against an adult.
• Make sure your child can’t be picked up at school by anyone you don’t personally authorize, and teach your child not to go with anyone else.
• Teach your child how to call 911, what questions they are likely to ask, and how to answer. Children should memorize their parents’ names, their home phone number, and their address and be able to tell it to a 911 operator. Choose the age wisely since some small children will dial 911 for fun, and some emergency services levy fines for non-emergency calls.
• Teach your child to say “No” firmly. Children simply can’t match wits or wills with an adult — certainly not with a wily, experienced child abuser — but children can learn to set a firm, unmistakable verbal boundary, and that may help save them one day. (Just so it’s understood, nothing that children do or say makes them responsible for child sexual abuse. They can’t protect themselves from adults, so if someone overcomes them verbally or physically, there must never be even a thought in my mind as a parent that my child “should have done more” or “should have done differently.” If a child abuser can fool me and everyone else — and chances are it’s someone I know — what chance did my child have? It is never, ever, ever the child’s fault.)
• Teach your child to be more and more autonomous as well as interdependent with family. Help him/her to learn to make a decision and act on it. Help your child practice saying “No” and speaking up in uncomfortable situations. Have your child practice telling you if something bad has happened, so your child can see you responding positively and learn that you are trustworthy to tell big, ugly secrets to.

Child Care Screening

• Visit any care location you’re considering. Tour it, ask about the routine, and observe caregivers in action.
• Research the care location on the Internet. Has anyone reported this center to police, social services, or business licensing organizations?
• Check the sex-offender registry for your state (list of state registries here). Other countries may also have sex-offender registries online.
• Can you come by the center without calling first, and do you have access to the whole facility without off-limits areas? You should be able to have this access.
• Ask about discipline.
• Ask about staff members’ education and about the center’s requirements for staff hiring.
• Teach your child some tips:
  • What “private parts” are, and that no one at the center is allowed to touch them.
  • How to say “No” if anyone wants your child to do anything that makes them feel embarrassed or hurts them.
  • Never to stay alone with an adult, but to go where the other children and caregivers are.
  • Not to let adults get your child to do things by giving him/her candy or gifts.
  • Not to let anyone take his/her picture if your child feels scared or uncomfortable about it. How to speak up if this happens.
  • To know that if he/she says “No” you will support your child, love your child, and protect your child. They need to know they have this backing from you.
  • To know that people will say mean things just to scare them into cooperating — it doesn’t mean those things are true. “If you tell, you’ll never see your mommy again,” “”Your parents won’t love you anymore,” or “If you tell, your family will get hurt” are the types of threats children may hear.
  • How to tell an adult they trust at the center, if another adult causes them to feel scared or uncomfortable.
• If your child confides in you that he/she has experienced any type of sexual or physical assault, call the police and take your child away from the care center. Don’t discuss anything with the center at this time; law enforcement can give you some guidance there. Report the information to social services and take your child to the pediatrician for an exam and checkup. Try not to let all this activity scare your child, and don’t blame your child. Thank the child for telling you, and take action. Explain as much as you can that’s appropriate of what you’re doing, telling your child that you’re protecting him/her and other little children. For a child to confide scary information like this to any adult is a brave and courageous act, particularly if the child was threatened in some way.

There are no guarantees in life. But these steps should help. Stay tuned for more on intervening if it happens to your child.

New for January 2012

I’ve joined the Ultimate Blog Challenge and will be posting every day in the month of January. This means you’ll see shorter posts way more frequently. Follow me here or on Twitter to be notified of new posts.

This also means I’ll post a lot of resources I’ve gathered over the past year or so, but that I haven’t had time to write up yet. A challenge like this pushes me to prioritize getting the information to you, rather than creating a flawless, lengthy post. You probably like shorter posts better anyway — I do too.

There’ll be several more quick posts in this series on “What To Do If You Suspect Your Significant Other/Family Member is Sexually Abusing a Child,” then we’ll move on to new resources.

If I could say any one thing to you as a child sexual abuse survivor, it would be this: You are never alone. At any given time there are thousands, or millions (depending on your country’s size) of people who would help you if they knew you were in trouble.

So please find someone you trust. Tell someone today, will you? A parent, a teacher or school counselor, a police officer, a teen hotline or rape crisis hotline… I promise you that there is someone, at least one person, around you who will listen and help you. And this will end. I know that right now it feels as though it’s going to last forever and that no one will save you. But someone will. Please talk to someone good today.

What To Do If You Suspect Your Significant Other/Family Member of Sexually Abusing a Child

Here’s Part I of the promised follow-up post to help the many folks who have been emailing in and asking questions about what to do if you suspect someone close to you of molesting your child/a child. I did meet with a professional at a local office of Lutheran Community Services Northwest, as promised some months ago — LCS provides (among other things) advocacy and prevention for child sexual abuse.

I will be posting 31 times in the month of January, an average of a post per day, so this information will be broken up into short daily posts. If people generally find this shorter format better, then I’ll probably change over to that in time.

LCS has so much great material that you’ll find it worthwhile to look up a local office so you can visit the child sexual abuse page for that office. You’ll find lots of national resources listed on those pages.

Part I: Warning Signs of a Possible Child Sexual Abuser

• Spends a lot of time with children outside of work.
• Seems to know more about the “in” thing for kids than about adult trends.
• Is someone whom other parents or children have made comments about to you. These comments will likely be nothing exact, but listen to them. “Mr. Smith is weird. I don’t like him,” said by a child, is something to listen to. “That piano teacher never allows parents to be present or even in the house during piano lessons, and my kids don’t want to go there” — said by another parent, that’s a big red flag. No, we don’t convict people on gossip or slander them. But absolutely do pay attention to comments, especially when you’re hearing a trend of comments about the same person.
• Is someone children avoid and act uncomfortable around.
• Is a relative whom family children don’t want to be left with. “Mom, I don’t want to go to Uncle George’s house” may just be a garden-variety complaint. So sit down with your child and ask questions. Better yet, make other arrangements. If your child’s caregiver is a family member whom your child cries, protests, complains or gets sick in order to avoid, that can be a big red flag too.
• Subtly undermines your child’s trust in you and tries to transfer your child’s trust to himself/herself.
• Regularly suggests trips alone with your child.

To be clear, none of these signs say a person is guilty of sexual abuse. But they are signs, and we as parents must pay attention.

There will be one more post today since it’s January 2 and I have a day of catching up to do, if I want to average a post every day for January. Hope you all had a good holiday season and that this new year will bring you good things.

 

Profile of a Female Perpetrator

This is another one of the promised articles for calendar year 2008, and it took more research than usual. There’s less data on female sexual offenders than on male offenders, and the data that exists is interpreted in many ways. The information below is culled from a number of sources (see the source list at the end for examples) and represents an overview of generally accepted conclusions about female sexual perpetrators. If we are dedicated to rooting out sexual assault in our society, we must face facts.

The truth about female perpetrators and child sexual abuse

The heartbreaking introduction must be this: Twenty to 25 percent of substantiated child sexual abuse cases are perpetrated by women. That’s right — one-fifth to one-quarter. Please understand this number correctly: It’s estimated that females report only about 10 percent of their sexual assaults, but males (especially children) underreport their sexual attacks even more.

What that means is that if 20 to 25 percent of substantiated cases are committed by female perpetrators, the real percentage is likely somewhat higher due to the fact that males underreport female attacks at an even higher rate than females underreport male attacks.

Current numbers show that about half the victims of female perpetrators are male, half female. In the case of the male victims, we can draw a fairly immediate line from victim to victimizer: About 59 percent of male sex offenders have a background of female sexual abuse.

Tragically, another line is even more direct than that: A male sex offender who has been sexually abused exclusively by a female chooses only female victims on average over 93 percent of the time.

What is a female perpetrator like?

It is widely acknowledged that women sexually attack for different reasons than men, particularly in the case of molesting a child. For example, where a man may use a child for sexual gratification, a woman may use a child sexually as part of her search for intimacy. Female perpetrators are often loners and have trouble forming relationships. Most come from abusive backgrounds.

So far as we have information, female offenders are significantly less likely than male offenders to perpetrate a violent sexual attack such as forcible rape, although those do happen. Their sexual attacks tend to be predicated on “winning” the victim and having a relationship with him or her.

Female sexual perpetrators are far more likely than male perpetrators to have an opposite-sex partner in crime. Many female sex offenders assault at the behest of a male partner, or at least facilitate and witness his assault. Far fewer female perpetrators act alone than male, and when they do, they typically have a longer, more severe history of abuse than male perpetrators. Far more male perpetrators than female actually don’t have a history of sexual abuse. Studies show that women are extremely unlikely to sexually assault a child where there’s no history of abuse in their own lives. These are simply informational statements as of 2008.

Female child molesters target boys significantly more often than girls. Female perpetrators of forcible rape or sexual assault against adults, however, tend to select female victims.

There may be truth to the idea that females are less likely to sexually offend than males. This unfortunately tends to feed our unwillingness to see females as abusers, to take their offenses as seriously, to hold them as culpable, and to sentence them as we sentence male offenders. There is no excuse for any blindness that interferes with protecting people from sexual assault (particularly children) and prevents effective justice and treatment for all offenders.

The double standard: How we portray and punish sexual offenders

Our society often thinks of women as the nurturers and caretakers of society and doesn’t want to see differently. Over 85% of male victims of female perpetrators are not believed when they tell their story. Media stories of male perpetrators use terms like rape, forced sex (another problematic term), and sexual assault, where stories of female perpetrators often use deceptive terms such as had an affair, had sex with, slept with instead of the more accurate raped or sexually assaulted. With a female perpetrator and an underage boy, in particular, people more often assume a kind of caring relationship between the perpetrator and her victim. The boy’s experience might even be regarded as a rite of passage. Male attackers are animals, while female attackers are “troubled.”

This double standard does not go only one way, however. Male sexual assault of females is considered sad, but a fact of life, and people even have sympathy and understanding for male attackers. “He must have had a terrible childhood,” “Boys will be boys,” and so on. Female attackers, on the other hand, are considered to be far sicker than male attackers. There can be perceptions such as “He’s just doing what men do; she’s a sociopath.”

Regardless of perceptions and prejudices, today’s laws should at the very least reflect the equal responsibility of women who have committed a sexual assault. They do not. The tragic result is systematic injustice perpetrated via the legal system. Female child molesters, for example, are arrested, charged, and prosecuted at significantly lower rates than male. They are sentenced more lightly. That’s if they reach the legal system at all, which they also do at a lower rate. Most female sexual perpetrators are never even arrested — fewer even than male rapists, and not many male rapists are ever arrested. So it’s a very small number.

Myths and messages about male sexual assault victims

If the injustice stopped with the legal system, that would be bad enough. But male victims find they’re lucky if they’re not simply laughed at when they tell their story of being sexually assaulted. Social custom still sends false and crushing messages to male victims — messages as antiquated as the lopsided sentencing laws. People’s reactions to male victims — whether the victims are children or adults — can include:

• “You should feel lucky.”
• “A real man would be glad to have sex.”
• “What’s the matter with you? It was just sex.”
• “What did she do — hold you down?”
• “You got attacked by a woman?”
• “I wish she’d come to my house and attack me.”
• “Honey, she’s your babysitter. You probably just misunderstood.”

These are some of the same messages people give to women who are raped, and if there’s anything I’d like today’s post to communicate, it is this: Sexual assault, and the painfully false messages and lack of support that can follow, are equally damaging to female victims and male victims alike.

In today’s culture, men often don’t — and often don’t dare — allow themselves to appear vulnerable. It’s incredibly difficult to even talk about a sexual assault, especially if a man has internalized, all his life, any of these common cultural myths:

• Real men always want sex.
• It’s impossible for a woman to rape a man.
• Women don’t sexually assault people. Women don’t molest children. If they do anything, it’s just play. It’s not really bad or serious.
• It’s OK for an adult woman to “have sex with” a teenage boy, even though it’s not OK for an adult man to “rape” a teenage girl, because boys and men are just sexual animals.
• A real man would be grateful for it.
• Men want it. And if they don’t, something is wrong with them.

We’ve begun challenging myths when they’re applied to female victims. Now it’s time to stop perpetuating myths when they’re applied to male victims too.

What about female victims of female perpetrators?

Younger female victims are reluctant to say they’ve been assaulted by a woman because they may question their own sexuality or worry about how they’ll be judged by others when people find out they were attacked by a woman. Like male victims of all ages, female victims of all ages are also much more likely to grow up to assault someone else than someone with no history of abuse or assault.

Resources for male sexual assault victims

As we’ve mentioned in this blog before, resources for male sexual assault victims are fewer than for female sexual assault victims. Here’s my earlier post on this subject. (Update in 2012: I’m sure there are more resources now. I’ve seen them, but haven’t had the time to go back and update all the relevant posts.) You would expect this, given the lopsided ratio of female sexual assault victims to male victims overall, but the ratio of resources for men is not even equal to that. Part of the problem is that while women have pressed for, and gotten, research done on their assaults, men’s relative silence due to severe shaming and social pressure has guaranteed that very little research has been done specifically on male victims. This is a heartbreaking oversight that needs to be remedied immediately.

Here’s a bit of the little we do know: If you are the wife, girlfriend, etc., of a man you suspect has been sexually assaulted, be a safe person for him to talk to. If you have children, let him see you being fiercely protective of them — and tell him you’re protective of him too. Open up a space for him (as opposed to badgering him) to talk to you if he chooses. Prepare ahead of time by having resources in hand that he might want to look at. If you sense he’s not open to talking to you about it, give him the materials. Be willing to be wrong about it and look foolish; you’d be shocked at how many men carry this secret. Eventually he may take action. Support his absences while he goes to meetings or counseling, and be willing to go to counseling with him if he wants you to. Above all, never, never shame him or blame him for any part of what happened.

Where is a child least safe?

It’s worth noting that despite the news stories in recent years, schools are still one of the safest places for children. Sexual abuse by teachers comprises less than 10 percent of all sexual assaults on children. The least safe place for a child is in the family. The vast majority of child sexual assaults are committed by family members. Incest stories tend to not make the news as often or as memorably because they’re so much more common than sexual abuse by others.

Wrap-up

Did anyone else notice the obvious conclusion to this research? The biggest single step we can take to help get rid of sexual assault in our society is to stop assaulting and abusing people today — especially children, who are tomorrow’s attackers if we assault them instead of protecting them. To stop a sick pattern — stop it!

Resource list for this post

• The Men’s Project / Le Projet Pour Hommes: The Men’s Project has grown to become one of Canada’s leading counselling and educational agencies for men and their families, and in particular for all male survivors of sexual abuse committed by males and females. The Men’s Project  has witnessed incredible expansion of their funded services, their fee-for-service programs, and their training and consultation services. Their mandate is  “helping men and their families build better lives.”
• Practical Aspects of Rape Investigation, Fourth Edition, by Janet Warren and Julia Hislop. These two, one a psychiatrist and the other a psychologist, studied female sex offenders and developed a typology. They found six types of female sexual offenders.
• “Female Sexual Abusers: A Theory of Loss,” by Hollida Wakefield, Martha Rogers, and Ralph Underwager, an important summary of several studies with extremely valuable nuggets of information in statements throughout the summary.
• “Female Sex Offenders,” a 2007 U.S. Department of Justice brief.
• “Female Adolescent Sex Offenders,” a fact sheet put out by the National Center on Sexual Behavior of Youth.
• Female Sexual Abuse of Children, by Michele Elliott, an older book but still extremely helpful for an introduction to the subject.
• “A Critique of the Female Sexual Perpetrator,” research by J. Johansson-Love in Aggression and Violent Behavior.
• “Female sexual abuse of boys often goes unreported,” an article by Joyce Frieden in Clinical Psychiatry News.
• Female Offenders: Critical Perspective and Effective Interventions, by Ruth T. Zaplin.
• A Comprehensive Study of Female Offenders, by Martin Guevara, Ph.D. Urbina.

Related articles

• Profile of a Female Perpetrator (rapeinfo.wordpress.com)
• 93% of Our Children Know Their Molesters (socyberty.com)

Sexual Assault Resources Specifically for Men

That men are raped is not in question. For example, see the Abused Empowered Survive Thrive and website, which has several large sections specifically for men, such as Male Rape Myths and Research and Statistics on Male Abuse Survivors.

As of 2011, the CDC estimated that almost 20% of women suffered rape in their lifetime. (By the way, just as a man’s physiological body response to rape is involuntary, so is a woman’s. This does not indicate arousal or consent for either sex. Keep reading.)

The same as for female rape survivors, many ignorant people in society hold bigoted or erroneous views about male rape survivors:

• Men can protect themselves, so he must’ve wanted it or else he would’ve stopped it.
• Now that he’s been raped, he’s homosexual.
• He was homosexual anyway, so it’s all just sex for him.
• He was homosexual anyway, so he deserved it.
• A real man could have kept it from happening.

While many of the emotional needs of male survivors are the same as those of female survivors, men have some unique needs. First, here are some struggles both sexes face:

• They feel violated and disempowered.
• They question themselves.
• They lose confidence in their ability to protect themselves.
• They wonder if they did something to bring the attack on themselves.
• They think they should’ve done more to stop it. Or less. Or something different.
• They feel blamed by society (“If she hadn’t gone to a bar dressed like that it wouldn’t have happened,” “If he was straight it wouldn’t have happened,” “Why did you provoke the attacker?”, etc.).

Here are some of the unique struggles men face:

• They feel emasculated.
• They wonder if they’ve become homosexual.
• They wonder if it happened because they’re homosexual (data shows that homosexuals are in fact targeted; I don’t know of an exhaustive study showing how rapists target male victims in general).
• Society believes men can’t be sexually assaulted by women, but they can be–and this is a stigma as well, with many people viewing the male victim as weak or as less of a man, or thinking that a “normal” man would be glad to “have sex,” or assuming that no woman could be strong enough to rape a man. (Aaaand we’re back to the “not a real man” myth.)
• Sketchy information shows that men (no matter who does the attacking) are even less likely to report rape than women because of the stigma attached to the “weakness” of a male victim or the stigma of questions about his sexuality or masculinity.
• There aren’t many resources for male rape survivors, so they’re more isolated and less served than women. Even factoring in the lower proportion of male survivors to female survivors, there aren’t a proportionate number of resources specifically for male survivors. Most services for female survivors also serve male victims, but here I’m talking about services that are dedicated to male survivors.
• Male survivors may have had an erection or ejaculation during an assault and feel guilty about it; the attacker or the victim’s friends/family may assume this means the victim must have “wanted it,” when in reality, both erection and ejaculation are physiological responses to stress that don’t require sexual arousal and that a man can’t voluntarily control.

Some of the good resources I can find for men are listed here.

• Articles, Information and Education on male sexual assault. This looks like a terrific list; unfortunately when I sampled the links I found that most of them don’t work. This page has clearly not been updated in a long time. The few links do work, though, lead to good material.
• Male Sexual Assault. This is the main page leading to the above list. Same deal–most of the links don’t work.
• For Men Only. Great resources and info from the University of Texas Austin. Definitions, myths, what to do, more.
• Sexual Abuse of Males. A Ph.D. has written up his research and information, mostly on sexual abuse of boys before age 16.
• MaleSurvivor. Tremendous resource on sexual victimization of boys and men.
• Men and Sexual Trauma. Good listing from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
• National Organization on Male Sexual Victimization. The name explains it. Lots of information, statistics, what you can do.
• Men Can Stop Rape. Facts, myths and resources on male sexual assault.
• Male Survivors. Help page from Brown University Health Education with statistics, information, more.
• Male/Male Sexual Violence, from Advocates For Youth in Washington, D.C.
• Male Survivors of Sexual Violence, a PDF analysis of studies and statistics on male sexual victimization compiled by the Michigan Resources Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence.

No one, no matter what their age, race, or sex, deserves to be raped or has “asked for it.” Rape doesn’t change people’s sexual orientation, and it isn’t OK to rape a man because “men want it all the time anyway.” Rape is never a turn-on. Raping men isn’t OK, and it’s never the victim’s fault — not ever. I will shout this from the housetops. To male assault survivors: You are not alone. We women have been attacked too, and we stand with you. We believe you. We believe in you. We want more for all rape survivors, no matter who has been attacked.

Related articles

• Former Marine To Fox News: Sexual Assault Should Not Be Part Of My Job (thefrisky.com)
• Profile of a Female Perpetrator (rapeinfo.wordpress.com)