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Notes -
Years ago, I was surprised to learn that this wasn’t really the case. Maybe historically?
(Note the three- to four-fold difference between lifetime female-victim rape rates and male-victim made-to-penetrate rates, which I would consider “large majority” but not quite “almost all”, and how the 12-month male-victim made-to-penetrate rates are actually higher than female-victim rape rates, comparing table 3.1 to 3.5.
There isn’t a breakdown for 12-month assaults by sex of perpetrator, but if we wanted to use the lifetime rates of perpetration (as shown in tables 3.4 and 3.8) to adjust the 12-month victimization rates so we only include cross-sex victimization, it only makes the rates of victimization between M->F and F->M almost exactly comparable.
I was extremely surprised by this when I dug it up and looked at the stats. I recall that I couldn’t seem to do the same for the 2015 and 2018 reports, because they seem to have removed the 12-month rates and/or the perpetrator sex breakdown. I recall also wanting to find similar statistics for other countries, but that was more difficult, so I gave up.
So for some reason male perpetration has gone down over decades, but female perpetration has gone up, so much so that the sexes are raping each other at similar rates (at least in the US)!
Even given that I might’ve fucked up this very simple analysis, the rates of victimization alone are very different from what we expect from the zeitgeist.)
Yep, I was wondering if I should tackle this topic in my comment but decided it was already lengthy enough as it was and wanted to refrain from unceremoniously burying them in data from the outset. I'm glad someone else brought it up though.
There's not only the NISVS, either, there's other corroborating data which indicates that women are no angels when it comes to sexual offending. For example, here is a 2012 research paper using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's nationally representative National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC, 2001-02). It found in a sample of 43,000 adults little difference in the sex of selfreported sexual perpetrators. Of those who affirmed that they had “ever force[d] someone to have sex … against their will,” 43.6% were female and 56.4% were male.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-012-9943-5
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