SINCE HARVEY WEINSTEIN’S DEFENDERS HAVE MANAGED TO TURN DISCUSSION FROM A “LOOK HOW AWFUL HARVEY WEINSTEIN IS,” INTO “LOOK HOW AWFUL ALL MEN ARE,” IT’S WORTH REVISITING THIS BY CONOR FRIEDERSDORF: The Understudied Female Sexual Predator: According to new research, sexual victimization by women is more common than gender stereotypes would suggest.
Only the 2010 report provides data on the perpetrator’s sex. It found that over their lifetime, women were vastly more likely to experience abuse perpetrated by men, as were male victims who were penetrated without their consent. “But among men reporting other forms of sexual victimization, 68.6% reported female perpetrators,” the paper reports, while among men reporting being made to penetrate, “the form of nonconsensual sex that men are much more likely to experience in their lifetime … 79.2% of victimized men reported female perpetrators.
Next they turn to the National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This survey focuses on violent crime. After pooling and analyzing the data gathered in the years 2010 through 2013, the authors found female perpetrators acting without male co-perpetrators were reported in 28 percent of rape or sexual assault incidents involving male victims and 4.1 percent of incidents with female victims. Female perpetrator were reported in 34.7 percent of incidents with male victims and 4.2 percent of incidents with female victims.
To study nonconsensual sex among the incarcerated, the authors draw on data collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics under the Prison Rape Elimination Act. (Their paper focuses on surveys of previously incarcerated inmates in state prisons; Stemple told me that the patterns they related are similar to data collected from those held in a broad range of prisons and jails.) Noting the high prevalence of “sexual victimization committed by female staff members and female inmates,” the authors report that women are “much more likely to be abused” by other women inmates than by male staff.
They add that “for women prisoners and girls in detention, staff perpetrators are overwhelmingly male, and for men and boys the staff perpetrators are overwhelmingly female.” Women are disproportionately represented among all staff abusers because men and boys are so disproportionately incarcerated overall.
Among adults who reported sexual contact with prison staff, including some contact that prisoners call “willing” but that is often coercive and always illegal, 80 percent reported only female perpetrators. Among juveniles, the same figure is 89.3 percent. Queer men and women were two to three times more likely to report abuse. “The disproportionate abuse by female staff members does not occur because women are more often staffing facilities,” the authors write. “Men outnumber women by a ratio of three to one in positions requiring direct contact with inmates.” . . .
The authors also note a 2011 survey of 302 male college students. It found that 51.2 percent reported “at least one sexual victimization experience since age 16.”
About half of the victims reported a female perpetrator.
I know, doesn’t fit this week’s narrative, but the science is settled.