The Atlantic: The Understudied Female Sexual Predator

Two years ago, Lara Stemple, Director of UCLA’s Health and Human Rights Law Project, came upon a statistic that surprised her: In incidents of sexual violence reported to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 38 percent of victims were men––a figure much higher than in prior surveys. Intrigued, she began to investigate: Was sexual violence against men more common than previously thought? [...]

In “When Men Are Raped,” the journalist Hanna Rosin summarized the peer-reviewed results that Stemple published with co-author Ilan Meyer in the American Journal of Public Health. “For some kinds of victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences,” Rosin wrote. “Stemple is a longtime feminist who fully understands that men have historically used sexual violence to subjugate women and that in most countries they still do. As she sees it, feminism has fought long and hard to fight rape myths—that if a woman gets raped it’s somehow her fault, that she welcomed it in some way. But the same conversation needs to happen for men.” [...]

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.” [...]

Stereotypes about women “include the notion that women are nurturing, submissive helpmates to men,” they write. “The idea that women can be sexually manipulative, dominant, and even violent runs counter to these stereotypes. Yet studies have documented female-perpetrated acts that span a wide spectrum of sexual abuse.”

They argue that female perpetration is downplayed among professionals in mental health, social work, public health, and law, with harmful results for male and female victims, in part due to these “stereotypical understandings of women as sexually harmless,” even as ongoing “heterosexism can render lesbian and bisexual victims of female-perpetrated sexual victimization invisible to professionals.”