It’s not “victim blaming” if you don’t blame the victim

Thanks to progressives, I now need to defend Donald Trump. I do not want to defend Trump. I do not like Trump. I think he is supremely narcissistic, purely self-interested, and likely one of the best manipulators in the world. He plays people, using their interests and biases to entertain himself. I doubt he wants to be the president of the United States. I doubt he intends to follow through should he win. This is all a game to him.

That said, despite Trump’s penchant for making stupid comments, his detractors also have the habit of taking his comments completely out of context. For example, Julia Sonenshein wrote about a three-year-old tweet Trump made about military rape:

26,000 unreported sexual assults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 7, 2013

Sonenshein is correct that it is a terrible comment. It implies that men are incapable of controlling their actions. While there are certainly some men like this, to assume that men and women cannot work together without the men raping the women is absurd. However, that was not what Sonenshein took from Trump’s tweet. She read a different inference:

The hidden truth of male-on-male rape in the military

The Washington Times published an article about a new study concerning rape in the military:

Far more military men are being raped by other men and experience other sexual traumas than is reported by the Pentagon because of the stigma attached to such assaults, says a new study released Tuesday by the American Psychological Association.

“Rates of military sexual trauma among men who served in the military may be as much as 15 times higher than has been previously reported, largely because of barriers associated with stigma, beliefs in myths about male rape, and feelings of helplessness,” the APA said in releasing findings published in its periodical Psychological Services.

If the survey of male combat veterans is accurate, it could mean the U.S. armed forces are dealing with an epidemic of male-on-male sex crimes.

Of course, in order to get the clickbait the editors decided to run the title ‘Gay’ rape in military underreported by Pentagon. This has nothing to do with the sexuality of the rapists or their victims. Men make up the majority of the military members. As a result, they will make up the majority of the rape victims because they are the most available potential victims. The editors at the Washington Times should know better than to play that kind of game.

Setting that aside, the numbers presented by the study reveal a severe problem with sexual violence against men in the military:

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Australian Defence Force male recruits share stories of forced sodomy to Royal Commission — Horror stories about sexual abuse of teen recruits to the Australian Defence Force (ADF) continue to surface two years after the sexual abuse on 207 male teens from 1960 to 1984 while aboard HMAS Leeuwin came out. On Tuesday, the mother of a female teen recruit described the horrific sex acts done on her daughter which led the 15-year-old to commit suicide.

Child-sex abuse victim whose abuser is in Australian prison says Brooklyn Jewish group ignored, covered up allegations — Manny Waks says he was sexually abused as a child in Melbourne, Australia, by a member of the Brooklyn-based Chabad-Lubavitch sect. And like many other victims around the globe, the activist says, he’s been unable to get justice from the organization because of New York’s statute of limitations. Under New York State law, survivors have to file lawsuits by their 23rd birthday.

Convicted paedophile awaits sentencing for abuse of boys — The 69-year-old man, who cannot be named to protect the identity of his victims, pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to three charges of sexual abuse on dates between January 1991 and May 1991 while the boys were aged five and 14-years-old. The youngest victim, now 30-years-old, said the man lived in a camper van next to his parent’s home. He said he was a friend of his parent’s and said “they trusted him, so I trusted him”.

Rape in the UK Military

Originally posted on December 4th, 2015

I wrote before about the problem of sexual violence in the United States military. It now appears the United Kingdom has a similar problem:

At least three rapes and 22 sexual assaults have been carried out against men in the UK military forces over the last two years, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) revealed under a Freedom of Information request.

Last February, a 20-year-old man was subject to “assault by penetration” by a group of seven men, The Times reported.

In May, another soldier, 28, was attacked by his seven fellow servicemen, while three other young men in the army – one of them 18 years old – were the victims of penetrative sexual assaults over the last year.

All in all, there have been 25 assaults between October 2012 and October 2014, the report revealed.

The numbers were disclosed by the MoD under Freedom of Information requests. They refer only to information gathered by military police, meaning that the real numbers could be much higher.

A former army officer offers his views:

Few male military sexual assault victims come forward

Posted on December 10, 2014

Male victims of sexual violence remain a largely hidden in society. While the media gives more attention to the issue of male victimization than before, many men and boys continue to remain silent. This is particularly true of men in the military.

Despite representing the majority of rape victims, assaulted men are significantly less likely to seek help or report their assaults:

According to an anonymous survey released last week by the Pentagon, nearly 1 percent of males in the U.S. military said they had experienced unwanted sexual contact, compared to 4.3 percent of women. That equates to about 10,500 men and 8,500 women. Yet only 14 percent of assaults reported last year involved male victims.

Afraid to be seen as victims or as weak or gay, men in the hyper-masculine military culture often don’t feel comfortable reaching out for help or reporting sexual assaults. Over the past year, though, the services have increased efforts to reach out to male victims, urging them to come forward so they can receive treatment and so officials can go after perpetrators.

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Breaking the stigma surrounding male rape — South Africa’s rape statistics are among the highest in the world. Most interventions to reduce these figures focus on female survivors. Matrix Men, an organisation that supports male rape survivors, says the stigma surrounding this crime makes it difficult to obtain reliable statistics. Activists believe as many as one in six men will in their lifetime suffer sexual abuse – and say men should start talking about it.

Ex-Big Brothers volunteer seeks to overturn sex abuse conviction — The judge who heard the child sexual abuse case against a McHenry County Big Brothers volunteer should not have allowed testimony alleging the man committed inappropriate acts decades ago, his attorney argued Thursday in appellate court. Attorney Doug Johnson asked a 2nd District appeals panel in Elgin to throw out the conviction of Leonard Puccini, 54, a Bull Valley man who was found guilty last year of sexually abusing a 12-year-old boy in 2009 whom he was mentoring through the Big Brothers.

‘I was raped at age 14 but told nobody for 28 years’ says client of new men’s counselling group — A FATHER-of-two has told of the difference a new rape counselling service specifically for men could make for victims. Upper Heyford-based Clean Slate launched its Adult Rape Outreach Service (AMOS) and Talking Young Men service (TYM) on Monday, with the help of £9,500 National Lottery funding. AMOS will provide counselling, help and advice to men over 16 and TYM will offer the same service to boys between age nine and 16.

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Alleged victim tells court of abuse by five different paedophiles in youth — An elderly Dublin man has gone on trial accused of sexually abusing a boy and paying him money in a flat over thirty years ago. The alleged victim told a jury today that he was abused by five different paedophiles during his youth, including the accused. The accused man (73) has pleaded not guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to indecently assaulting the male, who was aged between 11 and 13 years old, on dates from October 1983 to June 1985.

Boy Found in Basement Alleges Long-Term Abuse by Parents — When a 12-year-old Detroit boy went missing on June 14 and was found 11 days later, it should have been a day to rejoice. Instead, his discovery in the family’s basement has turned into weeks of unanswered questions, with some unsettling information about what the child’s life may have been like.

Defence taskforce finds appalling abuse — TEENAGE recruit Graham’s life was ruined on the night he was raped twice at a West Australian naval training base and he’s lived with the trauma ever since. THE appalling abuse of Graham and other junior sailors as young as 15 was all too common at HMAS Leeuwin, the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce (DART) says. Their stories could now be referred to the ongoing royal commission into child sex abuse, with many parallels to the effects of abuse by pedophile priests and others emerging from the hearings.