By Katerina Mansour, Staff Writer

Published in print Apr. 22, 2015

In our day and age, women continue to face significant strife related to sexual assault; however, they are not alone. Males are currently going through what I would compare to the very beginnings of female sexual abuse trials and struggles that began a few decades ago.

Of course, sexual abuse had always been a problem for women, but the media and society only started paying attention to it over the recent decades. Now the media is slowly covering male victims of sexual assault or abuse, and they are facing some of the same issues women have.

Many claim that it is impossible to rape a man— that men always want to have sex so they cannot be raped. They question why any female would want or “need” to rape or sexually abuse a man, and overall deny the existence of this problem.

On top of this particular problem, there are further gender-related issues that arise. Often men, who are victims of a sexual attack by a male, refuse to tell anyone because of the homosexuality stigma.

Furthermore, many males refuse to report abuse by females as they believe admitting to being abused by a female implies they aren’t man enough to defend themselves.

Well, the fact is that anyone can be drugged; anyone can be subdued; anyone can be sexually abused or assaulted.

According to Rape Abuse & Incest National Network, RAINN, 10 percent of the victims of sexual assault, sexual abuse and rape are males.

Furthermore, 2.78 million men in the U.S. have been victims of sexual assault or rape. While the numbers are significantly smaller than those associated with female victims of rape that does not mean that this problem does not exist.

In fact, by acting like this is not a problem because of how allegedly “rare” or “impossible” it is we are exacerbating the problem.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control conducted a study in 2005 on San Diego Kaiser Permanente HMO members that reported 16 percent of males were sexually abused by the age of 18.

A significant factor when analyzing these numbers is how widely underestimated they are by researchers. Why? Because men are much less likely to admit to being the victims of sexual abuse than women, and many are led to believe what happened to them does not qualify as abuse. There is a strong fight in trying to help women understand that yes they have been raped, yes they have been abused, but is anyone doing that for the men in our society?

Is anyone encouraging men to share their story and seek the counseling or care they need as a result of this abuse?

A shift in the way we perceive sexual assault and its victims needs to occur.

We are already dealing with the issue of sexual assault being minimized for female victims who are blamed for their alcohol consumption, clothing attire or allegedly promiscuous behavior.

On top of that, we are now encouraging males to remain quiet when sexual assault has happened as nobody would believe them, or we are telling them that it is not physically possible for them to be raped and that they are lying.

Sexual assault encompasses a wide range of actions that are not exclusive to a single gender.

We need to realize that by denying that a male can be the victim of a sexual crime we are further victimizing a group of people that have been abused in one way or another.

It’s time to throw away those gender stereotypes that promote the notion of male rape being impossible, and realize that no means no— no matter what gender you are.