Rape- Are women always the victim?

                                  Rape- Are women always the victim?

Whenever we hear or read the word sexual harassment or rape in somewhere the instant thought that comes to our mind is that some man or men harassed a girl or forced her to have non-consensual sex. We always assume that only men can be capable of doing such despicable, disgusting and horrifying thing and women are always the victims. Even news shown anywhere only signifies this fact. However, is it really the whole reality?

Well it is not. Firstly, it is not always that only a male can harass or force someone. A woman too can do those things. Whoever might be reading this will think that me being a guy I am trying to vilify women by accusing them of doing something like this and making guys seem like a victim. In reality, it does happen but we do not accept this fact because it seems unnatural and also because no cases as such make it to the news and people do not even report them, as they know the authorities will not believe them. A study, which was done by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), found that 1 in 21 men reported to have been forced to have sex with a woman. In addition, in 1978 in the UK, a woman Joyce McKinney was sentenced for 12 months in prison for raping a man. Even teachers have been found to rape their underage students in USA. In addition, if a man commits such crime he can be sentenced for life while woman get lighter sentences. Even in above such cases the men are held responsible for the assault. Most of the uninvolved population also thinks that the man raped is less traumatized then a woman by such incident, which is not true. In addition, it is not that women rape only men but they also force other women and there have been cases of that. It is also a fact that female-female prison is more common then thought.

Now about the fact that only females are always the victim is incorrect. As written above they can be raped or harassed by a woman or by a man. The study by CDC also found out that 1 in 71 men had been raped or had been the target of attempted rape. In addition, 1 in 10 male-male rapes are reported. This happens due to the fact they do receive a lack of support from the legal system and the people around them due to the stigma attached to it. A study in UK suggested that 3% of men reported of non-consensual sexual experience as adults and over 5% as a child. The first prosecution ever made for such case was in 1995 in UK. It shows that men can be and are victims of sexual harassment and rape.

Therefore, the need to write this article was that it is not that men are always the ones to commit the crimes and not always, the women are the victim. In addition, I am not saying that men are not as disgusting as they are made to be but that we should not categorize them always as criminals but be neutral in judging both the genders

(All facts were found on Wikipedia and are not made up by me.)