Dear

I am writing to you today because of an issue as important as it is difficult to speak about.

Sexual assault and rape.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains statistics on rapes broken down between
men and women in their National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. These statistics are
used by sexual assault crisis centers and organizations nationwide. A summary of these statistics can be
found here:
http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/sv-datasheet-a.pdf
Unfortunately, within the last ten years the CDC has begun classifying situations in which men were
made to penetrate against their will as separate from rape as part of an Other Sexual Violence
category. This creates an inherent sex-based double standard for the meaning of rape; if a woman does
not consent to heterosexual intercourse, her assault is termed a rape but if a man does not consent to
heterosexual intercourse, his assault most likely won't. When compared, the annual rate of men being
forced to penetrate matches the number of annual completed rapes against women almost exactly
nearly 1.27 million victims per year.
These statistics are being regularly misrepresented to the public to depict rape as a crime that largely
only men can commit and almost exclusively women experience. Not understanding the rhetorical
nuance of the difference between the legal and CDC definitions, many sexual assault activists and
organizations have unknowingly contributed to the marginalization of this issue. This one rhetorical
discrepancy is trapping potentially millions of male victims a year into a harmful silence about their
traumatic experiences as male survivors. This definition of rape tells these victims that their sexual
consent is not equal to that of a woman's, and it also reduces the perceived agency of women as
offenders. It sends a toxic message to male survivors that perhaps their assault truly wasn't rape. That
the violation of their consent to intercourse truly doesn't matter as much as a woman's. That society
doesn't care. That they should man up. Many leading academics on masculinity and gender posit that
internalizing messages like this contribute to destructive male aggression in later life. How much
cultural damage is being silently inflicted by this unspoken issue? Such an severe misunderstanding of
the prevalence of sexual assault involving male victims leads society to underestimate the severity of
the problem, and also leads to drastically insufficient tangible resources for survivors. It is also
notoriously difficult to raise awareness of.
I am asking that the CDC be compelled to re-evaluate their definition of rape and suggest that the
standard be changed to include all non-consensual sexual intercourse. I know this is a specific and
complex request, but it is an issue I feel very strongly about and it has remained invisible for too long.
Sincerely,