CALAGUAS, Patricia Claire S.

3CA2

LINSANGAN, Pauline M.

#MenToo: A Study On Society’s Negligence On Male Sexual Assault

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

Media plays a vital role in influencing people’s way of thinking. It has the power to dictate

whether something is right or wrong. While information keeps on spreading like wildfire through

various ways, an information is only considered to be true when it reaches news outlets and

national broadsheets. According to Austin and Dong (1994), the perceptions of credibility have

been found to be influenced by the content of the news reports and characteristics of the news

anchor (Markham, 1968), suggesting that perceptions of credibility may be influenced by

presentation variables.

With the rise of the digital era, a number of issues and problems that have been existing in

the society for a long time have now been sparking discussions all over the internet. With the role

of the Internet as a key communications tool for disseminating news (Chiagouris, 2008), people

nowadays become entitled to freedom of expressing their thoughts and ideas with just a single

click. Given that people come from different cultures, it is inevitable that they uphold and fight for

what they think is right, their different point of views and perspective in life. Strangers turn into
friends and colleagues, joining and fighting for various advocacies and discourses. These people

share stories rooting from personal experiences that one may or may not encounter in his lifetime,

and one issue that is timely and prevalent in the society is sexual harassment.

As cited in the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, sexual harassment constitutes on

unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other verbal or physical conduct of the

sexual nature (Swartz, 2009). Women post their traumatic experiences on social media pertaining

to sexual harassment on streets, public utility vehicles, and public places. These social media posts

about harassment lead netizens to sharing their sentiments and opinion regarding the issue, thus

making it viral on the internet, raising more awareness than before. In line with these occurrences,

last May 2017, an anti-catcalling ordinance that criminalizes unwanted sexual attention was signed

into law by Mayor Herbert Bautista (Sauler, 2016). Another republic act on sexual harassment is

the Anti-Violence Against Women and Their Children Act, also known as Republic Act 9262, that

considers sexual harassment as a form of violence against women. However, these laws have

gender preferences and are mostly attributed on women, excluding the male population in the

society.

Groth and Burgess (1980) suggested in a significant paper that male sexual assault (MSA)

is one of “the most under addressed issues in our society”. While it is fact that fighting for

‘equality’ has always been a thing in social media, people still fall into the notion of a patriarchal

society, thus making it undeniable that female rights are more often fought about than men’s rights.

In comparison, literature has given considerable attention to female sexual assault and rarely to

male sexual assault.

 Most male victims of sexual assault tend to keep their experiences from being reported.

Various suggestions have been posited around social stigmas, fear of rejection and not being

believed, or generally having no idea to whom or where to report such assaults (Campbell &

Vearnals, 2001). People tend to neglect the need to discuss male sexual assault for the media

depicts images of men as the ‘tough’ ones. Due to this, patriarchy becomes more evident in the

society, consequently making gender stereotypes and sexual assaults more often associated to

females.

The concept of a patriarchal society tends to keep people from seeing how even males get

to experience such harassment. With the intensification of the problem in the society, this paper

aims to recognize the need to study on the experiences of male sexual harassment, as well as the

perception of internet users regarding on male sexual harassment cases posted on social media

sites.

Bibliography

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