While preparing my notes for an upcoming workshop on disclosing sexual victmisation, I wrote a few notes about rape myths. 

Rape myths, Burt (1980) defined as "prejudicial, stereotyped, or false beliefs about rape, rape victims, and rapists." 

Subsequent work by Struckman-Johnson and Struckman-Johnson (1992) included beliefs specific to victimised men; specifically that men cannot be raped, that men are to be blamed for their own victimisation, and that we suffer no distress following a sexual assault anyway.

By revisiting this work, I recalled a passage in Koss et al.'s (2007) revision of the Sexual Experiences Survey (SES), once held up as the "gold standard" in measuring sexual victimisation on university campuses by the Obama administration. 

To this day, it persists as one of the most troubling passages I have ever encountered in my time researching within this space: 

While it may appear that I have some quibble regarding terminology, my concern extends much farther than that.

The authors don’t appear to be merely arguing that forced penetration by men onto women lies outside legal definitions of rape[1]; they also justify the exclusion of this dynamic by claiming that men's experiences are "qualitatively different," that they involve less force, and therefore lack the same kind of distress that women face. 

The effect of this is that they reproduce precisely the kinds of mythical assumptions that the Struckman-Johnson’s caution against. 

Whether its expressed explicitly as a stereotype, or implicitly embedded within a survey design, the underlying assumption persists:

that men's experiences of sexual violation are somehow less serious, less harmful, or less deserving of recognition than equivalent violations experienced by women. 

That it’s not as bad when a woman does it to a man. 

My critique therefore extends beyond mere methodology.

In other words, the Sexual Experiences Survey excludes a whole demographic from being recognised as rape victims because they’re the wrong gender, and because the type of violation they experienced didn’t match their ideological explanations about the nature of sexual harm. 

My concern therefore surpasses matters of semantics or pedantry. 

Surveys like this determine our entire understanding of the nature of sexual victimisation, it has follow-on effects by dictating institutional policy, and the allocation of support services. 

When a research tool systematically excludes some of the people it purports to include, those victims become statistical non-entities, and their exclusion is presented as scientific evidence. 

My own research deliberately adopted a different principle: that anyone can be sexually violated by any person.

It was that simple. 

Yet, by using gender-neutral language, I found that 59.8% of men and 80.5% of women who responded to my survey, had been sexually violated at some point in their lives. 

I do not present these figures to quietly wade into any debate about “who is the real victim”. I refuse to engage with such juvenile thinking. 

I’m not interested in those games. 
I’m interested in understanding the experience of anyone and everyone who has ever been sexually violated in their lives – no matter their gender, their age, their ethnicity, or how they know their perpetrator. 

I took a Cartesian approach and went back to basics by asking the question: what are the different ways in which anyone can experience a sexual violation that is likely to be distressing? 

My work presents compelling evidence that the language we choose, and the assumptions we include within our research designs, determine who is counted, who is believed and, ultimately, whose suffering is recognised. 

If my fellow researchers are determined to understand the true nature of sexual victimisation, rather than confirming ideological assumptions, then they’ll agree with me that no victim should disappear from our statistics simply because they are the "wrong" gender. 

Everyone matters. 

Everyone. 

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[1] Such as the Crimes Act 1961 which specifies the “direction of penetration” – something I would gladly appeal to any current MP to develop a members bill to amend so that this is more gender inclusive.