Sexist stereotypes are making us fail male victims of sexual assault

Sexism is a bizarre game which no gender ever really wins. Women suffer more than men in our gendered society. However, males may benefit the most from gender stereotypes, but their victory is in many ways a hollow one. The stereotypes of men as hyper-macho is one way in which they have secured their position as the dominant group in society. However, it also denies them vulnerability and victimhood.

This was encapsulated this week in a court case in Swindon, which laid bare how sexist stereotypes are causing us to fail male victims of sexual assault. A 21-year-old woman was found guilty of having sexual intercourse with an 11-year-old boy who she was babysitting while he was on a day off from school.

The victim’s father argued in court that the crime wasn’t so serious because the boy was “sex-mad” and “fully up for the experience”. Rather than seeing the attack as a crime, he said his son saw it is “a notch on his belt.” The judge agreed that the child was unusually “mature” for his age, whilst the woman who attacked him was “small and immature”. The woman was spared jail and given a six month suspended sentence.

It’s an incredibly sad case, and one which highlights how men and boys can be made to suffer under sexist stereotyping. The sexual assault of any child is an appalling tragedy, and every victim should be supported as much as a possible. However, given the gender dynamics of the case, the victim has been denied this justice. The awful stereotypes around masculinity have been affirmed by a judge. Yet no child can be “fully up for” being sexually assaulted, nor is any sex attack a “notch on the belt” of a victim.

The case lays bare how toxic and twisted social role of masculinity is. It has relied on the cartoonish cliche of school boys as horny, hormonal messes who always want sex. It caricatures boys as constantly "up for it" to the extent that their ability to consent or not to sexual acts is taken less seriously.

When men are sexually assaulted by women, we often fail to take the victims seriously because of gender stereotyping about power dynamics. It is deeply ingrained in society to see all intercourse, consensual or non-consensual, as something which men do to women; the female is passive and receptive while the male is assertive and dominant.

So when a woman attacks a man or a boy sexually, the crime lies outside our framework of how we see male and female behaviour, and we refuse to take male victims seriously. We see sex as a way in which men make a “conquest” of women, and fail to see how a male can be a victim of a sexual crime. We refuse to acknowledge how they can be traumatised by intercourse, even when it involves a minor.

Society is failing us all when it refuses to see men as "real" victims of sexual violence. It is only when we do so that we can start to recognise them as fully human and respect their trauma.