Andrew, who has now completed his studies in Urban Education at Brown University, is now a man that can reflect on the pleasant memories he made as an undergraduate student at the prestigious university. Unfortunately, it is inevitable that he will also reflect upon a traumatic experience he went through earlier on in his academic career.

Andrew was sexually assaulted six days into his freshman year of college. He had to see his assailant everyday for almost the entire duration of a semester before he came forward and took legal action against the man who had raped him.

After taking legal action it was revealed that the assailant had raped two other men who filed complaints on campus. The assailant was proven guilty and was punished by being suspended until “the following December,”.  Andrew won his case as well, this time the assailant was expelled from the university.

The Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network(RAINN) concluded that male college-aged students (18-24) were 78% more likely than non-students of the same age to be a victim of rape or sexual assault. Bridget Dooley is the current Title IX Coordinator at UAA. She says her office is working to spread knowledge of the support available to all victims of sexual violence. Her office is determined to create a safe environment where every student, faculty and employee is comfortable enough “to come in and tell their story and get help here.”  Her office is working diligently trying to make her goal a reality through efforts to make everyone on their staff aligned to their objective “prevention and awareness”. She confirms, “Those are the things we are actively working towards.”

Dooley notes that there are specific areas of her outreach program that she is trying to improve upon.  “We do know that it is something we need to reach out and involve males in more,” Dooley said.  She further elaborates, “I think that, first of all, we should acknowledge that there is a lot more we can do to reach out to males to help them feel comfortable reporting things they need to report and providing them support and education.” In this statement Dooley implies that there is a significant population of males who are not using the services available to them on the college campus.

Dooley was certain that a disproportionate number of men who were sexually assaulted on college campuses were not getting the proper support. If Dooley’s statement is to be regarded as fact, it must be proven true that male victims seek outside help at a significantly less percentage than their female counterparts. I asked both Clayton Bullock–a psychiatrist and co-author of Male Victims of Sexual Assault: Phenomenology, Psychology, Physiology–and Jim Hopper–a clinical psychologist, independent consultant, and teaching associate at Harvard Medical School–about the claim in order to verify or to invalidate Dooley’s statement.

Both Bullock and Hopper affirmed Dooley’s statement and gave me insights for why men are less likely to seek support. Clayton Bullock found that, through his research, male victims are less likely to come forward due to a mix of sociological reasons.  One reason is that male claims of sexual assault typically are not taken as seriously as female claims of the same nature. The threat of being teased or mocked is an obstacle that many men simply cannot overcome and stay to themselves about the situation in order to protect themselves. Another issue that he presented is that men can have a physiological response while the assault is happening.  He exclaims, “It is possible for men to get aroused and ejaculate when being assaulted,” adding that “what’s…bewildering for the males is that if they ejaculated or were aroused during the assault, it adds a layer of shame or confusion in their culpability of their own victimization.”  Jim Hopper adds that “naming their experience for what it was, sexual assault, rape, constitutes a threat to their very identity as men.”

“Culturally we still don’t want to see men as vulnerable or hurt,” Steve LaPore explains. Steve Lapore is the founder and director of 1in6, and he believes male sexual assaults are underreported because the issue is still taboo. 1in6 got its name from the estimate that one in six males are sexually assaulted before they even reach the age of 18.  “We tell little boys and men to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”  This gendered expectation that is ingrained into young men in American culture can have a devastating effect.  It is an unfavorable and false narrative that one can be completely self-reliant and not have to rely on anyone else. It is especially detrimental for an individual who has been traumatized to try to rely on themselves to overcome the trauma. However, a good number of men who have been sexually assaulted still feel the need to resolve their own issues even if they are aware that they are in need of outside help.

“[Women have] really moved the ball forward,” Lapore mentioned. He correlates a heightened awareness around sexual assault and domestic violence of all kinds against women and children with the decreasing trend in number of assaults. However, “it’s an awareness that doesn’t include men as victims,” he said. “If we could become willing to be inclusive, we would see more men willing to come forward and say we would like some help,”.

Lara Stemple–from the University of California, Los Angeles, Law School, and director of the Health and Human Rights Law Project–delves into how the definition of sexual assault is not all-inclusive. She is an advocate for a broader definition of the word rape because it is discriminatory. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) survey defines rape as penetration of the victim. In addition, a man being forced to penetrate a woman or another man is classified as “non-rape sexual harm” and is grouped alongside behaviors like flashing or lewd comments.

“We object to their [CDC] definition of rape,” she said. She provides what she believes to be a better alternative. In her opinion, the question that should be asked is “‘Have you been made to have sex against your will?’ If they say ‘yes,’ then that person was raped.”

Lara Stemple is not the only one that has an issue with the CDC survey. In a Time article written by Cathy Young, she proclaimed that the CDC was perpetuating a narrative that modern America has a “rape culture”…“saturated with misogynistic violence.”  Furthering Lara’s point, the CDC study goes much further in asking about specific unwanted acts. According to the agency’s findings, 1.7% men were raped but these numbers refer only to men who have been forced into anal sex or made to perform oral sex on another male. The National Crime Victimization Survey(NCVS) includes crimes unreported to the police unlike the CDC. In the early 1990s, the NCVS was redesigned to incorporate more reports of domestic violence and sexual violence in particular. It now includes questions that may not fit the conventional mold of criminal attacks. There are also more questions that inquire about rape directly, attempted rape or sexual assault, and there is a specific follow up question for respondents on “forced or unwanted sexual acts” committed by a stranger, a casual acquaintance, or someone they know well. Since the change, over a third of all victims who reported that they had experienced another form of sexual violence called “sexual coercion” at least once in their lifetime were male. Sexual coercion in the study was defined as being pressured into sexual activity by psychological means: lies or false promises, threats to end a relationship or spread negative gossip, or “making repeated requests” for sex and expressing unhappiness at being turned down.

However, there’s an even bigger problem with the reporting of male sexual assault. Mallory Mailen, feminist, editor, and sexual assault survivor, says “It is important that people understand this because, perhaps one of the greatest reasons rape culture is perpetuated, is because rape is almost depicted as a female victim and a male perpetrator,”. The CDC again has been found to have a slight bias in opposition to men. In cases where a young man and woman are drinking but not intoxicated to the point of incapacitation there persists a double standard. In a scenario, it is given that the two engage in a sexual act while intoxicated where neither of them gave explicit consent. In the case that the woman reflects on the situation and regrets it, she can be considered as a victim of sexual assault. However, the same is not true for the man if he were to have the same negative feelings afterwards.

Mallory, like Bullock and Hopper, agrees that “victims feel too ashamed to talk about sexual assaults because the topic is not spoken about enough and some still think men can’t actually be raped,”.

Mailen continues, “Even worse, they think that rapists are always men,”. Indeed, Stemple’s report found that male victims and female perpetrators are more common than Americans may believe. Stemple’s report also analyzed data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Surveys, which found that female perpetrators were reported in nearly 35 percent of incidents involving male victims. If the CDC reports that only 7% of males report being forced to penetrate a woman, and the NCV claims that 35% of victims are assaulted by a female, it is logical to believe that males are susceptible to sexual assault outside the normative domain of penetration; Another reason why the definition should be broadened.

In addition, most rapes go both unreported and unfairly punished as many times the offender is free to roam without going on trial or with a light sentence. Thus in the case of Andrew’s assailant who was convicted on two separate accounts of rape before finally being expelled from campus. Steve LaPore was not shocked that Andrew’s assailant received a lighter punishment. “In many cases we find that it’s more difficult for men to be believed, or to take their case seriously,”- a point he made earlier.

Stemple believes that the CDC survey was probably underreporting sexual assaults because the survey only called for one person to report assaults for the entire household. This is problematic because the person who was responsible to report the number of instances may have been ignorant of an assault in the family. Another issue is that the reporter may have dismissed an incident. With all things taken into consideration, the NSRC estimates that only a mere five percent of the total number of sexual assaults are reported.

The Executive Director of Standing Together Against Rape(STAR), Keeley Olson proclaims that “rape is one of the most unreported crimes, and for men, it really has to do with external pressures,”. “It comes down to a stigma in our society about rape in general, it affects all survivors of rape,” Olson said. “It’s the most unreported crime according to all crime statistics nationwide. It’s further under-reported with male survivors because…the fear that they won’t be believed, the fear that they will be judged harshly, the internal dialogue that they are having within themselves that many women also have…I should’ve been able to protect myself. I shouldn’t have been there. I shouldn’t have been with that person or whatever the scenario is. Men tend to keep it much to themselves so they never get much to a place where having their personal belief system questioned or challenged in anyway that it wasn’t their fault, that they’re not to blame. They are not always supposed to be so tough that they were supposed to defend against those things.”.

When asked about the support for males provided by STAR this is what she said “It’s definitely the same sort of support but we definitely train our crisis line responders to be knowledgeable of the dynamics of the way a male may present differently than a woman,”. “They might be more angry,…rageful though that’s common across the board…some internalize it more and some voice it more. In our experience males will be able to voice that rage a lot more, so they may come across almost aggressively, but it’s really just that kind of righteous rage that a survivor has every right to. So we just try to focus on that, that they have every right to be angry, that they have every right to feel rage for what happened to them.”

With an estimated 8.8 million new males scheduled to enroll into college this upcoming year it is imperative that American society changes the dynamics of the conversation about sexual assault and rape. Now is the time to take action. 8.8 million more males will be in an environment where they will be nearly twice as likely to be the victim of a heinous crime and it is society’s responsibility to improve the situation. It is a harsh reality that a number of these young men will go through a similar experience as Andrew. One positive takeaway from this is that Andrew did not have to face the issue alone, and neither do any of these young men who may experience the same trauma.

The first step is often times the most obvious step; If society is to extend greater support to men who have been raped, society should do a better job in including men in our conversations about rape. This justifies broadening and refining the definition of sexual assault to include more than just penetration of the victim which has been proven to be an exclusive barometer for men who have been raped but not harmed in that particular way. Broadening the definition serves two purposes. One, it validates men who would not have been considered victims under the previous definition. Two, it begets greater awareness and understanding of the scope of the problem in large.

It is possible for men to benefit in the same manner that women have benefited over the past two decades from awareness and prevention initiatives. The more inclusive conversations become, the broader our depth of understanding will be within the male population of rape victims. As a direct result, society can begin the long process of disassembling the negative stigma attached to being a male victim. Once the stigma has been erased, men will no longer have the additional embarrassment or shame that keeps them from seeking and receiving help.