Most rapes of men occur in prison. But even outside of prison, about 9 percent of reported rapes are against men (probably mostly by men, but no one knows for sure).57 Even rape outside of prison, then, is about as significant an issue for men as AIDS is for women — about 10 percent of the people dying of AIDS are women.58 Do we hear more about men being raped or about women getting AIDS?
The real area of neglect, though, is the rape of men in prison. In part because of the trauma he experiences, and in part because a man raped in prison by another man is more likely to rape a woman when he gets out of prison.59 The connection is depicted graphically in the film American Me (based on a true story). If we care about women being raped, then, we must know what happens to men in prison.
From the moment they are put in jail to await trial, innocent men, considered "fresh meat" by other inmates, are subject to rape. We tend to say to ourselves, "Well, it’s men doing it to other men and, after all, they are in prison." But it doesn’t make the man who is a rape victim feel better because he is raped by another man, or feel sexually secure after years of being labeled "gay" or "queer" by the men who raped him. Many of these men become " punks" — prison lingo for a sexual slave who is rented to other prisoners by the first person who raped him in exchange for drugs or other goods; many are gang-raped, and many are raped by a convict’s fist or a broom handle being thrust into his anus until his anus is ripped арап.60
It appears that as many males might be raped in jails and prisons each year as females who are raped outside of prison.61 We have not cared enough to study male rape in prison the way we have female rape outside prison, so we can project only from the most recent prison study of male rape — a 1982 study of a California prison. If the 14 percent projection is close to accurate, approximately one million males are raped each year in jails and prisons 62 In contrast, approximately 120,000 women are subjected to rape or attempted rape outside of prison each year 63 If female prisoners were being raped with such frequency by female inmates,64 we would quickly cite it as a violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution forbidding cruel and unusual punishment and of the Thineenth Amendment forbidding slavery ("punks”). We would demand a separate cell for each inmate, stria punishment for the perpetrators, the hiring of more prison guards, and the firing of prison guards who turned their backs on a raped female. Instead in many states, we spend twice as much on each woman in prison as on each man.63 As more and more women are being sent to prison, we see more and more TV specials on the plight of women in prison. We do not yet understand that when we neglect men, we rape women.