Gender
If the first cognitive distortion about sexual violence focuses on notions of consent, the second one concerns the gendered identities of victims and perpetrators. In the USA, four out of five victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy were male.[215] Estimates of the percentage of prisoners who are raped in US prisons vary from between 1 and 20 per cent.[216]
Although I have used the male pronoun to refer to sexual predators, the claim that the rapist is inescapably male is actually unsupportable.
Women, too, can be guilty of sexual violence, especially during armed conflicts. Female violence was particularly vicious during the conflicts in Rwanda, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the DRC, 41 per cent of female rape victims and 10 per cent of male victims claimed to have been assaulted by a woman.[217] In Rwanda, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko (ironically, the national minister of family and women's affairs) ordered militia to round up people in her hometown for slaughter, encouraging them to rape the women first. In most instances, female perpetrators abused their victims in conjunction with, rather than independently from, their male comrades.We should not be surprised by the presence of sexually violent women in armed conflicts. Nationalist and ethnic ideologies exerted a formidable power over these women, trumping female solidarity. Many female perpetrators had been subject to extreme violence, even rape, themselves. In insurgent forces, sexual violence has been used as a mechanism for forging effective fighting units. Some female soldiers also hoped that their cooperation in abusing other women would mean that their male comrades would spare them similar insults.