I'm confused by your use of the term "forced intercourse" here. Isn't this something that you usually call out, asking why they don't refer to it as rape?

Again, the first thing that came to mind was the lack of political and mainstream media attention these issues really get, when so many women are affected by sexual violence, coercion or suffer the ramifications of being denied access to reproductive health.

In the campaign, we hear "pro-life" or "pro-abortion." Interesting that a country that reveres human freedom, liberty and individuality still cannot grant women the choice to control their own bodies. Why can't this be part of the debates going on? Pro choice means supporting comprehensive sex education, access to contraception, family planning services and options, and safe abortions, and yet the issue comes down to "abortion" each time.

I think I am railing off topic a bit, but I definitely see the connection between sexual violence and reproductive and sexual rights and freedoms as they are both misunderstood and misrepresented by the mainstream media, and only the most extreme examples.

Does anyone know if there are any states which do include verbal coercion in the definition of rape? I believe that some states include verbal threats in the definition of force.

the_next_gloria,

I don't think you're off topic. Awareness of this serious, publicly under reported, conduct infers also viable solutions -- one of which is access to birth-control, a choice to not have unwanted pregnancy, especially if one cannot afford to raise a child, and all others. Diagnosis of a problem/issue, outreach and consciousiness-raising about it, are not exclusive of debate and dialogue about implicit solutions -- especially public policy, as it relates to the pro-life vs pro-choice debate.

"...verbal...pressure."

So now:

"Honey we haven't had sex in a month..."
"You are verbally pressuring me!!!"

{Dials 9-11}

Are you being purposely obtuse, Lee?

As someone who was, in a past relationship, "verbally pressured" or what I like to call coerced into intercourse (among other things), it is nothing at all like that.

wow, lee, just wow.
way to belittle the experiences of people who've been sexually assaulted. i genuinely hope that you realize how wrong it is to post something like that in a space like this without anything happening to you or one of your loved ones.

ugh.

"I could hide it when it was bruises.

"I could hide it when he forced me to have sex.

"But I can't hide my pregnancy."

Perhaps I'm missing something, and I don't mean to sound callous, but—is she inhabiting a world where she can't get an abortion?

Pregnancy is very, very hideable; pretending it's not is bad marketing.

Kee, perhaps you should re-read the personal stories. In many cases, the threat or use of violence and/or other forms of abuse such as financial abuse, prevents a woman from accessing abortion or other birth control.

I ought to know. It happened to me. My ex husband refused to allow me access to family finances when we were married. This prevented me from accessing birth control and he refused to use any. Naturally, I got pregnant. I was only able to terminate because I was able to get funds from an outside source.

"is she inhabiting a world where she can't get an abortion?"

It's not exactly easy or cheap to get an abortion, so for some women/girls it may very well be close enough to "can't get an abortion".

And besides, while I am 100% pro-choice (and would likely get an abortion if I were to become pregnant right now), it bothers me when people ask these questions. "Oh, she's pregnant, why can't she just get an abortion?!" The choice should of course be there, and women should be aware of that choice, but not everyone *wants* an abortion (no matter how they got pregnant), and not everyone can afford one for that matter. Your "is she inhabiting a world where she can't get an abortion?" was condescending, at the very least.

Kee, depending on which area of the country you live in, getting an abortion and 'hiding' your pregancy may not be an option. Id the woman in question under 18? There may be parental notification or consent laws. Even if the woman is 18 or over, there may not be a doctor in the area willing to perform the procedure, or she may not have the money to cover an abortion. Also add in religious, familial, and social pressures (not to mention the woman's own thoughts) and having an abortion may not be an option even if service and money were available.

Did you know that recent academic studies have found that women not only commit but initiate (not self defense) domestic violence almost as much as men do.

Sociological research, consistently shows that women are just as violent as men in relationships and that men sustain one-third of the injuries. California State University Professor Martin Fiebert summarizes over 200 of these studies in his online bibliography at www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm

Harvard Medical School just announced a nationwide survey that found half of domestic violence in heterosexual relationships is reciprocal and that women initiate most of the reciprocal and 71% of the non-reciprocal violence, while both sexes suffered significant injuries. http://www.patienteducationcenter.org/aspx/HealthELibrary/HealthETopic.aspx?cid=M0907d

The University of New Hampshire recently performed 32-nation study that found women are as violent and controlling as men in dating relationships worldwide. http://www.unh.edu/news/cj_nr/2006/may/em_060519male

I know this story is mostly about forced intercourse and not D.V., but it's still worthy to note that women are becoming increasing more violent, and according to these studies, the violence is not some sort of retaliation or self defense (like someone was attempting to force intercourse and the woman reacted violently). No, these are woman who initiate the violence and are the abusers.

I know this may be hard for some of you to accept, but it looks like woman are becoming just as bad as men are.

As far as reproductive coercion goes, looks like it swings both ways in the form of paternity fraud. Michigan Family Independence Agency statistics indicate that 30 percent of the paternity tests performed in Michigan exclude the tested man from being the child's biological father. The American Association of Blood Banks, which evaluated 280,000 paternity tests in 1999, found similar numbers. Currently 1.6 million men are forced to pay child support for children that aren't theirs http://www.rense.com/general51/chsup.htm

And as for verbally coercing someone to have sex...

Yes, people can be verbally coerced in many different ways. I know this from personal experience. I was once involved in a long term relationship with a man who regularly coerced me into having sex. At the time I didn't this was rape and like one of the above posters, I didn't know how to defend myself.

Some of his favorite tactics:
Repeatively asking for sex, as in every five minutes or so, getting more and more agressive as time went on.

Not letting me go to sleep until we had sex. Sometimes this involved waking me up around 1am and not letting me go back to sleep. Usually I gave in just to get some rest (8am classes the next day).

Picking a fight because I didn't want to have sex for some reason (wasn't in the mood, was doing homework, tired, etc). Usually this blew up into accusations that I was cheating on him.

Threatened to not let me have contact with my older brother, who was the only family member I had in the area. He often accused me of being "too close" to my brother and sometimes accused us of having an incestuous relationship.

Often threatened suicide. Usually because me not wanting to have sex at that moment meant that I didn't love him.

Threatened to kick me out of our apartment. Nevermind the fact that I was one paying most of the rent.

The phone was in his name and he had the long distance calling disabled so that I couldn't call my "lovers" back home. This was after I began to not give in to his bullsh*t. Having sex with him made him magically trust me again.

Threatened to kill my cat. Ironically, this was the last straw for me. (apparently you I could take the physical/verbal/emotional abuse and be cutting off from my family, but not a threat to my kitty cat. Go figure.)

I know there's more, but this is what I thought of off the top of my head. My point is that there are a lot of ways to force someone to have sex without physically forcing them to.

The verbal coercion sometimes escalated to physical abuse. Yes, he did physically hold me down on more than one occasion.

When I itemize the abuse like that, I have a really hard time understanding why I stayed in that situation for over 4 years.

IndyKat34:

First of all no one is arguing that there all types of victims in domestic abuse situations (men, women, victims of same-sex partnerships, etc.).

I've read the studies that examine both men and women's rates of abuse on their partners. I don't deny that women can be violent towards their romantic partners, but studies of straight statistics don't show the underlying causes of the domestic violence.

The Harvard Medical study you cited even stated as such:

The authors say they have no intention of minimizing the very real problem of serious domestic violence — the classic male batterer. The survey did not cover the use of knives, guns, choking, or burning, and it was not concerned with the kind of situation that can drive a woman to seek shelter outside the home. The view of the authors is that most intimate partner violence should not be equated with severe battering. Domestic disputes that turn physical because of retaliation and escalation do not have the same causes or the same consequences as male battering.

The site you linked on the New Hampshire study doesn't work, but I am curious in how they operationalized violence and control in such a way that men's and women's rates were similar.

You said: I know this may be hard for some of you to accept, but it looks like woman are becoming just as bad as men are.

You again ignore the underlying causes of violence and mistake motivations as being similar.

Finally, your last link was laughable. It plays so fast and loose with statistics that I LOL'ed. This author extrapolates that because one result of 30% of DNA paternity tests showing that the father was not the biological father of a child named in a paternity suit, that UP TO ONE-THIRD OF WOMEN LIE ABOUT WHO FATHERED THEIR CHILD (quote: "The sample size of 300,000+ DNA tests a year suggests that, as an upper limit, 30% of all children are conceived by a man other than the one named by the mother. With ~4 million children now born each year in the United States, 1.2 million men are likely victims of paternity fraud each year.").

I like to look at the results of the paternity tests thusly (because paternity tests really only come about when men are pretty sure their SO's have been cheating): Two out of three men who think their SO's are cheating on them are wrong. That's not a great track record.

Sure, women can lie when it comes to pregnancy and they can do it in order to maintain control within a relationship, which is flat out wrong. However, the vile actions of some women shouldn't negate the experiences of others.

Off-topic, I apologize, but I just read some of the above posts, and, well -- I just don't understand or want to understand why women in the 20/21st century still permit themself to become economically dependent on a man, whether he is their boyfriend or husband, whether she decides to have kids or not. I just see it as 100% abdication of one's power -- in the fantasy, fair-tale, name of delusional-love. And then after reality bites, they complain about how the "man" did this and that, instead of how they put themself into a patriarchy-prison. Some much for the walk down the isle, white wedding dress, and happily ever after guarantee. What, one person above talked about how her husband "would let her have access to his funds" -- and she marry this guy, WOW! I apologize for the 20/20 second guessing. But I only hope none of these women repeated their dependency on a male. Yes, I'm going to be 100% upfront about my bias or opinion as it relates to women choosing to become dependent on males economically, especially to be a wife and/or have kids .... 100% STUPID/DUMB! Now back to the topic .... sorry for that digression.

IndyKat's post reminds me of the people who interject into any discussion of sexual assault the fact that occasionally men are falsely accused of rape. Yes, that's awful. So is domestic violence, whether it's against women or against men. This country certainly needs to have a discussion about the reproductive rights of men, and how we balance them with those of women. But being as how the incidents of women and girls held in abusive relationships, forced into having sex, etc., VASTLY outnumber the cases of victimized men, I think your concern is misplaced.

When I was a kid, I had a doll like IndyKat34--everytime you pulled her string, she said the same thing.

I suggest that Indy take his/her tired, not-based-in-any-shared-non-MRA-reality argument and go elsewhere. Everytime you quote the Harvard study, one smart poster or another picks out that same quote that makes your entire argument moot. Just let it go dude, your argument is a bad one.

One more thing...Kee, almost 90 percent of counties in the U.S. don't have a ingle abortion provider. So, to answer your question...yes, she is.

One more thing...Kee, almost 90 percent of counties in the U.S. don't have a single abortion provider. So, to answer your question...yes, she is.

OneVoice, you cannot be serious. They are about to turn off power here at work to do some construction, so I have to shut off, and I'm sure someone else will come through and tear your argument to shreads, but can I say something? you're 100% STUPID/DUMB.

OneVoice, I found your post incredibly insensitive and offensive. I was in an emotionally abusive relationship for over a year (and I'm pretty sure it would've escalated to physically abusive if I didn't get out of there) and I WAS NOT in the relationship for economic stability or my lovely dreams of wearing a white wedding dress. How offensive! Have you ever spoken to someone in an abusive relationship? Do you even understand what emotional/psychological abuse is? How it works? Do some research before making such idiotic statements next time please.

OK OneVoice, I'll bite.

Why do women enter and stay in abusive relationships? There are many reasons. I know I did not hit all of the reasons, but here's a start.

1. The abuse is usually gradual. I sdidn't knowingly walk into a full blown abusive relationship. The situation degrades over time.

2. Women, especially young women, often do not know how to stand up for themselves. This is not because they are stupid. This is because they have been socialized since birth to be a good wife or stand by their man. We are taught not to make a fuss.

3. Woman are shown poor examples of relationships, from real-life role models to popular culture. In my case, I grew up watching my parent's relationship; my father was often abusive.

4. We are taught that men are providers and will take care of things. It is usually not the woman's intent to be helpless and dependent on the man. However, when one spouse must sacrifise a career, it is usually the woman.

5. The abuser often makes the victem feel like it's her fault. You make me so mad when you... or you make me so jealous when you... This is part of the emotional abuse.

6. The abuser destroys the victem's self esteem. The victem feels like she is unlovable and deserves to be treated this way. See above.

7. The abuser isolates the victem and cuts off her support system. This can be done in subtle ways. In my case, my ex-boyfriend would get very jealous when I would spend time with my firends and not him. In order to cut down on fights, I spent less and less time with friends.

OneVoice, you do realize that a number of the people here have been in the situation described? How about instead of hauling off with the insults, you ASK -- politely -- some of the posters who've commented about being in an abusive relationship why they relinquished control to someone else? Or better yet, read up on the issue yourself.

While you're at it, read the comments policy.

And if you're planning to respond to criticism with a lot of rude mockery, "LOL"ing, and protests that you're "just having some fun", as you have previously, please be advised that that's not going to fly here.

"OneVoice, I found your post incredibly insensitive and offensive."

My first answer. I don't care how YOU experienced my opinion. It was direct at YOU personally. It was my political opinion.

My second answer -- yes! I come from an abusive single-parent father home, where I was almost murdered four times, in a manner of abuse one would describe as tortue. My siblings and my mother (who is still alive today) also experienced this abuse. And I saw such abuse daily by other men (and law enforce) and others in my community, and I've also studied it in college, undergraduate and graduate level, and dialogue about such my female public interest lawyer friends/associates who do this work.

So, no, I'm not an expert. I did not write any books. I don't intend to be mean to YOU personally. And my post tried to qualify my political opinion with (I'm apologize about 20/20 second guessing people -- because I knew someone was going to take my comments out of context).

Enough said! Get some professional counseling if you cannot deal with opinions that you disagree with given your experience. I'm not being cold. I'm just not here to hold your hand, give you clinical therapy, or self-censor myself based on some impossible assumption of who might be subjectively offended or sensitive. I agree we all should strive to be understand. But millions of people blog in cyberspace and I suspect thousand on this site. There is would simply be impossible to accommodate or speculate or know what each and every persons values, life experiences and sensitivities are about a particular opinion I have. So I asssume, perhaps wrongly, that we all come here with "thick-skin".

Ladies,

I appreciate your critque. Some of you have made some assumptions about what I know or have not experienced or witness. I do understand some being upset. Again, my political opinion was not direct at them, personally. It was my political opinion -- and not one based on some sexist assumptions, or lack of reading, or any of those assumptions. How any of you (or other women and men) deal with their abuse is their personal business. How I deal with mine, and those persons I know, is ours. We all have our respective different life experiences and opinions. I don't get upset when persons talk about abuse, even though I have been and my mother and my sisters and other women. Offline and online, hundreds of persons have opinions or convictions that don't speak to my life or those I know. I let them have their opinion. They don't have to speak to my experiences. They don't have to have politics that comform to some presumption of how to talk to or interact with abuse persons. I don't get into that power dynamic, or expectation, or projection. So, can we leave this one alone, ladies.

I sigh in disappointment when I see reports like these, not because of the horror reported but because the study and report is so sloppy that the credibility of those speaking out about the problem of rape is damaged by stuff like this.

Here's the link to the actual report, a two page "fact sheet". It took a couple of clicks on links to get back to it. http://www.knowmoresaymore.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/child-trends-forced-sexual-intercourse-fact-sheet.pdf

Of the 18% who reported "not voluntary" for intercourse, 32% reported "threatened with physical hurt" and 61% reported "pressured by words/actions without threats". At most then this review would support a 6% rate of forced sexual intercourse which would be accepted by reasonable people. That's still a very high and very bad number, but it's not the 1 in 5 reported in the headline.

Verbal abuse in a relationship is a bad and demoralizing thing and verbal "coercion" short of threats of physical harm is also bad. But neither falls to the level of rape as most reasonable people would accept or define the term.

I find OneVoice offensive. And quite possibly, a troll. I request she/he be banned.

"Some of you have made some assumptions about what I know or have not experienced or witness."

I'd say you are making a lot of assumptions about people yourself, wouldn't you?

I find MariLove offensive. And quite possibly, a troll. I request she/he be banned.

"Some of you have made some assumptions about what I know or have not experienced or witness."

I'd say you are making a lot of assumptions about people yourself, wouldn't you?

"As far as reproductive coercion goes, looks like it swings both ways in the form of paternity fraud. Michigan Family Independence Agency statistics indicate that 30 percent of the paternity tests performed in Michigan exclude the tested man from being the child's biological father. The American Association of Blood Banks, which evaluated 280,000 paternity tests in 1999, found similar numbers. Currently 1.6 million men are forced to pay child support for children that aren't theirs"

Bullshit!

The myth behind paternity fraud
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) ^ | 30 June 2005 | Adele Horin

Posted on Wednesday, July 06, 2005 3:38:08 PM by Lorianne

Widespread paternity fraud is an urban myth - that is the finding of research published today which says claims up to 30 per cent of Australian men had not fathered children they believed to be theirs are wide of the mark.

A more realistic figure is 1 to 3 per cent, according to Michael Gilding, a professor of sociology at Swinburne University.

"The most outlandish figures have been quoted," he said. "But they have their origin in some very questionable research."

When news broke that the federal Health Minister, Tony Abbott, was not the biological father of his alleged son, Daniel, many authorities, including obstetricians, testing laboratories, and newspapers claimed between 10 and 30 per cent of Australian men might make a similar discovery about their own children.

But Professor Gilding, director of the Australian Centre for Emerging Technologies, said the state of anxiety being promoted about paternity was silly.

"It's a product of the alienated fantasies of fathers' rights activists and the commercial interests of the paternity testing industry," he said.

Prompted by the repeated assertions of widespread paternity fraud in the aftermath of the Abbott drama, Professor Gilding undertook an exhaustive review of available international research. It is published in the latest People and Place, the journal of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University.

He found studies based on genetic testing of families for medical conditions such as cystic fibrosis consistently showed a non-paternity rate of no more than 3 per cent in Western countries. These studies provided valuable evidence of the incidence of non-paternity in general because the genetic testing was unrelated to paternity issues.

As well, several representative surveys of sexual practice in Western countries consistently showed high rates of monogamy in marriage. For example, in the 2001 Australian sex survey of 10,173 adults, of those who had been in a regular relationship for at least a year, only 2.9 per cent of women had more than one sexual partner. The survey pointed to differences in socio-economic groups with 6.5 per cent of women with household income of less than $20,000 having had more than one partner compared to 2.2 per cent of women on more than $52,000.

Dr Gilding dismissed figures from laboratories that specifically test for paternity as being small, unrepresentative samples where the issue of fatherhood was already in question.

virago, your last paragraph demonstrates Gilding is talking about a different number than the paragraph you criticize. Gilding is talking about overall paternity, testing for various reasons even when paternity is not an issue. The first paragraph is talking about percentages where the paternity is being tested because it is contested. Neither number shocks me.

kaylagrrl, From your comment comparing me to one of your dolls you played with as a kid, sounds like you have a lot of hatred in you. Maybe the truth hurts a little.

"Verbal abuse in a relationship is a bad and demoralizing thing and verbal "coercion" short of threats of physical harm is also bad. But neither falls to the level of rape as most reasonable people would accept or define the term."

While my cynical side tells me you may be correct, the fact that "most reasonable people" would not define these things as rape speaks more to the fact that our society condones sexual violence than anything else.

I have been in the type of situation this study describes. Similarly to VT Idealist, my partner:
systematically isolated me from my friends and family,
used the money I earned so that I had no savings,
accused me of cheating if I did not want to have sex,
told me that if I did not have sex when he wanted I did not love him,
acted as though making sex pleasurable for me was an unrealistic burden, repeatedly (every five minutes) harassed me to have sex with him when I had already said no,
and, here's the kicker:
when I had repeatedly said no to sex he responded with, "just let me try a little, maybe you'll change you're mind," and proceeded to climb on top of me anyway. Because he had emotionally and verbally abused me constantly, and because I cared about him (and was at least slightly afraid of him) I didn't fight back. I just laid there miserably, trying to block out what was happening, until I couldn't stand it any more and pushed him off. He usually proceeded to act hurt like there was something wrong with me for not "changing my mind" and liking it.

I was never held down or overtly threatened with violence, but I most certainly was raped. When I told my current partner about what I had experienced (in much less definite terms than I have used here) he immediately recognized it for what it was. The fact that "most reasonable people" might not is just sad.

middleageliberal, I think your missing the point. The paragraph that I criticized states that 30% of "contested" paternity tests exclude the men being tested as the biological father of said children. The father's rights groups try to spin this 30% number to the general population. In other words, they wants us to believe that 30% of men IN THE GENERAL POPULATION are victims of paternity fraud. This is what indyKat34 is trying to say.

The father's rights group also like to spin that all the men being tested are angry fathers who have been misled by evil wives and girlfriends into believing they were the biological fathers of their children when they were not. However, not all men who are tested fit into this category. A woman may have alleged several men as possible fathers, and testing was done to sort out the men who were not the fathers. These men are not being misled. Many men are accused and tested because a man who is NOT excluded as the father is alleging the mother had multiple sex partners as part of his defense. Sometimes, men are tested because of legal presumption. In other words, a woman may list the correct father, but because she is married to someone else, the legal presumption is that her husband is the father, and the husband is tested to exclude him, None of these cases have to do with "paternity fraud". If anything, these are cases of paternity testing being used to find the correct father to avoid naming the wrong guy as bio-dad in the first place.
For FRA's to claim that all men who are excluded as the father in the 30% of contested paternity test are victims of paternity fraud is midleading and dishonest. On top of this, they are trying to say that 30% of men in the general population are victims of paternity fraud based on a skewed sample. That's why Gilding rejected figures from laboratories who do paternity testing. These laboratories don't always know why a particular man is being tested, and they only want to make a buck. It's just another way of saying that women are nothing but a bunch of lying sluts. On the other hand, 70% of the contested paternity tests correctly identified the man being tested as the biological father, and FRA's can't get around that fact. Gilding's idea of looking at genetic testing for medical reasons in families to get accurate data on paternity fraud in the general population is more realistic. These figures are 1-3%, and the FRA's just can't deal with it.

There are plenty of trolls on this thread.

I, for one, am surprised the numbers for assault aren't higher.

I've only ever met *one* woman out of 10,000 or so who claimed not to have been harassed. I'm guessing it should be the same for sexual assault.

I was sexually assaulted at *least* 15 times in my life, not including sexual harassment, and I am *not* a fashion model. So how do you explain it???

I'm *very very* sure the numbers are *much, much* higher and there is a problem in reporting them.

One Voice- if your opinion is truly a political argument, then why does it include calling abused women "stupid"? Your idea of someone's intelligence is subjective, biased, and not based in any fact- so it is a personal attack, and indefensible.

Insulting someone is hard to disguise as discussion, as one is based in ignorance and the other in critical analysis.