I recently read an article about why it was legal for men to be raped in the UK. Obviously this statement intrigued me, being a law student, as I was fairly certain that there was something not quite right about it.
Now, there is no such thing as male 'rape' by a woman because under section 1 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003a person commits an offence if "he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person with his penis". Obviously women do not have penises and therefore cannot rape a man and rape therefore is an offence that can only be committed by men.
However there is an offence under section 4 of the very same act headed "Causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent" which criminalises causing another person to engage in sexual activity without consent and if that activity involved penetration of another's body by the victim's penis. This to me seems to mean that if a woman forced a man to have sex with her then she could be convicted under this section which carries the same sentence as rape, but the offence doesn't have the same name as if a man had had sex with a non-consenting woman.
This article does mention this however. It points out that from a moral standpoint forced sexual activity in the sense I have mentioned in the previous paragraph is wrong but not legally. This may be so as the stigma that comes with the word rape is much greater than that which comes with the lengthy name that is included in the act. But why does this mean that we can't call it rape? It's basically the same offence, but the name is different because when the word 'rape' was coined it either described a man forcing himself upon a woman or a type of plant. It all seems very unnecessary to change the legal terminology when the offences carry the same punishment when colloquially it would most likely be referred to as rape anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that there is some argument for the changing of the name. But I also think that given the fact that most victims don't really want to talk about the event as shown in this article, most men would be absolutely fine with it being called one thing legally and another thing outside of court. It's hard to believe that anyone would underestimate the seriousness of such an event. Many would treat it in the same way as if the roles were reversed. All of the negative feelings would be aimed at the attacker, in this case the woman, and all of the sympathy would be given to the victim, in this case the man.
The law still makes the act of forcing a man to have sex with a woman against his will illegal. There is no doubt about this. There are many cases of this in the UK and in the USA where the statistics for this offence are added to the statistics for the rape of men which balances out fairly evenly with the numbers for the rape of women. Is there really any issue with the legal name of the offence? After all the punishment of the offence is what matters in my opinion and not the name given to it.
