More men are committing more rapes. Why?
The answer isn't simply pornography or social media. It's the rewards and consequences boys and men see every day – online and in the physical world.
Almost every line on this graph is moving in the wrong direction, and these are just the rapes and sexual assaults reported to police. The real figure is likely to be ten times higher. The explanation for this lies in what men and boys are learning about who matters, what masculinity requires, what choices get rewarded and what gets punished.
Accountability
As I showed in detail in 2024, while the number of rapes and sexual assaults reported to police is increasing, the rate at which people report rape and sexual assault to police is decreasing, as is the conviction rate for the small proportion of men who go to court (updated and expanded data is now stored on my website here).
In other words, more men and boys are raping and sexually assaulting more women and girls and fewer of those men and boys are being held accountable. This problem is bad and getting worse every year.
The Australian Childhood Maltreatment Study (ACMS) found that teenage girls are the ones most likely to be sexually abused (which is clearly demonstrated on the graph) and the person most likely to abuse those girls is a teenage boy. Despite this, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that teenage boys are underrepresented in the few men police proceed against in rape and sexual assault cases.
I’m not an advocate of prison as a solution for men’s abuse of girls and women, particularly for teenagers and young men, but (for now) the legal system is our only means of holding men to account for the choices they make. We do not have any other options, not even for boys who are too young to give up on and too old to not be held accountable. All we have is the legal system and even the Australian Law Reform Commission agrees that it is clearly failing.
Men and boys know this. They have learned that sexual conquests win status and as long as they stay away from the rape myth script of “real rape”1 there are rarely any negative consequences for force, intimidation or contempt for women’s consent.
Despite all the Manfluencers wailing about false accusations ruining men’s lives, they know that most men are never going to suffer any consequences for raping or sexually assaulting women and girls. They should, they’re part of the systems that ensure this continues to be true.
All the online nonsense about false allegations of rape proliferates the feeds of boys and young men but it has nothing to do with fear that men will be subjected to malicious lies about rape. It’s about making sure that truthful claims will always be treated as dubious. The denizens of the manosphere create and inflate fear of false accusations to perpetuate the myth that women are the enemy and rape is a lie.
We know this because nowhere in the manosphere - even in its softest parts, where men don’t noisily perform obvious fear and hatred of women - nowhere are the Manfluencers talking about consent. None of them are making sure their followers instinctively, continually check that their sexual partners are enthusiastically consenting. They’re not pointing out the dangerously violent trends in porn that can teach young boys to ignore consent, joy, fun or shared pleasure. They’re not reassuring boys and men that having truly consensual sex is not just easy to do, it’s also a sensual, pleasurable, fun way to have better sex – unless sex is more about achieving dominance and conquest than sexual pleasure. And this is sadly, egregiously, horrifically, too often the view of sex in spaces that define manhood as a demonstration of power and domination.
Masculinity isn’t like climbing a mountain. No one arrives at the top of Mt Manhood and gets to just sit down and rest. Nor can they climb back down that mountain and take their manhood achievement with them. Proving masculinity credentials to other men is a Sisyphean task and they never get to relax, not the men judging each other’s masculinity and certainly not the men attempting to prove it. In this view of manhood, sex is currency that buys masculinity points. Women might be the objects of sexual aspirations, but other men are the motivation.
In sex, when desire is about power rather than pleasure, consent becomes an obstacle not a pathway to fulfilment.
The rewards of rape – or at least of staying silent about rape
The always brilliant Soraya Chemaly recently published an essay on the moral injuries men and boys do to themselves by nurturing contempt for women (it’s a long piece but definitely take the time to save and read) What Teenage Boys Already Know: What’s a Little Rape Compared to a Man’s Potential? She explains how boys are taught from childhood that contempt for women wins respect from other boys and men. It’s a badge of manhood while “defending a girl’s or woman’s humanity brings real risks, of excommunication or being considered weak, effeminate, or untrustworthy”.
At five or six, this might look like a boy being mockingly told to “stop crying like a girl” or shamed for clinging too closely to his mother. At eight or nine, it’s the quiet or sensitive boy bullied or teased for playing with girls. By 11 or 12, it’s the boy who’s immersed in games and family films where female characters are typically depicted as sexualized prizes, sidekicks, or nagging obstacles to men’s self-actualization. At 13, the same boy might belong to a group chat where friends have created a deepfake of a classmate or teacher, and even though he knows it’s wrong and doesn’t share it, he says nothing and stays in the chat. By 17, around the time a popular athlete on the high school team is accused of assaulting a girl, his looking away and ignoring emotional discomfort are easy and familiar.
As an adult, this learned contempt can be as simple as making or ignoring throwaway comments on a social media post. These are a few responses I found in less than five minutes of skimming #malefeminist on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. I could list hundreds. I chose five.
Bruv’s a cuck
Did your wife’s boyfriend whip you til you said this?
I know a homosexual when I see one
How low are your testosterone levels bro
Free tampons for this bleeding c**t
Shame is the punishment for men who believe women, support everyone’s liberation from the confines of rigid gender roles or recognise the reality of men’s violence. Specifically, shamed masculinity. Men are trained to fear rejection of their manhood by other men far more than they fear anything women might do to them.
The old quote about men being afraid women will laugh at them while women are afraid men will kill them might be true but it doesn’t recognise that men are far more afraid that other men will laugh at them - and then kill them - than they are of anything a woman might do.
When I was doing the research for my book on teaching consent in schools and preschools, I lost count of the time I saw boys performing masculinity for each other. They never even bothered to glance at the girls for their reaction.
One teacher told me about playing the Stand Up Sit Down game with grade five students. Sit down if you love brussels sprouts. Stand up if you like maths homework. The kids jumped up and down giggling and calling out their disgust at sprouts and homework. Stand up if you love Taylor Swift. Most of the girls stood, murmuring joyfully to each other about the Eras Tour. The boys threw themselves flat on the ground, writhing on their stomachs and clutching the carpet. They were making loud vomit noises and yelling out their disgust, eyes on elastic to make sure the other boys were noting their consummate rejection of girlish fandom.2
Robust data shows boys start enacting sexual violence in childhood. It continues throughout adolescence and into adulthood. It starts in preschool with gendered play, turns into sexual harassment in primary school that’s too often waved away as “jokes” and it culminates in rape during secondary school. There are rarely any negative consequences for the boy who committed the rape. Socially, academically, legally and personally, there is no price for him to pay. The girl he raped lives a very different life.
When I was writing the consent book I heard too many stories about boys sharing documents rating their female classmates from unfuckable to rapeable. On very rare occasions the boys were suspended, in one case that made the media they were expelled. But far more typically they got a bit of a scolding. Sometimes they might have had to go to a masculinity session with a guest speaker implicitly or explicitly reinforcing the belief that poor sad men are victims of women’s growing freedoms - ideas culled from the manosphere and spread over their worldview like mouldering peanut butter on toxic toast. But they don’t have to apologise, let alone make restitution to the girls and gender diverse people they’ve hurt. They don’t even need to acknowledge that pain. They absolutely don’t have to answer to police or courts. They don’t have to do anything at all.
Why does this matter? Apart from the searing injustice that so many men and boys are heedlessly causing such pain to women, girls, non-binary people and even other men, the lack of accountability is contributing to the increasing rates of sexual violence. Men and boys can see the rewards of committing rape outside the “real rape” script. Even the men who find rape disgusting know they won’t be punished for ignoring it but there will be a high price to pay for speaking up.
Why would they change?
I’ve had to change the comment settings for this post because I don’t have the time or patience to monitor all the comments flooding in from angry manbabies who can’t cope with women having space and confidence to write about their ideas and expertise. So, if you want me to waste ten seconds of my time to block you, you’ll have to pay me for it.
AI declaration: I do not use AI for writing or research. I do use ChatGPT occasionally to find research papers (academic databases search engines are rubbish) and for proofreading because I hate typos and without an editor my writing is full of them. Mostly I stay away from using AI for writing because the few times I tried it the results were so incomplete and unreliable that it ended up being faster and better to do it myself. I’m told AI has improved significantly since then, but I’ve chosen to not explore this because I don’t want to be tempted away from the complex imperfection of my own thoughts, voice and analysis.
I have sometimes used AI to create images, and they are all labelled as such. Graphs and data are all my own work from spreadsheets I create myself and data I download from reliable sources such as the ABS.
The ‘real rape’ script says it’s only rape when a pure, innocent girl is attacked at night in a public place by man she does not know. He is an immediately recognisable monster motivated by overwhelming lust for her beauty. He uses physical force to penetrate her vagina with his penis. She screams, fights back and receives visible physical injuries. After the rape, her attacker flees, and she immediately reports the rape to police, where her story is taken seriously, her injuries are documented, her attacker is identified, and the case quickly proceeds to trial. She cries every time she talks about the rape but is never angry, vengeful, or numb. Tears are the only sign of trauma she ever displays. From the very first report to police right through to the cross examination at trial, she remembers, in precise chronological order, all the details of the attack and this recollection is unwavering regardless of time or circumstance.
Anything that deviates from this script means it wasn’t a ‘real rape’ and the victim becomes the suspect. Not only is her credibility diminished and the devastation of being raped erased by these deviations, but her alleged rapist becomes the object of sympathy. If she’s not a pure young girl and it wasn’t a real rape, she must be a vindictive liar. She is getting back at a good man who rejected her lewd advances, or she’s after the buckets of cash the victimised men pay bad women to reclaim their good name, or she’s hiding her immoral activities from the judgement of more worthy observers.
I’ve written more detail about rape myths, the “real rape” script and how they contribute to men’s belief that rape is allowable here.
This is an edited version of one of the stories from my book about consent education, which includes many anecdotes from teachers, students and parents. To protect the anonymity of everyone involved the details of these stories are mixed together to produce composites that are true but cannot be recognised. This story might sound like something you remember or a moment you think you recognise or ever something that included your child. It is not.
I do support prison for men & boys who SA women & girls. It's a violent crime & needs to be treated as such.
That real rape scenario is such bullshit. A politically constructed bullshit.