New Jersey Judge Bruce Gaeta has decided to ignore reality in favor of his own Van Halen-inspired fantasies, and has refused to sentence a teacher convicted of child rape to prison time on the grounds that no harm was done. According to the Judge, when 43 year old teacher Pamela Diehl-Moore sexually exploited a seventh grade boy in 1999, It’s just something between two people that clicked beyond the teacher-student relationship. He then showered us with the further insight that I really don’t see the harm that was done and certainly society doesn’t need to be worried [NY Times].

Boys have been raised from birth to think of sexual aggression and sexual violence as being something that men do to women, that men cannot be victims. As a peer educator, I’ve had male groups laugh out loud when we made our perfunctory statement that there might be survivors of sexual assault in the audience (in fact, according to the CDC and National Institutes of Justice’s National Violence Against Women Survey, about 1 in 33 men is a rape survivor).

So when men are the victims of sexual assault, we either glibly mock them — as in the case of the sexual torture of men in prison (as well as the increasing fashion for jokes about sexual abuse by priests) — or else pornographize the sexual abuse, in the case of the abuse of boys by older women. The idea expressed is that somehow child rape, which we wouldn’t hesitate to condemn if it were an older man and a younger girl, or an older man and a younger boy, suddenly becomes the fulfillment of every boy’s fantasy when it’s an older woman and a younger man. What the commentator really means is that it is the fulfillment of his own pornographic fantasy. These, in turn, are actually nothing more than a pornographic manifestation of mouldering Victorianism—when most boys’ first sexual encounter was an adolescent encounter with an older woman in prostitution, arranged at the behest of the father or another older man to initiate the boy into manhood.

It is long past time that boys recognized that sexual violence is criminal and traumatic even if the survivor has a dick. The overwhelming majority of sexual violence is committed by men, not by older women. And the overwhelming majority of it is committed against women and girls. But as long as boys regard victimhood as simply a conceptual impossibility, we will continue to live in a boy culture that ignores or laughs at sexual violence. Not only does this bit of ideological flotsam re-victimize male survivors, whose suffering is laughed at or salaciously leered at by older men; but it also harms our ability to seriously deal with sexual violence against women, since boys simply dismiss it as a women’s issue and refuse to acknowledge that sexual violence is a vicious violation of the human rights which all of us, of every gender, share in common.

• GT 2001-08-08 Jason Mallory writes on the rape of men in prison
• GT 2001-09-30 Terrorism Against Women in Colorado, judge gave convicted batterer 1 night in jail
• GT 2001-05-17 Seattle SuperSonics forward receives only 15 days in jail for attempted rape
• GT 2001-03-11 and GT 2001-03-12 Faux Leftists make excuses for Lionel Tate’s savage murder of a six-year-old girl