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Written by WiG
Feb 21, 2012
An attention-getting ad campaign encouraging survivors of male rape to come forward debuted this week in London subway stations.
SurvivorsUK’s public service announcements say "Real Men Get Raped" and show a nail piercing a rugby ball.
The posters went up in 140 locations and will remain in place during the Six Nations rugby tournament, according to a report in the New York Daily News.
Spokesman Michael May said, “We’ve chosen to use an alpha male sport in our advertising to challenge assumptions about the type of men who get raped. It’s just as likely to be a rugby player as a librarian, a suited city banker as a hooded gang member. And we hope that by challenging our innate assumptions about the identity of male victims, we can make it even fractionally easier for a male rape victim to ask for help.”
In London, one man every hour is the victim of a sexual crime, according to SurvivorsUK.
But at most, 11 percent of male victims report the attacks, the website malehealth.co.uk reported.
“Males are taught from a very early age that they should be ‘strong’ and ‘in-charge,’” Kim Etherington, a professor at the University of Bristol, was quoted as saying in the Daily News. “To be successfully masculine is to be sexually potent, competitive with other males in sexual matters, and dominant with sexual interactions. Being raped challenges and negates all these preconceptions.”
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