Jannet Fiskio has met a lot of survivors of sexual crimes through her job as the community educator for the Sexual Assault Support Services in Eugene.
She said she admires victims who are trying to recover from their painful experience and tries to work with them to help them overcome their trauma.
As a community educator, Fiskio not only meets female survivors but males as well.
It may seem difficult to imagine men as sexual victims, but 10 percent of the victims of reported sexual crimes in the United States are men, according to FBI statistics. Fiskio indicated that Eugene’s statistics mirror this trend, saying that about 10 percent of SASS’s clients in the Eugene-Springfield area are men.
SASS provides advocacy for survivors who want to go to hospitals, make police reports or prosecute their assaults in court, Fiskio said. Of the 3,439 client contacts made by SASS, 316 of them were male, according to the SASS annual report for the 1998-99 academic year.
“Most of the men I talked to were sexually abused as children,” Fiskio said. She added that the same is true with female survivors.
“It makes me really sad,” she said. “Sometimes it makes me very angry.”
Fiskio said that she also meets adult survivors, but she feels it’s hard for them to talk about their experiences.
Jan Power, a spokeswoman for the Eugene Police Department, said that two rape cases with men as victims have been reported in the last three years. However, she said that reported cases are very rare because many sex crimes remain unreported. Another factor in the low number of male-rape cases is that male-targeted sexual crimes are not categorized as “sexual offenses,” Power said. Instead, those cases are considered assault cases.
Thirty cases of male sexual crimes were reported last year, according to police officials. These include 17 sexual abuse cases, six cases of public indecencies, three cases of sodomy, one rape case and three other violations. This year, 13 cases have already been reported. These include six sexual abuses, five public indecencies, one unwanted sex penetration and one sodomy charge.
Joan Saylor, the administrative lieutenant of the University’s Office of Public Safety, said that she remembers one case of male rape on campus in the last three years.
“Sexual assault is one of the most unreported crimes,” Saylor said, adding that she agrees with FBI statistics that indicate 10 percent of rape survivors are men.
“More cases are out there that haven’t been reported,” Saylor said.
According to SASS, the majority of male survivors are assaulted by individuals of the same sex, and in most cases, the sexual orientation of both offender and survivor is heterosexual.
Fiskio said that in reported cases, 90 percent of the sexual offenders against men are men, and 92 percent of male offenders are heterosexuals.
While resources for male victims of sexual assault are limited, Fiskio believes this could be changed.
“We’re here to support and educate both men and women,” she said. “We can reform the system to provide better for everyone.”