One reason it’s hard to know how many rapes are reported is just trying to figure out what gets reported as rape.

And isn’t that girl just horrible? How could she not have bravely stood up to those vicious, agressive, deranged, murderous rapists? What was she, chicken?

So while in all of our eyes what this young man went through was a brutal rape, the law of the county in Texas where it occured is likely different. And unless the AP journalist wants to be sued by the attacker’s family and shunned by the police department for false reporting, the journalist has to use the legal terms employed for that county.

Like Joni said, the charge was aggravated sexual assault, so it would have been perfectly accurate to say that the victim had been “sexually assaulted.” As with the Duke case, the media has been using “rape” even though one of the actual charges is “sexual offense” because “rape” is for penile-vaginal forced sex and “sexual offense” is for forced penetration with an object.

I think one of the media biases is that when a man is sexually assaulted, it’s almost always with anal penetration, so “sodomy” comes to mind. Whereas, when a woman is assaulted, regardless of whether the penetration was vaginal, anal or oral, and whether it was a penis or other object, it’s easier for members of the press to conceptualize it as “sexual assault” or “rape.”

So while in all of our eyes what this young man went through was a brutal rape, the law of the county in Texas where it occured is likely different. And unless the AP journalist wants to be sued by the attacker’s family and shunned by the police department for false reporting, the journalist has to use the legal terms employed for that county.

Standardization of these terms, and definitions of these terms in stories would be very beneficial to the reading public, but editors don’t want to waste space with things like that since space = money.