Dutch Report: Girls Are almost as Bad as Boys
Mar 5th, 2010 | 3 responses
Can girls, do girls, coerce boys into committing sexual acts?
According to a study to be published shortly in a Dutch scientific publication, the answer is “yes.”
As a matter of fact, under the sub-heading, “Girls are just as bad,” the Dutch NRC Handelsblad reports:
The scientists were surprised to find that more than 10 percent of all boys and 8 percent of all girls had ever forced someone to commit a sexual act against their will. “The girls are almost just as bad as the boys,” Hendriks said. “We didn’t expect that. And the numbers we found are far higher than those in earlier studies.”
The Handelsblad is quoting clinical psychologist Jan Hendriks and criminologist Anne-Marie Slotboom who will be publishing the results of their research shortly in the Dutch scientific publication, Tijdschrift voor Seksuologie.
In their report they conclude that one out of ten boys and one out of every twelve girls they interviewed have used sexual coercion at one point.
Their acts varied from forcing a kiss or touching someone to involuntary genital intercourse or oral sex. The scientists also looked whether education and ethnicity, such as Moroccan, Turkish, Antillean or Dutch descent had any influence on such behaviour.
The article goes on to “define” sexual coercion, to comment on previous similar studies (including in the U.S.) , and to provide some specifics on the methodology of the study.
The reason the article got my attention is that when I lived in the Netherlands as a young man, many years ago, such “openness” about sex was rare. How times change.
Also—call me naive, call me “never-been-coerced”—as a man, once a boy, I just can’t believe that girls would so frequently and “brazenly” coerce boys into having sex against their will. I could be wrong. As I said, times have changed.
If interested, please click here.
3 Responses to “Dutch Report: Girls Are almost as Bad as Boys”
Given the very broad definition of sexual coercion, there may be nothing to see here. How in the world can you equate forcing a kiss with forcing genital intercourse (aka “rape”)?
There's not a lot to glean from the article because it lacks any real details. The big gaping hole in the story was a chart listing the questions, and breaking down the “yes” answers by the 3 groups. Just adding up the number of “yes” answers, and thereby equating a coerced hug or kiss with unwanted genital contact may paint a skewed picture.
It doesn't surprise me that girls would have a similar number of incidents as boys — it's pretty well known that girls like sex too (plus they enter puberty earlier), although the cultural narrative tells us that only “bad” girls like sex. What would surprise me would be if the number of girls who used violence or threats as part of their coersion were as high as the number of boys. There's a big difference between stealing a kiss from a boy you like (heck, I would have met that criteria by 8 years old!) and using force or physical intimidation to get someone to kiss/sleep with/touch you.
I dunno. There are some sexually aggressive women, but I don't worry about getting gang raped at knife point walking through a parking lot at night like women have to.
Through hazy memory, the worst “coersive” experience would have been a woman who reached out for a crotch grab on a city sidewalk. I'm fairly sure most women wouldn't have to work as hard as I just did to recall an experience of unwanted touching.
The study seems hard to believe if it compares apples to apples. If it compares kisses to rapes, well maybe they get similar numbers, but it's apples and oranges.