Being a victim of rape and sexual crime is not a competition. When media coverage on such crimes is partial and does not reflect the whole picture however, it becomes an important justice to name a truth.
Over the last few, days headline news in a wide variety of media has reported on the case of Zhenhao Zou a 28-year-old found guilty of drugging and raping 10 victims. He is thought to have at least 40 more.
This recent case is not dissimilar to another quite recent case that of Reynhard Sinaga who was convicted of 159 sexual offences of which 136 were rapes. Further evidence indicated that he had 206 known victims.
Both of these extremely dangerous men have an extraordinary range of common factors, which even a superficial reading of the cases reveals. There is one factor however that is different. All the victims of Zou were women. All the victims of Sinaga were men.
It is not possible to ignore the vast difference in the victim statistics. The media coverage on Zou however has done just this. Zou is being portrayed by some as the ‘most prolific rapist’ and by others who hint of wider picture by referencing him as ‘being among the most prolific rapists. This distorted reporting erases the male victims of Sinaga and in so doing plays directly into the massive problem we have in the UK which is the failure to recognise, name and be pro-active about the vulnerability of men, especially when that vulnerability is linked to men’s experience of rape and sexual assault.
I have worked with many hundreds of rapists and sexual predators. I worked on the Sinaga case for several months both pre and post sentence. I come to know his thinking well and like many others who commission crimes against men, he was very well aware that the targeting of his victims would be relatively easy, that they would be unlikely to report their victimisation and would quite likely not be believed if they did. All because of the fact that they were men. He was right. Many of his victims did not report and were only discovered because he had filmed them. Many were never identified, and many exist that we do not know about, of that I am certain.
The case of Zou has been and remains in the spotlight now for several days. That was not the case with Sinaga. It was headlining news on conviction in some media only. This failure to recognise and name male vulnerability comes at a very high cost. Perhaps the most horrendous cost is the continued silencing of men who experience sexual crime and evidenced in the fact when research tells us that on average it takes men 25.6 years before they tell anyone about their experience. Important then to recognise that for the year 2022 the crime survey identifies 275,000 sexual assaults against men. What would that figure be we must ask if men were not so conditioner to remain tragically silent so for so long.
I say all this whilst working to highlight the failure to recognise, investigate and respond pro-actively to the vulnerability of men who go missing. In a significant number of cases, the police response in particular can only be described as beyond woeful. It is markedly different, in the most unhelpful of ways, when compared to the approach applied when women go missing.
I am not competitive. All victims are victims and their individual experienced cannot be devalued statistically. But all victims regardless of gender are deserving of justice and for male victims of sexual crime that, if the media is anything to go by, is absolutely not happening.
Br Stephen Morris fcc
