Male Rape, City News Service, October 30, 2002.

The leader of a Los Angeles-based group criticized the FBI today for failing to include male rape victims in recently released violent crime statistics.

Lara Stemple, executive director of Stop Prison Rape, said the approach used in the FBI's annual report trivializes male victims. She called on the government to revise the report categories to include the rape of men as a violent crime.

The group said studies have shown one out of 10 male inmates is a rape victim.

"If any other group in society was so blatantly excluded from crime statistics, we would hear an enormous outcry," Stemple contended.

Victims suffer physical and long-term psychological harm, and may contract HIV, Stemple said.

But unlike many state penal codes that use a gender-neutral approach to rape, the national crime report defines forcible rape as, the "carnal knowledge of a female forcibly against her will."

Stemple's group said the categories in the FBI's Uniform Crime Report were created in 1929.

"It's not 1929 any more," she said. "And Americans shouldn't be given crime statistics compiled with 1929's assumptions about rape and gender."