I am much more likely to believe them if they bring it up in context where they are not hating on women or trying to make excuses for their own actions.

I mean if a boy or man is talking about it for the purpose of suggesting new safety measures or filing a suit or something sure I will believe him. Never seen that before but I would.

What I have seen: men on the internet talking about it as a pretext for why they hate women. Men bringing it up specifically when confronted with their pedophilia / assaults / other very bad sexual behavior, as a way to get pity. I don’t believe them when they say it like this. Men lie all the time

I dated someone who said he was raped by his babysitter when he was 9. I was horrified. Later he said a woman in her fifties picked him up on the street when he was 14 and took him to a motel. Then he said his mother would come on to him when he was a teenager.

By this point, I'd noticed he was a bullshitter and storyteller about other things. But I still couldn't believe he would brazenly lie about that until he added me to his collection of women who did him wrong. He didn't accuse me of rape, just emotional abuse, but it was enough to get women consoling him and turning on me. Later I heard he did the same thing to his wife. Everyone sided with him in their divorce.

Men learn that claiming abuse excuses their own behavior- cheating, inability to commit, sex crimes - and earns women's sympathy. So I am skeptical now because while I think it happens, I simply do not believe there's an army of women molesting little boys which is essentially what men claim. We see other signs of male pedophilia, including CSAM, but we just don't see the same when it comes to women.

People who work with abusive men or with men in marital counseling all discover that most men who say they were abused as kids are lying and were never abused. I think they lie to manipulate and get sympathy, or because it is part of their fantasies.

I’m much more likely to believe a man was abused if the perpetrator was a man or another boy. Pedophiliac women that offend are so rare it’s hard to believe all the claimed abuse especially when so many times it’s wank fodder, like all the tims claiming forced fem abuse by a mother or grandmother. It’s just not credible.

I do always want to believe survivors’ stories. I’ll always believe a man or a boy if he says he was raped by another man. And if a little boy came up to me saying a woman touched him inappropriately, I’d believe him.

But with men talking about their experiences being SA’d by women as young boys it would depend on context… like if they’re talking about how being SA’d affected their self-esteem, or feeling uncomfortable or dirty around their abuser, i don’t see a reason to not believe them.

But men almost only bring up the existence of female sexual abusers in an attempt to silence women from talking about how the vast majority of sexual abusers are men.

I have asked both my brothers why they sexually abused me. One insists he was a victim of SA also, but by older boys. The other says he doesn't think that's true and they were just exposed to lots of pornography at a young age. I believe the second brother and think thr first just wants an excuse.

Years ago, when I was at university, I knew a TIM who told me that when he was 9, his 14 year old sister and a group of her friends raped him over a whole weekend (apparently his parents weren't around). He also said, in a different conversation, that he had "borrowed" this same sister's bras and underwear when he was a little older, and that she "shamed" him for it (Which is pretty mild compared to what I would have done if I found out some dude was in my underwear). My guess is that he had a gross fixation on his poor sister, but I really didn't want to ask too many questions, and I ended up avoiding him.

Most of the time I believe people if they tell me this. Especially if nothing is to be gained by it. I also had a male relative who told me his mother was "inappropriate" with. him as a teenager, and could barely discuss it, and this was late in his life long after she was gone. I believe him 100%. There was no reason to lie, he has no history of abusing anyone, and I think it was about him wanting to finally say something. So it really depends.

I would definitely be suspicious of that crap coming from an abuser when it's used as an excuse. There is no excuse.

I think it happens at the same frequency as women lying about abuse/rape.

Does it happen? Yes. But not very often (and when it does happen I've noticed often other grown men are also involved). Statistically, women just don't commit these kind of crimes at the rate men do.

Mostly I think they lie and use it as a way to excuse their own abusive behaviors and to discredit the feelings and experiences of women.

I’ve never read why does he do that? but I know alot about it. I believe he says in the book that most of the time abusive men weren’t abused themselves and abused men don’t necessarily become abusive or something like that.

I do think some women have sexually abused young boys. But I think the reasons are different from Abusive men , I feel like lots of these women have it in their heads that they are in relationships with these boys. Most of the time when a female teacher is found to be “in a relationship” with a male student, she says that she’s in love with him. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the same for other women that are accused of this.

I also think men always want women to be just as bad as them. Lots of times when a man says he was sexually abused by a woman- I will believe him BUT I think he was abused by a man. Men don’t like to admit the problem is men. It’s easier to say a woman did it. But men also have a problem when a teen boy says he had sex with an older woman , men immediately start congratulating him. So I don’t think they necessarily think it’s abuse. Or it’s only abuse when it’s convenient for them.

Raped? How does a woman rape?

I’ve talked to some men who claim to have been fondled or masturbated by baby sitters. It never occurred to me to disbelieve them. I can imagine that some women might find the lack of fear for their safety appealing and assault a boy. Also, I don’t think we do women and girls, or feminism, any favours by dismissing the possibility of women ever committing any kind of sexual harm.

I also never believe men that have abused women and children when they say they've been molested. Call me callous, I don't care.

I've seen people that are telling the truth, and I've seen the auto-pedophillic self satisfied smirk of a fucking monster. Not hard to tell the difference, but we just have to believe that men aren't inherently evil if not easily led to evil by their dicks. Must be something else. Must be women raping little boys fault and not men being fucking predators. Couldn't be that.

I don't believe them.

My ex-husband told me he was orally raped by a babysitter when he was a toddler. He told me this to explain his BDSM obsession. However, anytime I tried to talk to him about it, he denied he ever told me that.

He was an abusive POS so… on one hand, I could believe it and it helps explain his behavior (abused people abuse people) or he could 1000% be lying because he’s an abusive POS.

I do believe that there are many boys who are molested by older girls or women. I don’t believe that adult women do this to boys at anywhere close to the rate that adult men do it to girls. But I do think it’s common enough that most people would be shocked.

I think it flies under the radar because I don’t think it’s recognized as “bad”, even by the victims, in the same way we recognize it as bad when it happens to girls, but it has happened to several men I know, and I absolutely think it colored the way they interacted with women sexually as they matured.

Whenever men use it as an excuse as to why they do terrible things to women, I am inclined to disbelieve it, because bad men will say anything to get out of trouble. It certainly isn’t acceptable as an excuse. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Very interesting information you've shared.

I briefly dated a guy before he told me he used escorts to help with his sexual trauma from a family friend who forced him to shower with her when he was a child and she an adult.

I never questioned that it happened, but I thought him connecting it to why he abuses women now was disgusting and obviously instantly broke it off with him.

If a grown woman initiates any sexual advances on a boy under the age of consent, then, YES is it's rape.

If he initiates and he's under the age of consent, she needs to be the adult and not engage AND report it immediately to someone higher up in her organization to protect herself.

If he won't take no for an answer and assaults her, she needs to file charges immediately.

I said "it depends" but really I mean "mostly not". I will never discount the concept that someone could be a victim of anybody, and there are women predators out there, but really, it isn't common even slightly to to the level it is claimed.

I voted It Depends.

Women statistically are not as sexually deviant as men, so while it does happen, it's not even close to how often men do it. Not remotely.

At the same time, people don't always tell stories "just for sympathy." Sometimes they are telling the truth and want that truth acknowledged.

Sometimes I talk about my abuse on here to offer people perspective or to explain human behavior to someone who asked why x does y. (People can keep their sympathy. I don't even check my messages on here.)

So is the guy just out for sympathy or is he trying to educate/raise awareness, vent, or express himself when he wasn't allowed to as a child? I would believe him based on those factors.

I have seen a depressing number of instances brought up in circumstances where the focus was not garnering sympathy, but rather things like laughing about fucked up situations that were one's own damn fault, in anonymous situations where women were not assumed to be in the audience.

So yeah, I believe them the same way I would believe women. If he brings it up out of the blue in a way that seems designed to elicit sympathy, I will be wary of him. It may very well have happened, but if he brings it up too early on, I'll assume he's unstable and may hurt me down the line, so keeping a distance is for the better.

Men, and women, generally don't disclose these sorts of things unless they're very close friends. Men even more so, since culturally, men aren't supposed to be 'vulnerable'. I do know people who have disclosed these things to me, and I believe them due to them having proven over a long period of time, that they are trustworthy and not out to get my sympathy.

I've known enough guys who had their first experiences with friends' mothers when they were barely teens (and it happens enough with female teachers and their male students, even though nowhere near as often as the reverse) that I don't immediately discount it.

The guys I know aren't saying it to excuse anything, by the way. They're just talking (yes, my male friends and I have often talked about our sexual histories in group settings) and are often shocked when someone in the conversation tells them dude, that was messed up and legally rape in our jurisdiction.

I had an older dude tell me that his mother did sexually indecent things to him when he was a young boy. For the most part, I'm inclined to believe him, but also reserve some skepticism. As other women have noted, it's a lot to do with the context of the disclosure and if there seems to be credible motivations for lying or creatively misinterpreting facts.

I believe it happens, but so infrequently that I am never going to meet a man that it really happened to and who would tell me all about it. If a man said it to me I'd assume it was a lie.