About eight times a day, a man, woman or child is forcibly raped in Pennsylvania. Or, more precisely, is reported to have been raped, this being the least reported of crimes.

From the State Police's bureau of research and development we know that nearly 10 percent of the more than 3,000 reported victims of rape in 1999 were male. Most were under 18; 90 were 10 and younger.

Adolescent boys. Vulnerable boys. Boys who likely will drag the scars of that experience with them as they stumble toward adulthood, just as surely as their unfortunate sisters who were sexually assaulted. Rape isn't about sex. It's about the dehumanizing abuse of power and privacy.

Except in the eyes of the FBI.

For reasons both sexist and bureaucratic, the FBI continues to employ a narrow, anachronistic definition of rape in what is known as the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), the annual compilation of national crime statistics. Rape simply is "the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will."

All the variations of rape outside that definition - rape of males, rape committed against the victim's will but without force, statutory rape - are downgraded in the UCR to a lesser, less-reported category of crime. As a result, says Carol E. Tracy of the Women's Law Project in Philadelphia, "the public at large really doesn't have any idea of the extent of sex crimes in this country."

Tracy and the Law Project have begun campaigning to broaden this definition. This week, they sent draft letters to sexual-assault coalitions across the country, outlining the consequences of the problem. They hope to garner signatures and support before presenting a final argument to the FBI in mid-June.

Although she doesn't hold out much hope that the FBI will act quickly, criminologist Jane Siegel says many of her peers consider the UCR definition woefully inadequate. "This is not just semantics, it's a significant issue," says Siegel, assistant professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University in Camden.

"It continues to reinforce the image of rape as that specific act defined in the UCR," she says. "If the police don't believe a woman was raped if she wasn't beaten, it makes the task of sensitizing the police all the more difficult."

It has also created anomalies within the UCR. Rape data from Illinois are not included in the UCR, for instance, because that state refuses to adhere to the FBI's narrow definition and reports all rapes as rapes.

Let it be said that this is an issue of reporting, not prosecution. In Pennsylvania and most other states, rape is more broadly defined and gender-neutral - which is why Harrisburg records both male and female victims. But Tracy argues that the narrower FBI definition sends a dampening message to police departments: These other sorts of rape aren't as significant. They're not worth quick responses or aggressive investigation.

Maybe they're not really rape.

The injustice of this message is staggering. A recent federal report found that 31 percent of victims of sexual assault under age 6 were male. Yet the FBI would count sexual assaults on those boy-victims as Other Sex Crimes, a less important category reported only when an arrest has been made.

The UCR also lumps rapes committed by blood relatives in that lesser category, and rapes in which there is no evidence of physical force. Do we really expect that the most vulnerable of victims - children, and the mentally or physically disabled - are able to resist sexual assault? Why should the crimes against them be discounted simply because these victims have no physical bruises?

This is hardly the first time the UCR has been criticized. In the 1980s, the FBI included a broader, more realistic definition of rape in a new system for gathering crime data called the National Incident-Based Reporting System. But the new system is so detailed and complex that now, more than 15 years later, it is used only in small communities. "For a department of our size," says Philadelphia Deputy Police Commissioner Charles Brennan, "it will take millions of dollars and years of time to move in that direction."

The much more sensible option, one that Brennan advocates, is to expand the UCR's definition of rape to make it more consistent with state and local law enforcement standards. Keep the old definition, too, if that helps to track trends and comparisons. But for the sake of accuracy and fairness, the UCR, now more than 70 years old, must be brought into the 21st century.

Centuries ago, rape was defined not as a crime against a person, but as a crime against property. The underlying message was clear: Women were property, to be protected from defilement from those outside the family, and men were, well, never raped.

Our concepts of sexuality, privacy and personhood have advanced since then. Time for the FBI to catch up.

Copyright 2001 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc

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