I started this research because I was exhausted. Exhausted by the “not all men” response every single time women talk about male violence. Exhausted by being told we’re exaggerating, being dramatic, man-hating. So I decided to look at the actual numbers. What I found was worse than I expected.
As a mother, as a woman trying to build safe community, I needed to know: How many men are we actually talking about? How many men cause physical or sexual harm to women and children? And once I started pulling that thread, I couldn’t stop. Because the overlap between different types of harm, the men who hit their partners AND watch violent porn AND seek out images of children, that overlap is devastating.
Here’s what the research actually says.
In the United States, there are approximately 168.34 million men. Let’s start with the most conservative estimates for physical and sexual harm:
Sexual Violence: Research shows that 57% of American men report perpetrating at least one act of sexual violence since age 14. Nearly 99% of rape and sexual assault perpetrators are male. In child sexual abuse cases, about 90% of abuse is committed by men or male adolescents.
Domestic Violence: It is estimated that 1 in 4 men will use violence against a partner in his lifetime. Males perpetrate 95% of all serious domestic violence.
That would put the initial numbers at 60 Million MEN who cause harm to women and children.
My initial estimate when I was talking to my husband, was that if we actually needed to rid the United States of men that seek out to harm women and children, we would have to hang over 1 million men. He scoffed at this, and told me that was ridiculous, so I went scouring the internet for receipts.
I wanted to prove this wrong. I wanted the research to tell me I was being unfair, exaggerating, or too emotional. But the research didn’t prove me wrong. If anything, it suggested I was being conservative, way too conservative. And these numbers broke something inside of me.
Then I wondered: How many of those 60 million men who commit physical or sexual violence ALSO consume violent or exploitative pornography?
Here is where the math gets even more devastating, because the pornography consumption numbers aren’t a subset of the 60 million. They are a separate, larger, overlapping pool that encompasses the vast majority of ALL men:
General pornography consumption is approximately 60-70% of ALL men consume pornography regularly. That is not 60-70% of violent men. That is 60-70% of all 168.34 million men. That means 101 to 117.8 million men are regular pornography consumers.
Violent pornography makes up 88% of mainstream internet pornography features physical aggression such as slapping, gagging, and spanking. This is mainstream porn content. That means 88% of those 117.8 million, approximately 103.7 million men are regularly consuming content that depicts violence against women.
“Teen” is the #1 most searched-for keyword related to porn in 2022. We’re talking about over 100 million men specifically seeking out young-appearing sexual content. While technically legal when depicting 18-19 year old adults, this normalizes sexual interest in youth.
This picture now depicts that the 96 million men who perpetrate direct violence and the 103.7 million men who consume violent pornography are two overlapping circles. The combined unduplicated number of men either perpetrating direct violence OR consuming violent sexual content is approximately 120-130 million men.
We were told 1 in 4 men. The real number, when we look honestly at who is consuming violent sexual content alongside who is perpetrating direct violence, is closer to 3 in 4 men. Not 1 in 4. Not 1 in 3. Three in four.
This is where it gets unbearable. This is where I wanted to stop researching because the numbers are so horrifying:
CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) consumption is more rampant than I ever imagined. Australian research found that 0.8% of adults intentionally viewed CSAM in the past year. Applied to the US male population, that’s approximately 1.3 million men actively seeking out images of child sexual abuse.
One. Point. Three. Million. Men.
And here’s what makes it worse, when CSAM offenders are studied in treatment programs, 26% had an officially documented contact offense at sentencing, by the end of treatment 85% had disclosed a history of contact offending. That is 1.105 million men who are actively trying to make physical contact with a child to exploit them!!!
Most CSAM offenders didn’t initially seek it out but their involvement progressed over time, often starting with legal pornography. The system is built to get them to be ok with this sort of content.
As a mother, I already knew that men who are doing this, can not be rehabilitated. But I did the research anyway.
The research on treatment effectiveness is devastating, and exactly what I thought it would be. Multiple studies show treatment has minimal to no effect on recidivism rates. When comparing offenders who completed a year or more of treatment versus those who refused treatment, recidivism rates were nearly identical, around 20% for both groups.
Out of 340 million Americans, we’re looking at:
– 96 million men (57%) who self-report perpetrating physical or sexual violence
– over 100 million men who search for “teen” pornography
1. 3 Million Men actively searching or creating through Grok CSAM with 85% of 1.3 million men actively trying to make it happen in the physical is still 1,105,000 men!!!
Who by the end of treatment disclosed they had made or attempted to make physical contact with a child to sexually abuse them.
That’s not men who watched something on a screen. That’s one million, one hundred and five thousand men who have physically put their hands on a child.
And that’s only the 1.3 million we know about through the CSAM research. That’s only the ones who got caught, entered treatment, and then disclosed. The actual number of men who have made physical contact with a child is almost certainly significantly higher because:
Most CSAM consumers are never detected
Most child sexual abuse is never reported
Most reported abuse never results in conviction
Self-report in treatment still undercounts
So 1,105,000 is not the number of men who have sexually abused a child in the United States.
It is the floor.
This is still a conservative number of 120-130 million men are either perpetrating violence, consuming exploitative/violent pornography, or seeking out images depicting children or young-appearing individuals.
We are told in mainstream that it is about 1 in 4 men. But research proves that it is 3 out of 4 men that are not safe for women, children or animals.
Here is something that doesn’t make it into the research papers on male violence, but that every woman who has ever watched her dog react to a man already knows:
Animals know.
Dogs cower, growl, tremble, and back away from men at rates that have no equivalent response to women. This is so well-documented in animal behavior research that it’s considered a standard behavioral pattern. A 2008 study published in Current Biology found that human observers consistently perceived male figures as approaching and female figures as retreating, and animal behaviorists believe dogs share this same perception. Fearful animals are always most afraid of something moving toward them. Men, in their size, their gait, their energy, always appear to be approaching.
Research also shows that male pheromones, chemicals released in higher concentrations by men than women, cause measurable stress responses in animals. Studies in Nature Methods found that mice and rats exhibited significantly elevated stress and decreased pain responses in the presence of human males. Even a T-shirt worn by a man caused this stress response. Not a T-shirt worn by a woman. A T-shirt worn by a man.
Animal behaviorist Patricia McConnell, one of the most respected voices in the field, documented extensively that dogs who have never been abused by men still consistently fear strange men more than strange women. The behavior isn’t about trauma history. It’s about something the animal’s body already knows.
Dogs walk into a kennel full of women and lie down peacefully. Men walk into that same kennel and every dog goes off like a siren.
Animals haven’t been programmed to override that instinct. They haven’t been told they’re overreacting, being dramatic, or being unfair to men. They haven’t been conditioned since birth to smile at the thing their body is telling them is dangerous. They haven’t been taught that politeness matters more than their own survival instincts.
We have.
Women and girls are taught from the time they can understand language to override the exact same instincts that dogs are acting on. Be nice. Don’t be rude. Give him a chance. You’re overreacting. Not all men. He probably didn’t mean it. Don’t make a scene.
The dog that growls at the man is not being hysterical. The dog is being accurate. And the woman who feels that same instinctive wariness, whose body is sending the same signals that animal bodies have been sending for millions of years, she is also being accurate.
The research on 120-130 million men causing harm or consuming violent content doesn’t tell us anything the animal kingdom didn’t already know. It just finally gives us the numbers to say out loud what our bodies have always been telling us: the fear is not irrational. The fear is data.
Yes, technically it’s “not all men.” It’s 58-80% of men, maybe more. But here’s what women experience:
We can not tell by appearance, voice or walking by someone if they are included in 3 out of 4 men!!!!
The 1.3 million men consuming CSAM? They’re not wearing signs. They’re coaching Little League. They’re teaching Sunday school. They’re our neighbors, coworkers, and relatives. The research shows most CSAM consumers remain undetected. The men who’ve perpetrated sexual violence? Most never face consequences, studies show only a tiny fraction of sexual assaults result in conviction.
When 3 out of 4 men are either perpetrating direct violence or consume content that normalizes and fuels that violent. It FEELS like all men because we have no way to know which men are safe. Statistically, is IS almost all men!
We can’t background-check our way out of this. We can’t trust our way out of this. The numbers are too large.
So when we say “men do this” and the response is “not all men,” what you’re really saying is “only 75-80% of men, you’re being hysterical.” But 75-80% means every woman knows multiple men who have caused harm. It means every mother is statistically likely to have her children in contact with men who pose a risk. It means the problem is pandemic-level, not isolated incidents.
I started this research wanting to know how to protect my children and build safe community. What I learned is devastating. We have been severely underestimating the scale of the problem.
Women, men who are not abusing, and children need to start figuring out how to eliminate 120+ million men from spaces.
But until then, they’re already in every space. They’re integrated into daily life. And most will never be identified, never face consequences, never be held accountable.
What we CAN do:
• Believe women and children when they disclose harm
• Stop defending men reflexively with “not all men,” the numbers say it’s enough men that we need to completely restructure how we think about safety
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Build structural prevention into spaces: multiple-adult policies, mandatory reporting, limiting unsupervised access
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Trust the animal instinct, in ourselves and our children. If your body says danger, listen to it. You were not designed to override those signals. (This is actually known to cause auto immune disorders, which are higher in women, for this reason.)
• Teach children comprehensive sex education, bodily autonomy, and consent
• Support survivors and prevention programs
• NO longer accept that we have to keep living like this!!!
• Most importantly: Stop acting like women are hysterical for being afraid. The numbers justify the fear.
For the men who are offended by this, if your first response to reading this is “I would never.” It doesn’t matter. Your defensiveness is not more important than women’s safety or children’s safety.
If you’re actually one of the good ones, here’s what I need from you:
• Stop defending other men reflexively
• Believe women when they tell you about their experiences
• Hold other men accountable: that rape joke isn’t funny, that comment about a teenager’s body isn’t harmless
• Understand that women’s wariness is statistical
• Accept that we can’t tell the difference between you and the 3 out of 4, so we have to be cautious with everyone
Your feelings about being grouped with violent men are valid. But they’re not more important than the actual violence women and children face from those 130 million men, just in the United States. (I will share an article about the world impacts of this in my next article.)
I did this research hoping to be proven wrong. Hoping the numbers would show that women’s fear was overblown, that we were being unfair, that “not all men” was actually a reasonable response.
Instead, I found that the scale of male violence against women and children is even worse than I feared. The overlap between physical violence, sexual violence, violent pornography consumption, and CSAM is staggering. The lack of effective treatment is devastating. The number of men who will never face consequences is overwhelming.
This isn’t a comfortable truth. It’s a horrifying truth. But it IS the truth, backed by research from multiple sources across multiple countries over multiple decades.
When women say “men are doing this,” we’re not being dramatic. We’re being accurate. The numbers say so.
And it’s time we all started acting like it.
If you want to do your own research, here are some prompts you can use to find more information.
• Studies on sexual violence perpetration showing 25-57% of men report at least one act since age 14
• Research showing 1 in 4 men use violence against a partner in their lifetime
• Australian research finding 0.8% of adults intentionally viewed CSAM in the past year
• Studies showing 88% of mainstream pornography contains physical aggression
• Research on CSAM offenders showing 85% disclosed contact offending by end of treatment
• Meta-analyses showing minimal effect of treatment on sex offender recidivism
• Data showing “teen” as the most-searched pornography term in 2022