ABSTRACT
The visibility of male-dominated criminal violence differs substantially from culture to culture. Accordingly, a perception of masculinity and male dominated violence as monolithic categories is misleading. Criminology has a record of ignoring gender. When gender was raised in theorizing, the fact that women commit fewer crimes of a violent nature than men has resulted in binary and/or essentialist notions' of male and female. The traits of sexual assault demonstrate that rape is a practice linked to specific frameworks of gender relations in which issues of hegemonic masculinity are transformed, or at stake. Rape has to do with male power but in more varied and complicated ways than the radical view has put it in early theorizing. Unsubstantiated claims about the ubiquity of rape and rapists in Japan need to be taken with care. Indeed, the most explicit critics agree that Japan's streets are safer for women than those in Western countries.
