Bisexual women more prone to sexual assault, says study

It is noted that 50 percent of bisexual women have experienced rape at one point in their lifetime, while approximately 75 percent reported experiencing sexual violence.

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New Delhi: A study reveals that bisexual women are at a higher risk of facing sexual assault in comparison to straight women and lesbians.

As per the study, it was noted that 50 percent of bisexual women have experienced rape at one point in their lifetime, while approximately 75 percent reported experiencing sexual violence. 

Bisexual women become an easy target for perpetrators due to intoxication, such as substance use, hypersexualisation, and biphobic harassment, that further contributes to negative mental health outcomes in the wake of sexual violence. 

"The media, and pornography, in particular, have a long history of depicting women as 'bisexual' while engaging in same sex behaviours for the pleasure of male onlookers. Recently, this experience, which has been labelled 'performative bisexuality', has become common place in bars and at parties where two girls/women engage in same-sex behaviour for the purposes of arousing men/boys," said Nicole Johnson, professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, the US. 

"Many of these women/girl later denounce bisexuality, furthering the 'invisible-hypervisible' experience of bisexuality," Nicole was quoted in an interview to Bisexual.org, a public charity based in the US.

The study also found that the sexual violence enacted against bisexual women within intimate relationships may also result from social construction of bisexual women as especially worthy of distrust, jealousy, and other emotions and perceptions related to uneven power dynamics and hostility within the relationship.

(With IANS inputs)