One in five calls to the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre's 24-hour helpline in the past year were from men, with most reporting child sexual abuse.
The number of people attending counselling and therapy rose by 21 per cent on last year, and more than one in 10 of those counselled were men, according to the centre's figures for the year to June, published yesterday.
The centre's director, Ms Olive Braiden, said a significant factor in the steady increase in males using the centre's services was television programmes on clerical abuse or abuse within institutions, which have triggered memories of childhood abuse.
She said: "Men suffer in exactly the same way as women and recover in the same way. Once they look for help, men are often more assertive than women in following it through."
Almost half of the 7,500 calls to the centre were from teenagers. The number of calls increased by 406 on the previous year. Some 3,411 were first-time callers and more than half the calls related to child sexual abuse while 39 per cent concerned rape; 79 per cent of callers were women and 21 per cent were men. Ten years ago, men accounted for 10 per cent of all calls.
About one in four of the 697 clients who used the counselling service were under 20. Some 87 per cent of the total were women and 13 per cent were men.
Four out of five women and one in five men who used the counselling service complained of child sexual abuse, while 90 per cent of women and 10 per cent of men were seen for both child sexual abuse and rape.
The figures reveal a reluctance to report alleged sex crimes to the gardai, with only 28 per cent of people who used the counselling service reporting the offence. More than a third of all offences reported were rape and 19 per cent were child sexual abuse.
In 67 per cent of cases, the rapist was known to the victim, while one-third of victims were raped by strangers.
Clients were more likely to report rape to gardai if the rapist was a stranger. Almost 40 per cent of stranger rapes were reported, compared to 25 per cent of rapes by relatives or boyfriends.
Of the 24 women who used the counselling service and became pregnant, 14 kept their child. This compares to eight last year who kept their children, out of 21 who had become pregnant.
The increase in calls to the centre confirms the upward trend in rapes reported to gardai, with a 13 per cent increase last year following a 40 per cent increase in 1997.
The Garda is planning a national strategy to tackle the continuing increase in reported rapes, based on research being undertaken in Templemore, Co Tipperary.
Ms Geraldine Connolly, the head of the centre's clinical services, commended the 1,575 "brave" men who called the crisis line. She said the aim of the service was to help bring all clients "through being victims to being survivors and finally being an ordinary person who can live their life in the world".
Ms Braiden said the centre was financially over-stretched, and called on the government to almost double its funding for the centre, from £230,000 this year to at least £400,000. She said the centre's budget has not been substantially increased since 1992, despite the fact that it is dealing with many more clients.
"We are competing more and more with every charity and despite the fact that the country is awash with money, it isn't coming our way," she said.
Ms Braiden said she looked forward to the establishment of a register of sex offenders this year which would help to prevent repeated abuse.
Ms Angela McCarthy, head of training and education, said the centre planned to send people to Kosovo along with Concern, to train local councillors and field workers to deal with the trauma following the recent war. This project is due to start at the end of this month and will continue next year. The organisation has already completed training programmes in Bosnia and Croatia.
The centre is holding flag days this Thursday, Friday and Saturday.