In Hurt's 1981 report on 900 motorcycle crashes his team investigated in the LA area, 117 riders--13%--suffered groin injuries. He devoted 9 pages to them, almost as much as the 12 pages on head injuries. I'm going to post his introductory paragraphs, a table or two, and a few bullet points. There's more on these and other kinds of injuries in the report. You can download it as a scanned PDF from
here (this is the best scan I've found; I'm able to copy and paste mostly accurate text from it).
8.9 Groin Injuries
Early in the course of data collection, it became apparent that a substantial number of riders (and some passengers) complained of injury to the groin and often diffuse abdominal pain. In most instances this was associated with a characteristic pattern of damage to the motorcycle in which the top and sides at the back of the fuel tank was deformed inwards. Indeed, it was often possible to tell the type of cloth of the rider's pants (such as corduroy) from the cloth marks left on the paint. Handlebars typically showed signs of rider contact such as bending or forward rotation in the clamps.
A total of 117 riders sustained groin injuries (13% of the 900 cases) which ranged from simple complaints of pain to rupture of the urinary and severe lacerations of the penis. Basic information defining the injury is shown in Table8.9.1, which shows the distribution of lesion type and the system or organ involved. The large majority of groin injuries involved no external bleeding; contusion of the genitals accounted for 87.2% of the groin injuries. The lack of external trauma often led treating physicians to overlook the groin injury. Many of the riders were hospitalized for testing for internal injuries (testing was usually negative) when they were simply suffering referred pain from groin impact.
TABLE 8.9.1--Groin Injury Lesion Type
[table=head]Lesion Type | Frequency | Adjusted %
--------------------|--------------------|--------------
contusion | 102 | 87.2
laceration | 12 | 10.3
pain | 1 | 0.9
rupture | 1 | 0.9
avulsion | 1 | 0.9
[/table]
TABLE 8.9.2--Groin Injury Severity
[table=head]Severity | Frequency | Adjusted %
--------------------|--------------------|--------------
minor | 92 | 78.6
moderate | 17 | 14.5
serious | 2 | 1.7
severe | 6 | 5.1
[/table]
Some other noteworthy findings:
- 89.8% of the crashes that resulted in groin injuries were frontal impacts, either dead-on or offset to either side.
- Those crashes were overwhelmingly multiple-vehicle--91.5%
- In 52.6% of crashes resulting in groin injury, impact point was the fuel tank, in 29.1% it was the handlebars