Rape in the Nordic Countries

Continuity and Change

Marie Bruvik Heinskou, May-Len Skilbrei, Kari Stefansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429885129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429467608, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

While the Nordic countries are listed at the top in most international rankings of gender equality and citizens' feelings of security, studies on the prevalence of sexual victimisation present a different picture, suggesting that the very countries that have invested much in establishing gender equality actually see a high prevalence of sexual violence. This book sheds light on the phenomenon and construction of rape and other forms of sexual violence within the Nordic region, exploring the ways in which rape and sexual violence are dealt with through criminal law and considering governmental policies aimed at combatting it, with a special focus on legal regulations and developments. Thematically organised, it offers new research on perpetrators, victimhood, criminal justice and prevention. Multi-disciplinary in approach, it brings together the latest work from a range of scholars to offer insights into the situation in the five Nordic countries, asking how and why rape and other forms of sexual violence occur, whilst also addressing the timely issues of online sexual cultures, BDSM and the grey areas of sexual offences. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, criminology and law with interests in gender and sexual violence.

1 A Nordic research agenda on rape and sexual violence

May-Len Skilbrei, Kari Stefansen and Marie Bruvik Heinskou

Introduction

How best to prevent and prosecute rape, and to protect its victims, is debated in countries across the world. Rape has also become a central topic in supranational forums such as the United Nations and the European Union and is something that mobilises transnational civil society organisations such as Amnesty International and Equality Now. The issue has also spurred engagement on an individual level, as is evident in how the #MeToo movement that gained momentum in 2017 brought the world’s attention to rape and other forms of sexual harm.

This high level of attention reflects both an increasing awareness of the harm of rape throughout the last few decades and real or perceived changes in the extent and characteristics of the phenomenon of rape. Several countries are currently experiencing an increase in reported cases of rape. Since increased attention towards and understanding of the phenomenon affect identification and people’s willingness to report, this increase does not necessarily mean that more people are victimised than earlier. But it does make rape into a phenomenon that policy-makers have to address. The large numbers of reported cases and the notable gap between these cases and convictions are something that, together with the visibility of personal experiences of violation found in social media, are key to the current debates and to opportunities for action.

That rape and other forms of sexual harm are taken seriously is not only something that has arisen from current developments. This story has been a long time in the making. Following the publication of Susan Brownmiller’s radical interpretation of rape in her 1975 book Against Our Will and other interventions at the time, women’s movements throughout the world have directed our attention towards female victimisation and have offered a gendered analysis of the reason such victimisation exists and why governments have not done more to combat such victimisation. Since the book’s publication, rape and other forms of sexual harm have become thoroughly associated with male perpetration and female victimisation; such acts have been interpreted not only as attacks on individual women but also as attacks on women as women. Most of the chapters in the present book are influenced by such understandings of rape as a social phenomenon, with causes and effects which reach far beyond the people who are directly affected by such acts.

Female perpetration and male victimisation continue to be less debated and researched than other forms of rape. Police statistics continue to represent rape mainly as something that men subject women to. Now that we are aware of the problems of building our understanding of the phenomenon on figures that easily reproduce what is already taken to be true (and therefore are more easily identified and reported), calls to open debates and research to cover male victimisation have grown stronger (see Javaid, 2018; United Nations, 2018). While most of the examples covered in this book offer analyses of various aspects of male perpetration and female victimisation, some of the chapters also present discussions of the consequences gender has for how we understand rape.

While rape in many countries is defined as a physical assault and is often seen as a particularly harmful form of sexual violence, research in many contexts has demonstrated that treating rape as separate from other acts is problematic for two reasons. First, sexual harm is represented along a continuum, where the severity of the acts differs but shares key factors and consequences (Basile, 1999; Salfati & Taylor, 2006). Second, research demonstrates that to separate rape from other acts and crimes is difficult for the people involved, including witnesses and police, which means that to sharply separate rape from ‘rape-like’ or ‘grey zone’ acts means that we miss a great deal of information about why and how rape occurs.

Following this notion, the present book is about rape in the wider context of other types of sexual harm. The need to understand rape in a wider context, where other sexual and violent acts are not easily separated from rape, is also important in light of how rape itself is a highly contested issue (Conaghan, 2018; Reitan, 2001). The meaning of the concept has changed historically and varies across and within countries. Different and conflicting conceptualisations may co-exist and cause confusion about the boundaries of the phenomenon, for instance, when legal and lay understandings are different. Rather than departing from one authoritative definition of rape, the authors in this book explore rape as a contextually and historically situated occurrence and offer insight into the complexities of addressing the issue for those affected, both in research and at the societal level. This approach also means that we include other forms of sexual violence or assault than rape in the book, including phenomena located in the ‘grey area’ between rape and sex (Gavey, 2013).

These developments and controversies create a need for research. Because debates feed on numbers, a key topic of research to date has been the development of better tools to assess the scale of the problem and to understand more about who is affected, and why. The fact that those in the field have difficulties in agreeing on definitions and perspectives implies that we also require the discursive means to understand the problem and those affected, as well as the responsibilities of societies to confront the problem. At the same time, these same characteristics place great responsibility on researchers to be very clear about their theoretical positions and the limitations of their findings, and to ensure that their findings are not misrepresented in ongoing debates. While clear transnational and global trends exist in how rape is understood, approached, and researched, we argue that the necessary methodological, theoretical, and epistemological development of the rape literature needs to be grounded in national and regional manifestations in the form of concrete empirical studies. This book is an attempt to explore methodological, theoretical, and epistemological issues, using the case of rape in the Nordic countries as a starting point. In this way, the book’s authors offer insights into the literature and on continuities and change in the Nordic context.

The Nordic context

The Nordic region is a particularly interesting case for the exploration of rape and other forms of sexual harm as both a personal and a socio-political issue. For several decades, the region has often been portrayed as being ‘best in its class’ in ensuring equality and social protection to its population. The Nordic countries are generally associated with a strong welfare state – what Gøsta Esping-Andersen in 1990 termed the ‘social democratic welfare regime’ – and the merits of this way of organising society and state–citizen relations continue to attract international attention (McKowen, 2018). As mentioned above, women’s movements in the last few decades have offered an analysis of rape as something that is caused by and has consequences for much more than the people who are directly involved in a given case of rape. This situation has meant that policies that were designed to assure greater gender equality are also widely thought to serve to prevent rape and other forms of sexual harm. This link has also been made in the Nordic countries, and the institutionalisation and success of the region’s gender-equality policies have received international praise (Borchorst, 1999). The Global Gender Gap Report (World Economic Forum, 2018) from 2018 places Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland in the top four positions (in that order), while Denmark is in 13th place. Not only is gender equality something that the individual Nordic countries have strongly emphasised over the last few decades; ensuring gender equality has also been prioritised and harmonised at the regional level, through strong collaborations between the various countries on several platforms. The Nordic Council of Ministers, for instance, sees gender equality as a ‘key area of co-operation for the Nordic countries’.¹

The fact that the Nordic countries are generally, but not uniformly, oriented towards gender equality is often presented as the result of an alliance between feminism and the state and as an alignment of the concerns of civil society and the state. The alliance and alignment between feminism and the state are expressed by Helga Hernes’s term ‘state feminism’, from her 1987 book Welfare State and Woman Power: Essays in State Feminism. This link secures support and disciplines the state into mainstreaming gender into the state’s various policy areas and governmental branches. This situation is often considered a feminist victory, but what is less often discussed is how this alliance and alignment have also disciplined feminist activists in how they prioritise causes and protest. A central aspect of Nordic feminism is that it has very explicitly turned to criminal law as an instrument for achieving gender equality (Burman, 2010), and acts such as rape are commonly viewed as the result and expression of gender inequality but also as an attack on and something that is detrimental to gender equality.

To investigate rape in the Nordic countries is thus also to investigate the foundation and consequences of Nordic gender equality. The Nordic countries are often presented as a coherent region in terms of welfare orientation, state–citizen relations, and gender equality. At the same time, great differences exist between the five Nordic countries, both in the centrality of gender equality as a stated goal and in how the individual countries approach rape and other forms of sexual harm. To draw together analyses from all the Nordic countries therefore invites a comparison between contexts that, from the outset and from the outside, look very similar, but when looked at more closely, they have several important differences.

There are also other reasons to problematise the imagery of the Nordic countries as being uniform and consistent in their prioritisation of gender equality. Researchers have questioned whether the region really is special, or at least if it is still special (see Liinason, 2018; Witoszek & Midttun, 2018). While the Nordic countries may not be as exceptional and uniform as they are often presented, ideas about Nordic coherence and the continuing prioritisation of gender equality are central to national identities in the region (de Los Reyes, 2017; Tham, Rönneling, & Rytterbro, 2011). The Nordic Council of Ministers, for instance, presents gender equality as one of the aims of its collaborative efforts: ‘Successful Nordic co-operation on gender equality can not only help us increase gender equality in our own region, but also help to ensure the strong profile of the Nordic region internationally on gender equality’ (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2019, p. 5).

Gender equality policies are not the only internationally acknowledged side of the priorities and orientations of the Nordic welfare states. These nations are also known for humanitarian penal policies that stand in contrast to developments in many other Western countries in the last few decades. Low levels of punishment, penal innovations designed to protect vulnerable groups from the negative consequences of imprisonment, the widespread use of ‘open’ prisons, the existence of humane prison conditions, and an elaborate system of transition from prison to ordinary society have all earned the region a reputation for ‘penal exceptionalism’ (Pratt, 2008). While some (e.g. Ugelvik & Dullum, 2011) have critiqued the conclusion that Nordic societies are less punitive and that punishments are more humane, the levels of punishment are low in relation to other European countries – with one notable exception, the punishment for sex crimes. In the last two decades, several of the Nordic countries have changed their rape legislation and punishment levels considerably. Denmark, Finland and Norway currently have similar formulations of the crime of rape in their penal codes, as they all emphasise violence and coercion (Jacobsen, 2019, p. 48), while Iceland and Sweden both revised their respective acts in 2018 to criminalise the lack of consent rather than the presence of violence or coercion.

The willingness to punish sex crimes seems to make such crimes an exception to the Nordic or Scandinavian penal exceptionalism (Tham, 2001). The position of the women’s movements in the region and the strength of women’s political mobilisation and representation (for an analysis, see Borchorst & Siim, 2008) are also relevant sides of the context. In their priorities, the women’s movements have expressed what the criminologist Kristin Skjørten (1996) has called ‘legal optimism’, i.e. an overly strong belief in what criminal law can accomplish. One could argue that the low thresholds of sex-crime legislation and the breadth of acts that are criminalised as sexual harm were enabled by decades of feminist investment in changing understandings of the relationship between public and private and between the state and its citizens. Matters that are typically considered private elsewhere are more often treated as being within the scope of the state in the Nordic countries (Borchorst & Siim, 2008).

Bearing in mind the great investments that have been made in the Nordic countries to counteract sexual harm and to establish gender equality, it appears paradoxical that phenomena such as rape continue to pose a challenge to policy-makers. Figures of police-reported rape and figures from population-based surveys indicate that rape affects a considerable part of the population in the Nordic region (Heinskou, Schierff, Ejbye-Ernst, Friis, & Liebst, 2017; Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, 2017; Thoresen & Hjemdal, 2014). The number of cases of rapes reported to the police has increased in the region, with the increase particularly evident in Sweden. Because Sweden, in many areas, has what is often considered the most progressive policies on gender equality, but also on sexual violence, in the region, it also appears paradoxical that the nation consistently shows higher figures for reported sexual victimisation than the other Nordic countries (Tham et al., 2011, p. 587). While this situation does not mean that levels of victimisation in society are higher or increasing, the increase in registered numbers of rape in the Nordic region has attracted attention internationally (see, for example, Fox News, 2017).

The Nordic approach to rape also shows other paradoxes. While people in the region have paid attention to the power and role of law in combatting rape, they have paid less attention to the issue of which other steps can be taken to prevent rape and to promote desistance among perpetrators. Services are available for both victims and perpetrators that may also serve to prevent trauma, revictimisation, and re-perpetration, but such services are not comprehensive and systematic throughout the region or within each country. One may suspect that this is a case where criminal justice approaches have been prioritised and that they often overshadow other policies.

For these and other reasons, rape and other forms of sexual violence are currently high on public agendas throughout the Nordic region, especially in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Fears over high figures and high levels of attrition through the criminal justice process are often debated in terms of a need for legislative revisions. Overall, ideas about rape and sexual violence and the appropriate responses to these issues seem to be changing in interesting ways in this region. While changes are also happening elsewhere in Europe, there are reasons to consider the ongoing changes within the Nordic region as being related to each other and linked to broader developments in terms of penal cultures, welfare state retraction and expansion, gender equality policies, and public–private partnerships.

These factors make this a particularly important time to look at rape in the Nordic countries from different angles. Based on this background, the authors in this book illuminate the phenomenon and construction of rape and other forms of sexual harm within the Nordic region, as well as on how they are addressed through social policies and in legal systems. The aim is to fertilise both the international scholarship on sexual violence and the scholarship on the Nordic region. The chapters in this book have been arranged based on our ambition to cover a broad area. The structure and content of the book will be described in greater detail below; first, a note on terminology.

A note on the ‘victim’ label

In a recent article on the social risks of labelling, telling and reporting sexual assault among college students in the USA, Khan, Hirsch, Wamboldt, and Mellins (2018) caution against understandings of rape that are organised around identity categories such as ‘survivor’ and ‘perpetrator’, as ‘such words suggest a kind of person rather than an act or expe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1. A Nordic research agenda on rape and sexual violence
• 2. Theorising sexual violence in intimate relations in Scandinavia: A literature review
• 3. Cultivating ethical negotiations or fetishising consent in BDSM?
• 4. Understanding unwanted sexual touching: A situational approach
• 5. Making the case for ‘good enough’ rape-prevalence estimates: Insights from a school-based survey experiment among Norwegian youths
• 6. From the protection of marriage to the defence of equality: The Finnish debate over the sexual autonomy of wives
• 7. Towards voluntariness in Swedish rape law: Hyper-medialised group rape cases and the shift in the legal discourse
• 8. Rape law and coercive circumstances
• 9. Empowered or protected? The ‘problem’ of complainants’ rights in Danish and Norwegian preparatory works on criminal procedure
• 10. Othering the rapist: Rurality, sexual violence and the Bjästa case
• 11. Sexual transgressing: Situational and narrative perspectives
• 12. Rape in the age of the Internet
• 13. Digital sexual violence: Image-based sexual abuse among Danish youth
• 14. Breaking the silence: Social media disclosures of sexual violence in Iceland
• Index