Rape

Challenging Contemporary Thinking

Miranda A. H. Horvath, Jennifer M. Brown, Miranda Horvath, Jennifer Brown

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134026463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Criminologia

Rape remains one of the most controversial issues within criminal justice and receives high profile coverage internationally. Despite the many changes there have been to the law, practice and procedure in the investigation of rape allegations, and support available for victims, victims are routinely blamed for their victimization. Only a very small number of perpetrators ever face prosecution, let alone conviction.

This book aims to take stock of current thinking and research about rape and the way it is handled in practice within the criminal justice system, and to challenge some of the widely held but inaccurate beliefs about rape. It brings together leading researchers in the field from psychology, sociology and law, considering new research and presenting new data from a strong theoretical and contextual base.

The main focus of the book is on adult victims of rape, with chapters exploring such issues as rape and the media, the use of alcohol and drugs in rape, police decision making on rape cases, conviction patterns in rape trials, and interviewing victims of rape and sexual assault.

Chapter 1

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Setting the scene: introduction to understanding rape

Miranda A. H. Horvath and Jennifer M. Brown

Origins

This collection emerged out of a series of seminars funded by the British Psychological Society (held between 2005 and 2007) which brought together a network of researchers with the common focus of rape. This network evolved into the Sexual Offences Research Initiative (SORI: http://www.sori.co.uk). The contributed chapters represent the range of topics discussed in the seminars and bring together some of the leading European researchers currently thinking and developing ideas, conceptualising and researching aspects of sexual violence. Additional contributors were invited to cover topics felt to be of particular importance when considering rape and sexual violence. As originally conceived our seminar discussions addressed emerging areas of concern, specifically: attrition; drug-assisted rape, including the role of alcohol; consent and the Sexual Offences Act; and false allegations. The seminars had three major foci: Methodology; Concepts and Models; and Practice Application.

Methodology

Previous research has investigated rape using a number of techniques depending on which aspects of rape are the focus, for example: vignettes, mock juries, questionnaires, interviews, secondary analysis, trial observations, service evaluation and case tracking. There are pros and cons attached to these relating to reliability and generalisability of data. Moreover, rarely is any form of data triangulation employed.

There are particular difficulties when seeking to engage rape survivors in research, for example gaining access, particularly where this is mediated by gatekeepers, and ensuring ethical concerns and matters of confidentiality and anonymity are adequately addressed. There are also issues surrounding the researcher’s role in relation to a range of potential participants (e.g. victims, police officers, prosecutors). The seminars reviewed approaches to research investigations.

Concepts and models

Previously, research has incorporated a wide variety of conceptual approaches, for example counterfactual thinking, decision-making, heuristics, social identity theory and feminist perspectives. The members of the seminar group have considerable expertise across these theoretical domains and the seminars provided an opportunity for the sharing of ideas and approaches and for examining their explanatory power and indicating the overlap and differences between them.

Practice application

A criticism that is often made of academic research is that it has very little application in the ‘real world for practitioners’. We offer in the final chapter some suggestions for further research and practitioner/ academic collaboration. This is by way of an agenda for action rather than a fleshed out set of solutions. We seek to challenge both the academic community and practitioners to work on and further develop the ideas discussed in the book’s chapters.

The chapters in this collection draw together the three foci outlined above. Furthermore, while this book extended authorship to cover more topics than were debated during our seminars, the core membership have developed their thinking through these interdisciplinary exchanges. In those exchanges it became apparent that other topics such as the role of the media and sociocultural issues were important and we were delighted that additional collaborators joined the project of writing contributions to this edited collection.

Rape

Many authors have identified rape as a unique crime, for numerous reasons as outlined by Liz Kelly (2008: 256):

… for centuries [rape] has been the subject of unique evidential requirements (Temkin 2002), but also because of its specific characteristics (New South Wales Standing Committee on Social Issues 1996). Unlike other forms of assault, rape violates personal, intimate and psychological boundaries – what in human rights language is designated human dignity and bodily integrity, and in feminist and critical theory is termed sexual autonomy or sexual sovereignty (Richardson 2000). The meaning of rape for women, within gender and generational relations and cultural contexts, underlies its emotional, psychological and social impacts and consequences.

Legislative reform, investigative practices and prosecutorial decision-making have been undertaken internationally since the early 1980s, however, there are huge variations in the speed and effectiveness of these changes. In fact little is still known about the efficacy of some of the more recent strategies and laws. This has been particularly evident in England and Wales where, in recent years we have seen a raft of key action plans and legislation, including the Rape Action Plan 2002, the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the Victims of Crime and Domestic Violence Act 2004, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) Policy for Prosecuting Cases of Rape 2004 and the Cross Government Action Plan on Sexual Violence and Abuse 2007. Also, a Home Office advertising campaign (reportedly costing £500,000) focused on urging men to ensure they get a woman’s consent before they have sex with her (Home Office 2006a, 2006b). Some of these efforts have been the subject of evaluation (e.g. Temkin and Krahé 2008 show what little impact the Home Office campaign had on the perceived severity of rape or on views about length of sentences for those convicted). The conviction rates for rape remain stubbornly static at around 6 per cent of all cases reported to the police. The justice gap, i.e. the disparity between cases and conviction rates, is still very wide for this offence. So what is it about rape that makes it so difficult to successfully prosecute? The contributions reflect different stages of the route through the criminal justice system and the authors offer a range of explanations for why women might not report the rape, why police investigators or prosecutors decide to drop cases and what influences jurors when deliberating the guilt or innocence of defendants.

Aims

The key strength of this book is the integration of a diverse range of scholars with very different approaches and backgrounds. The ambition of such integration is to establish the groundwork for developing a model for in-depth, interdisciplinary engagements that may provide a stronger conceptual basis for designing successful interventions to reduce the justice gap. The book clearly is not attempting to be exhaustive. We have concentrated on adult women as victims, survivors or complainants with adult men being the perpetrators, offenders or defendants. We accept that there are other specific categories of victims – children, the elderly, men – and also other perpetrators – young offenders or women abusers. We hope these chapters provide a fresh examination of topics that will stimulate new research collaborations across disciplines and set challenges for practitioners. Our SORI meetings were lively and productive. We hope this book will encourage engagement and debate between researchers, practitioners and policymakers to address the impediments that at present see relatively few women seeking justice, and those that do not getting it.

The book presents a comprehensive and up-to-date review of research on rape stereotypes; it confronts existing stereotypes and challenges current thinking about rape. As a result it is more wide-ranging than previous texts and addresses some of the prevailing issues besetting the criminal justice system with regard to the crime of rape. The collection is multi-perspective and includes new and unpublished data. As noted above this collection does not seek to provide an account of every issue in relation to rape. The fact that our focus is on adult women as victims and adult men as perpetrators is because this is the most frequently occurring dyad (Greenfield 1997). To do full justice to other victims and perpetrators another volume would be needed. Further, like Ward’s (1995) book, we are concerned with attitudes about rape but our approach reflects contemporary issues and concerns. We also echo many of the issues covered by Jennifer Temkin and Barbara Krahé in their 2008 book Sexual Assault and the Justice Gap: A Question of Attitude about the attrition process and methods for tackling the justice gap. However, this collection provides a wider perspective on individual psychological as well as group social processes and varieties of sexual violence.

Terminology

We have not imposed any rules on the contributors to this book about terminology; as such the reader may notice some variation in the chapters. The focus of this book is rape, broadly understood as penetration of the vagina and/or anus with a penis without consent. In England and Wales, the Sexual Offences Act 2003 expanded the definition to include oral penetration and some authors reflect this change. The term sexual assault is also used; it can include a range of behaviours from unwanted touching or kissing to penetration with an object, essentially any unwanted sexual contact.

Perhaps most controversial is the term used to describe people who have been raped. Terms in use include victim, survivor and complainant. In Chapter 7 Aisha Gill provides some discussion of the issues surrounding these terms because the women she interviewed expressed a wish to her to be identified as survivors. The majority of authors have chosen to use victims: for some this is because they are working with police data which identifies them as such, for others it might be a wish to identify the harm that has been done to them by the perpetrator. The term survivor may also imply the woman has recovered from the trauma, whereas the term victim implies she is still suffering. Complainant is the term used by O’Keeffe et al. in their chapter because the focus of their empirical study was women who had made a complaint of rape or sexual assault to the police and by Munro and Kelly since they are looking at the legal process.

As with the issues already discussed about what to call those who have been raped, debate exists about what we should call those who have committed the act. In some respects the distinctions here are clearer cut; if someone has been accused of rape they may simply be referred to as ‘the accused’; similarly, if someone is standing trial for an alleged rape they are ‘the defendant’. The term perpetrator and offender are used interchangeably and imply those accounts have yet to be tested in court. Finally, if someone has been convicted of a rape they can be labelled a rapist. However, the accused and the defendant are also alleged rapists. Rapist and rape victim are very emotive and pejorative terms which can label an individual with a social stigma they are likely to carry all their life and face the consequential opprobrium. We do not offer any ‘preferred’ terms but have left to the authors the usage which they felt most appropriate in the context of their chapter.

Themes

We have identified six threads that emerge across the chapters:

• attitudes;

• ‘real rape’;

• social knowledge/discourse;

• attrition;

• methods;

• practice application.

In order to give the reader some context we briefly outline these themes below. However, it should also be noted that not all appear in each chapter – indeed chapters can be read as free-standing entities although a cumulative reading adds much which we try and summarise in the final chapter.

Attitudes

Attitudes are summary evaluations of an object of thought. Attitudes have been defined as consisting of three component parts: affective (how a person feels about some object or class of person), cognitive (the beliefs, opinions or ideas about the attitude object) and behavioural (what a person does in relation to the attitude object) (Stahlberg and Frey 1996). Central to attitudes about rape, its victims and perpetrators are rape myths which operate to deny or minimise harm, blame victims and exonerate perpetrators (see particularly Gerd Bohner and colleagues’ chapter). Rape myth acceptance influences the victim’s responses to and determines whether they will even label what has happened to them as rape (see Hannah Frith’s chapter on sexual scripts, Maddy Coy’s accounts from prostitutes and Aisha Gill’s contribution on Asian women’s narratives). These attitudes also influence police decision-making (see Stephanie O’Keefe, Jennifer Brown and Evanthia Lyons’ study and also the chapter by Lesley McMillan and Michelle Thomas). Jurors too are influenced by the attitudes they bring with them into the jury room and Vanessa Munro and Liz Kelly explore these in their chapter. The affective component of attitudes, feelings of anger and disgust are also important and Roger Giner-Sorolla and Pascale Russell explore this in Chapter 3. Jo Lovett and Miranda Horvath’s chapter and the research reported by Betsy Stanko and Emma Williams present some convincing evidence to show that rape myths have little basis in actuality.

‘Real rape’

A number of chapters use the term ‘real rape’ (or ‘stereotypical rape’) to refer to the widely held belief that genuine rapes contain the following elements: the victim and rapist are strangers; the assault occurs in an outdoors location; the victim shows active visible resistance; and the rapist uses or threatens to force the victim. The roots of this term can be found in Susan Estrich’s 1987 book Real Rape: How the Legal System Victimises ...