Rape And Society

Readings On The Problem Of Sexual Assault

Patricia Searles, Ronald Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813388243
• eBook ISBN: 9780429972836
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the 1970s rape became the point of departure for an ongoing feminist examination of the subordination and sexual victimization of women. More recently, domestic violence, prostitution, sexual harassment, and pornography have come to the forefront of investigators' concerns. Rape and Society returns to the original focus on rape while also illuminating the interconnections among the many forms of violence against women. The book provides a comprehensive treatment of the subject, drawing on writers and researchers from across a range of social and behavioral sciences and the humanities and representing the experiences of women of diverse backgrounds and lifestyles. From the private torment of a child abused by her father to the horror of mass rape and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, the authors analyze rape as a tool of humiliation, control, and terror. Rape and Society is an essential resource for academics and professionals and for anyone wanting to come to grips with the magnitude of the problem of sexual violence. Because the selections are moving as well as thought-provoking and varied in approach (theoretical, empirical, literary, and experiential), this interdisciplinary anthology is a superb text for undergraduate and graduate courses in women's studies, psychology, sociology, and criminology. It offers incisive analyses and carefully designed research to help us understand and explain rape while sensitizing us to the personal dimensions of sexual victimization and the emotional toll of living in a violent society. There are hopeful voices here too, helping readers envision a safer and more humane world, offering concrete suggestions for social change, and encouraging us all to gather the power and courage to take on the work that lies before us.

Part One
Feminist Foundations for the Study of Rape and Society

FEMINISTS BEGAN THEIR INQUIRY into the problem of sexual assault at a time when the predominant assumption in society, the criminal justice system, and criminology was that women were to blame for their victimization. For instance, Menachem Amir wrote in 1971 that "the victim is the one who is acting out, initiating the interaction between her and the offender, and by her behavior ... generates the potentiality for criminal behavior of the offender or triggers this potentiality, if it existed before" (p, 259). Amir suggested that "victim precipitated" rape occurs in situations where the victim's behavior is interpreted by the offender as directly inviting or signaling availability for sexual contact. Included here are such situations as those in which a woman agrees to sexual relations but changes her mind, fails to strongly resist sexual overtures, accepts a drink from a stranger, or uses "indecent" language and gestures. According to Amir, victim precipitation is also assumed if a woman has a "bad" reputation, is believed to be promiscuous, or has previously engaged in sexual relations with the offender.

From a feminist perspective, however, Amir represented a way of thinking about rape that perpetuated "rape myths." Rape myths are presumptions that women are tempting seductresses who invite sexual encounters, that women secretly want to be raped, that women eventually relax and enjoy rape, and that men have urgent sexual needs that prevent them from controlling their behavior (Berger et al. 1986; Burt 1980). These myths constitute biases that have been reproduced in the legal system, making it difficult for women to achieve justice and to hold men responsible for the harms they have perpetrated.

In the first chapter in this section, "The Trauma of Rape: The Case of Ms. X," Diana Russell presents an interview with a rape survivor, a moving account of a woman who was attacked in her home by a stranger, held prisoner for two days, and repeatedly raped and brutalized. It conveys the deep and long-lasting trauma often associated with rape and shows how rape myths can compound the shame and humiliation rape survivors may feel, keeping them locked in a prison of silence.

The second chapter, Stevi Jackson's "The Social Context of Rape: Sexual Scripts and Motivation," is one of the earliest critiques of the traditional view that rape is an aberrant act of a "sick" individual. Jackson articulates what has become a classic feminist view that rape is an extension or exaggeration of conventional sexual relations and power differentials between women and men. She analyzes the means by which everyday sexual scripts provide vocabularies of motives and techniques of neutralization that rapists use to justify their conduct.

Jackson views sexual assault as a form of socially conditioned sexual aggression that stems from traditional gender-role socialization and sexual learning, not as a biological inevitability. Supporting this view are cross-cultural studies that categorize some societies as "rape prone" and some as relatively "rape free" and that find more rape in societies characterized by male dominance, gender-role rigidity, and glorification of warfare (Sanday 1981a; McConahay and McConahay 1977). The more male-dominated or patriarchal the society, the more social relations between the sexes are hierarchically organized to appropriate women's sexuality (including their procreative capacities) for the use of males. Violence against women is maintained through the institutionalization of dichotomous dominant masculine and subordinate feminine roles and by sexual scripts that promote sexual coercion as culturally normative behavior and a source of sexual pleasure for men and, to some extent, women. Under these conditions, male dominance is normative and even eroticized. As Susan Griffin (1981:78) observed, "In our culture male eroticism is wedded to power. Not only should a man be taller and stronger than a female in the perfect love-match, but he must also demonstrate his superior strength in gestures of dominance which are perceived as amorous." Sexual coercion becomes commonplace, and women's sexual lives are fraught with danger and abuse. Rape and the fear of rape come to be "a daily part of every woman's consciousness" and a means by which men as a group intimidate, control, and keep women "in their place" (Griffin 1979:4; Brownmiller 1975). Thus rape serves as "an unofficial buttress of the status quo" (Jackson 1978:37).

In order to facilitate recognition of rape as a serious offense, it has become customary for feminists to emphasize that rape is a crime of violence, not a crime of sexual passion or an uncontrollable expression of a biological need. When viewed this way, rape seems to be a distortion of an otherwise natural human sexuality, a "displacement of power based on physical force onto sexuality" (MacKinnon 1983:646). But according to Catharine MacKinnon, rape is no less sexual because it is violent. In the third chapter, "Sex and Violence: A Perspective," MacKinnon suggests that analysts who define rape—along with battery, harassment, and pornography—as forms of "violence against women" often set up a false dichotomy beween sex and violence. She argues that it is a male point of view to sharply distinguish between rape and intercourse, sexual harassment and ordinary sexual initiation, and pornography and erotica because in women's experience rape, sexual harassment, and pornography are not so clearly distinguishable from normal everyday interactions. MacKinnon reminds us that although these violations are often collectively referred to as "violence against women," they all involve a fusion of dominance with sexuality. As she says, "If women as gender female are defined as sexual beings, and violence is eroticized, then men violating women has a sexual component."

Liz Kelly (1987:48) developed a concept she called the "continuum of sexual violence" to help us understand that all sexual violations have a "common character": They all involve men's use of "a variety of forms of abuse, coercion and force in order to control women." Although the continuum concept enables naming and documenting a range of abuses, Kelly argued that women's experiences cannot be placed into "clearly defined and discrete analytic categories" because women's experiences and how they subjectively define them "shade into and out of" particular categories (p. 48). For example, the category of sexual harassment includes looks, gestures, and comments, as well as acts that could also be defined as rape or assault. Kelly pointed out that women do not necessarily "share the same definition of a particular incident" and warned that it is inappropriate to use the concept of continuum to create a hierarchy of offenses based on the "seriousness" of abuse (p. 52). As she said, "The effects on women cannot be read off simplistically from the form of sexual violence" experienced (p. 49).

The "continuum of sexual violence" is also useful for linking particular forms of sexual violation to "more common everyday male behaviour" (Kelly 1987: 51). Elizabeth Stanko (1985:10) suggested that "women who feel violated and intimidated by typical male behaviour have no way of specifying how or why typical male behaviour feels like aberrant male behaviour" because their experience of men's violence is filtered through a perception that men's behavior is either typical (hence unharmful) or aberrant (hence harmful). The ability to view men's behavior on a continuum helps women "locate and name their own experiences" (p. 51). Kelly found that women experienced heterosexual sex not as an either/or (that is, as consensual sex or as rape), but on a continuum moving from choice to pressure to coercion to force.

Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer (1987:164) further extended the analysis of the common character of all sexual violations. They said that all violations entail "similar assumptions about male sexuality and women's relation to it." All presume that "men need and feel entitled to have unrestricted sexual access to women, even—sometimes especially—against women's will." In addition, all "collectively function as a threat to women's autonomy," undermine women's self-esteem, and limit women's freedom of action. Hence women must live with the fear of sexual violation (since men's sexuality is presumed to be "naturally" aggressive and predatory), and women must monitor their behavior (since they are responsible for preventing their violation). If they are unsuccessful, women may be blamed for their victimization, and their suffering may be ignored, questioned, or trivialized.

Cameron and Frazer helped us see the functional similarity of very different kinds of violations. For instance, they pointed out that both flashing (exhibitionism) and rape are "acts which men do in order to reassure themselves of their power and potency; both include, as a crucial factor in that reassurance, the fear and humiliation of the female victims" (1987:164). Thus the range of functionally similar violations includes both violent acts (e.g., rape and battery) as well as nonviolent sexual intimidation (e.g., flashing and obscene phone calls). Acts of nonviolent sexual intimidation, the common everyday "verbal, visual, and physical intrusions,... serve to remind women and girls that they are at risk and vulnerable to male aggression just because they are female" (Sheffield 1989:483-84).

Complementing feminist theoretical analyses of rape and sexual assault are studies that attempt to measure the prevalence of rape (the proportion of a group of females that has been victimized) and the incidence of rape (the frequency of victimization in a group of females). But the measurement of rape is fraught with methodological difficulties. For example, official crime statistics underrepresent the extent of violence against women because women often fail to report their victimization to the police.¹ Women avoid coming forward because they feel humiliated and embarrassed, fear retaliation by the offender, fear being subjected to hostile questioning, or worry they won't be believed. In fact, it is not uncommon for police to label a woman's complaint "unfounded" (Estrich 1987; Russell 1984).

Victimization surveys, which bypass police reports and ask victims directly about their experiences, attempt to remedy the problem of underreporting. Although these surveys uncover more rapes than official statistics do, they are not valid indicators of rape either (Eigenberg 1990). For instance, the most commonly cited survey is the annual National Crime Survey, which gathers information on a variety of crimes. Until quite recently,² the NCS has asked "whether someone has tried to take something from them, rob them, beat them, attack them with a weapon, or steal things from them. None of these questions asks whether someone has tried to rape them. The question that is supposed to elicit rape reads: 'Did anyone TRY to attack you in some other way?'" (p. 657).

More in-depth victimization surveys that focus specifically on rape, such as the one conducted by Mary Koss, have uncovered higher rates of victimization than those reported in either police or NCS studies. In the final chapter in this section, "Hidden Rape: Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Students in Higher Education," Koss documents the prevalence and incidence of sexual victimization and sexual aggression in a large sample of college women and men across the country. She found that the majority of women and men whose experiences met legal definitions of rape did not label themselves as rape victims or offenders.³

That women may not define what is legally rape as "rape" is not so surprising if we remember MacKinnon's observation that rape is not necessarily very different from what might be for women rather typical experiences of intercourse. MacKinnon (1983) believes that when male initiative and dominance constitute the normative pattern of sexual interaction, the whole notion of "consent" becomes problematic. When, for the most part, women's consent is granted under conditions of dominance and inequality and men are socialized not to take women's "no" seriously (e.g., to presume "no" means "maybe" or "in a little while"), it becomes hard to assess just how much resistance is required to communicate to men either that consent has not been granted or that it has been withdrawn. Hence women may perceive no alternative but to acquiesce. They may, in fact, prefer acquiescence to the risk of bodily injury or to the "humiliation of a lost fight" (p. 650); or perhaps they have learned to eroticize male dominance so as not to feel "forced." Under these conditions, MacKinnon argued, true consent is absent, and the lack of physical force does not guarantee a freely given agreement. Thus women may not define the encounter as rape, although they experienced it as unwanted and nonconsensual. And men, failing to distinguish acquiescence and consent, may not either.

Notes

1. When several news organizations broke with tradition and publicized the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape in 1991, many feminists were outraged. They argued that public exposure subjected survivors to additional trauma and decreased the likelihood that women would come forward in the future. In fact, a Newsweek poll conducted after this incident found that 86 percent of those surveyed believed that disclosure would discourage women from reporting rape (Kantrowitz 1991). Other feminists, however, argued that secrecy heightens the shame of rape and that regularly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• PART ONE FEMINIST FOUNDATIONS FOR THE STUDY OF RAPE AND SOCIETY
• PART TWO WHY MEN RAPE
• PART THREE VARIETIES OF RAPE AND SEXUAL ASSAULT
• PART FOUR RAPE AND THE LEGAL SYSTEM
• PART FIVE SURVIVING AND PREVENTING RAPE
• References
• List of Credits
• About the Book and Editors