Understanding Sexual Violence

A Study of Convicted Rapists

Diana Scully

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135220273
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Understanding Sexual Violence examines the structural supports for rape in sexually violent cultures and dispels a number of myths about sexual violence--for example, that childhood abuse, alcohol, and drugs are direct causes of rape.

1

A Glimpse Inside

This book, which is about men’s sexual violence toward women, is the result of several demanding, often frustrating, sometimes gruesome, but always fascinating years in which my research associate, Joseph Marolla, and I entered men’s maximum- and medium-security prisons and interviewed 114 convicted rapists as well as a contrast group of 75 other felons. Since research began on these men, I have had the opportunity to present the work to a wide variety of groups—students, academicians, feminists, rape survivors, professionals of all persuasions, the media, and the general public. Audiences always ask two questions: what motivated me to undertake the project, and what kind of an experience was it for me, a woman, to be confined daily in prisons talking face to face with men convicted of rape, murder, and assorted other crimes against women. Curiosity about why and how the research was done is often greater than interest in the findings. Therefore, it seems fitting to begin by reflecting on these questions. And because research inside of prisons, on people confined against their will, is complicated by practical obstacles, ethical dilemmas, and methodological problems that do not customarily occur in investigations of most other groups, it is appropriate to highlight a few of the more perplexing problems that surfaced during the course of this project.

Androcentric Bias in the Sciences

By the late 1960s, higher education in the United States was feeling the impact of the second wave of feminism and the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. With the gradual increase of women faculty in college and universities (albeit at lower salaries than men) came an increasing awareness of the extent to which knowledge about women and women’s concerns, or women-centered knowledge, was absent from the content of most courses in the traditional disciplines. In response to these omissions, innovative courses, focused on women’s experiences and perspectives, were developed that eventually led to the creation of a new academic field—interdisciplinary women’s studies. Undoubtedly the effort to establish women’s studies in higher education was motivated, in part, by the alienation the founding mothers felt as practitioners committed to bodies of knowledge that ignored or erased the significance of women’s experiences, contributions, and problems.

From modest beginnings, new scholarship on women now flourishes in the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, and, while the transformation has been more successful in some disciplines than in others,¹ the impact of feminist scholarship is observed not only in college curricula, but in knowledge generally. At the heart of feminist critique in the social sciences are several basic assumptions.² We understand that women and men live in separate phenomenological, if not physical, worlds, which means there are important gender differences in our social construction of reality. Because our experiences in and of the world are not the same, the relevances of our worlds are also different.³ The greater power of men, relative to women, has resulted in knowledge or science that is based primarily on the relevances of a privileged, white, male social universe, supported ideologically by the assumption that the masculine is the yardstick against which all else is compared and judged.⁴ Therefore, much of conventional knowledge reflects the tenets of patriarchal ideology despite its claim to be objective science. Feminists argue that these “universal” male truths are irrelevant to women at best, and alienating and oppressive at worst. To correct omissions and distortions of the past, the emphasis, especially in early feminist scholarship, has been on understanding women’s world, not by tossing gender in as a variable, but by putting women at the center of research that is nonalienating, nonexploitive, and potentially emancipating. The challenge of feminist scholarship extends beyond filling in the gaps in knowledge about women to shifting or, if necessary, constructing new paradigms that account for women’s experiences and perspectives and that contribute to a more complete gendered understanding of the world.

The Need for Feminist Research on Men’s World

The significance of this new, intellectually inspiring scholarship on women’s world cannot be overstated. Yet I continue to be concerned that feminist scholars are neglecting another, also important, area of critical work on men’s world.⁵ There are important reasons for concern. If, as evidence suggests, men dominate through an ideology that erases or ignores the significance of women and allows men to take for granted that their social constructions are reality, then transforming knowledge, and ultimately patriarchy, requires a challenge of that reality—even though it requires intruding where women are not always welcome. Indeed, the idea of a ruling ideology suggests that men’s privileged status distorts their perceptions and understanding of the world. While not diminishing the continuing responsibility to illuminate women’s subordinate condition, the debunking of patriarchy is not accomplished by focusing exclusively on the lives and experiences of women.

As an activist in the women’s movement of the 1970s, I was impressed by the mounting feminist anger over the sexual victimization of women. To dispel harmful stereotypes and provide a structure for assisting the survivors,⁶ it was critical that the experience and trauma of women who had been raped be examined, and, in the late 1970s, feminist scholars enthusiastically tackled this challenge. The new awareness was inspiring vital research on rape myths and the psychological, medical, and legal problems experienced by the victims of rape (see, for example, Burgess and Holmstrom 1974; Holmstrom and Burgess 1978b). This period also witnessed the publication of several groundbreaking theoretical feminist treatises on rape,⁷ and sexual violence moved to the center of emerging radical feminist theory on patriarchy and the origins and maintenance of women’s subordination. Yet, despite the growing feminist presence in the rape literature, the need for research on sexually violent men was being ignored. Consequently, this area of rape research continued to be dominated by men and the profession of psychiatry. I was concerned that the feminist tendency to focus on women’s experience of rape did not go far enough to challenge the prevailing assumption that sexual violence is the result of an individual, idiosyncratic disease (for a full discussion of this point, see Chapter 2), an explanation that my sociological background led me to doubt. Focusing on victimized women also did not constitute enough of a threat to the sexually violent male world in which we live because women are not the clue to men’s sexual violence. In fact, focusing on women can lead to blaming the victim and to perceiving rape as women’s, rather than men’s, problem. Women cannot reveal the motivations and justifications of the men who rape them because they don’t share the reality of sexually violent men. Such insight is acquired only through invading and critically examining the social constructions of men who rape.

This concern, as well as my training as a sociologist and my personal experiences as a woman, provided the motivation to do research on sexually violent men—to gain an understanding of how the meanings and relevances of their world differ from mine. Indeed, the gender imbalance of power allows men to ignore women’s world, but the subordinate status of women forces us to pay attention to men’s world. Rapists are not the only perpetrators of violent and degrading acts toward women, but because of their position at the endpoint of the continuum, they are ideal informants on our sexually violent culture. And that is the purpose of this book: to understand sexual violence from the perspective of men who rape—to provide outsiders with a view inside.

In 1975, Public Law 94-63 established the National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape in the United States within the National Institute of Mental Health. The Center was mandated to provide funding for research, training, and public education activities in the areas of rape and sexual assault of children and adults.⁸ This event was important for women because it signified official recognition of the seriousness of rape and also established a funding source for rape-related research. In 1979, I applied to the National Institute of Mental Health for funds to conduct face-to-face interviews inside of men’s prisons because I believed (and still do) that penetrating the male world of sexual violence requires direct, experiential contact with the experts, men who rape. Statistical studies using data from surveys and official sources could not duplicate the range of information and depth of understanding that could be obtained by observing and talking confidentially with the men. The National Institute of Mental Health eventually did support this research, which consisted of 89 pages of semistructured interviews with 114 convicted rapists and a contrast group of 75 other felons—a total of approximately 700 hours of interviews and 15,000 pages of data. Before funding was approved, a number of thorny problems had to be resolved. Important among these was the specific question of whether men convicted of crimes against women would talk about it to a woman and, conversely, whether a woman would be able to talk about rape with them. Other issues concerned general rapport and cooperation, human subject protection, and the validity of truthfulness of the information gathered in the interviews. Before approaching these topics, however, it is necessary to explain the reasons for choosing convicted incarcerated rapists for this research and the limitations imposed by this choice.

Are Convicted Rapists the Best Targets?

Research on rapists is hampered by obstacles in accurately determining the size and characteristics of the male population that rapes as well as by unavoidable restrictions on obtaining a representative sample of sexually violent men. There are several reasons for these problems. First, rape is among the most underreported of major crimes. Most studies estimate that only between 25 percent to 50 percent of completed and attempted rapes are brought to the attention of police (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1972; Law Enforcement Assistance Administration 1974). Thus, it is certain that a significant proportion of men who rape never enter the criminal justice system at any level and consequently the characteristics of this undetected group cannot be stated with certainty. Victimization research provides insight on some of the factors that affect women’s willingness to report rape. In one study of 246 victims who contacted the women-run Seattle Rape Relief, 100 had not reported their rapes to the police (Williams 1984). Analysis revealed that women were more likely to report if the characteristics of their attack resembled a “classic” rape—a sudden, violent attack by a stranger in a public place or a home that was broken into, involving the use of a weapon and resulting in injuries in addition to rape. For a combination of reasons—fear of retaliation from the rapist, fear of not being believed or the stigma of a trial, self-blame, or the desire to protect friends and families—reported rape underrepresents assaults between people who are acquaintances, friends, or relatives; that occur in social situations such as dates; and where verbal threats, rather than more direct forms of violence, are used to make the victim comply.

Additionally, for a number of social and legal reasons, conviction rates for rape have been low relative to other major crimes. For example, in 1978, of the 635 rape complaints that were reported to police in Seattle and Kansas City, criminal cases were prepared on only 167 suspects. Of this number, only 45 cases brought rape or attempted rape charges by prosecutors, 32 cases went to trial, and only 10 defendants—less than 2 percent—were convicted of rape or attempted rape (Law Enforcement Assistance Administration 1978). While convictions may have increased during the past ten years, low rates were the norm when the men in this study were processed by the criminal justice system. In addition to the class and race differences in conviction and sentencing that are a general characteristic of the criminal justice system, because of factors such as biased attitudes regarding what constitutes “real” rape, state statutes that required proof of victim resistance for conviction, and courtroom tactics aimed at discrediting the victim, accused rapists who used overt violence and/or weapons and who committed accompanying crimes were more likely to be sent to prison than accused men who did not fit this profile. Rapists in prison, then, are more likely to have raped strangers, used weapons, physically injured their victims, and committed other crimes in addition to the rape. They also are likely to be poorly educated, lacking economic resources, and members of racial minorities.

An ideal research design would include interviews with a proportion of men from the potentially large group of undetected rapists who may not fit the rapist-in-prison profile. In attempts to investigate this population, several researchers have used anonymous questionnaires to identify and measure the characteristics and attitudes of sexually aggressive college men. While not diminishing the significance of knowledge gained through this approach, these efforts are considerably removed from lengthy interviews with undetected rapists about their criminal activity. Even if a large group of these rapists could be located, the dangers and ethical dilemmas involved in such research would be enormous. In the final analysis the researcher would become an accomplice by protecting the identity of men actively engaged in rape. The only realistic alternative is to study convicted incarcerated rapists and to be aware of the ways in which research findings may be skewed due to differences between this group and men who rape but avoid detection and/or prison.

In another sense, however, convicted rapists may be the best group with which to explore the ideas presented in this book. Unlike the psychiatric model, which assumes that pathology or disease causes rape, the feminist/sociocultural model pursued herein locates the predisposition for sexual violence in the gender imbalance of power in patriarchal societies (for a complete discussion of this model, see Chapter 2). Of all men who rape, those in prison are most likely to fit the psychiatric model and the least likely to fit the feminist/sociocultural model, making them an ideal test of these conflicting explanations.

At the time this research was conducted, no national profile of convicted or incarcerated rapists existed.⁹ Thus, while ideally the typicalness of a sample should be established, it was not possible to determine whether the rapists incarcerated in the southeastern state where this research was done were similar to prison populations of rapists nationwide. Other researchers have noted the same problem and have concluded only that rapists who become available for study from prison populations tend to be poorly educated and from low-status occupations (Dietz 1978).

A detailed description of the characteristics of the 114 convicted rapists and 75 other felons interviewed in this research is contained in Chapter 3. Briefly, as expected, the rapists were poorly educated and held low-status jobs prior to going to prison. Most were serving sentences for more than one crime, including 11 percent who had convictions for first- or second-degree murder, and the sentences ranged from 10 years to 7 life sentences plus 380 years. Of the rapists in this sample, 46 percent were white and 54 percent were black; the majority were young, less than 35 years old when interviewed.

All of the participants were volunteers who were recruited by letters sent to every inmate in the seven prisons used in the project. Obviously, a random selection of the men would have been preferable, but ethical limitations typically force research of this nature to rely on volunteers. Often, however, volunteers have characteristics that are different from those of the average member of the group they are used to represent. For example, compared to a statistical profile of all felons in this state, it appears that men who volunteered were disproportionately white, somewhat better educated (at the time of the research), and slightly younger than the average inmate. On the positive side, using volunteers avoided a major methodological problem present in much of the research on convicted rapists that has been conducted by prison staff, such as psychologists and psychiatrists. Since therapists tend to use their own clients as research subjects (for example, see Groth 1979), only men who have sought counseling and who believe their behavior was caused by an emotional or psychological problem are included in these studies. In contrast, volunteers from the prison system at large included a large number of men who neither defined themselves as rapists nor thought of themselves as emotionally disturbed. This book will demonstrate the importance of this distinction.

Lasting Impressions: A Woman’s View of Life Inside Men’s Prisons

For most readers unfamiliar with the environment inside of prisons, words are inadequate to describe the shock one experiences as the gates slam shut. Men’s prisons are bleak, severe, depressing places, swarming with people and at the same time barren.¹⁰ While common stereotypes of male prisoners may be too extreme, and conditions inside institutions vary, prison culture seems to breed bored, frightened, angry, and very lonely men who believe that survival depends on constant vigilance and a tough facade. Externally, at least, traditional male role behavior is exaggerated. Manhood is validated through physical strength and aggression. Expressions like anger are expected and acceptable but emotional sensitivity to others or the appearance of caring is regarded as dangerous.¹¹ Any display of characteristics or behavior traditionally associated with the feminine is scorned and avoided. Confined men do not trust other people, including other inmates, and they don’t talk to each other about matters of personal or emotional importance. In prison, any display of emotional sensitivity is interpreted as weakness, and, because weakness means vulnerability, the men keep their feelings private. Kept to oneself, personal information can’t be used detrimentally when it is in someone’s interest to do so. Friendship, in the sense of a trusted person to confide in, does not seem to exist in men’s prisons, not even, I discovered, among brothers. While a lack of emotional intimacy may characterize male relations generally, unlike men outside, many of the men inside also lack female confidantes. Indeed, men’s prisons are very lonely, desperate places.

I became acutely aware of this peculiar (to me) environment the first day in prison when I realized that, although an unfamiliar woman is hardly a common sight in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A Glimpse Inside
• 2 Rape Is the Problem
• 3 Profile of Convicted Rapists
• 4 Nothing Is Rape: Justifying Sexual Violence
• 5 No One Is a Rapist: Excusing Sexual Violence
• 6 Rape: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Crime
• 7 Isn’t Rape Men’s Problem?
• Afterword: Defending Against Rape
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index