RAPE

Rape: Consensus and Conflict Approaches

Rape: Consensus and Conflict Approaches

Introduction

What is common to acts of rape is sexual intercourse (or possibly some other sexual act) performed by one person on another in the absence of the second person's consent. It typically involves the use of overt force or threats, although it may instead involve coercion or occur under circumstances in which what we would count as consent could not have been given (as, for example, in statutory rape). It occurs in most if not all cultures, but its incidence varies widely. Nearly all rapists are men, and the overwhelming majority of victims are women, although some victims are young boys or, especially in settings such as prison, men.

The word 'rape' is derived from the Latin rapere and originally referred to the carrying off or pillaging of property. Gradually it took on a sexual meaning through singling out for particular attention the carrying off of a particular sort of quasi-property, namely women. In European and Euro-American societies women did not acquire most of the rights associated with legal personhood (e.g., the franchise and the right to bring suit in one's own name) until the twentieth century, and their earlier status, although not precisely that of property, bore important similarities to it. In particular, women were not legally or morally those who were wronged by harms done to them; rather, the injured parties were their fathers or, if they were married, their husbands.

A woman's chastity (virginity prior to marriage and sexual exclusivity after it) was of considerable value, first to ensure her marriage ability and later to guarantee that any children she bore were her husband's. Rape drastically reduced a woman's value, thus wronging the man who had a right to benefit from it. (In Athens in the fifth century b.c.e., for example, seduction of a married woman was a worse crime than rape, since more of value was stolen from the husband.) Under slavery in the United States, slave owners were taken to have the right of sexual access to their female slaves, and sexual intercourse forced on slave women by the men who owned them was not considered rape. (Ullman, 2007)

More recently, as part of women's fight for legal and moral personhood, there has been a shift toward considering rape as a crime against the woman herself. The harm done is no longer considered as a decrease in the value of something for someone else, but rather as a direct harm to the victim, a harm similar in many ways to the harm done to victims of (other sorts of) assault. With that shift it became possible to think of men and boys as victims of rape, although in many ways the crime remains gendered. Not only are the large majority of victims actually women, but male victims are put in a position (that of being the passive recipient of another's sexual activity) that is culturally encoded as female.

Consent and Conflict Approaches

Sexual activity between an adult and a child - 'intergenerational' ...