RAPE

Rape



Rape

Rape

The term, rape, refers to crimes of aggression which are acted out in sexual ways. In the large majority of cases, these crimes are enacted by adult men against women and girls. However, rape can also occur between adults and children (as in incest), between same sex individuals (as in prisons), and between minors (as in date rape). Historically and persisting throughout the twentieth century, rape also occurred during times of military conquest and civil war. Indeed, internationally, it was likely to occur wherever sharp discrepancies in power exist (as in the rape by Romans of third century B.C. Sabine women, as in the slave labor economy of the antebellum U. S. South, as in twentieth-century Balkans and Uganda, and among certain South African Catholic religious) (Allen, 1996).

The crime tends to be hidden and underreported. Those cases which enter legal systems as of 2000 tended not to reach conviction. Theories abound on causes, treatments, and legal issues. But clearly the crime is associated with male dominance and linked to age-old ideas which define women as property to be conquered, bought, or stolen. As of 2001, national and global attention to rape increased the likelihood of convicting perpetrators and achieving greater gender equity in access to human rights (Brown miller, 1975).

The term rape is currently defined in most states as engaging in sexual relations with a woman without her consent. Rape is nothing new and has been a problem for American women from colonial times (indeed for women everywhere since the dawn of history): There are records of complaints from as early as 1768 and through the Revolutionary War that British soldiers were raping colonial American women, and George Washington on July 22, 1780, sentenced one of his own soldiers to death for raping a woman. Since this time, however, the legal definition of rape has changed in many states and even among the international community (Crenshaw, 1991).

According to Martha A. Field in Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice, in the United States historically rape was defined as “carnal knowledge of a woman by a man not her husband, by force and against her will.” This definition's assumption that a husband has sexual privilege over his wife reveals the persistent belief that marriage gives men power over women, an imbalance which denies to females the autonomy and self determinism males enjoy. The bias here is linked to fundamental global patriarchal patterns which systematically treat women as transferrable goods (echoed in marriage rituals in which fathers “give away” their daughters).

The legal tendency to see force and resistance as defining elements and to require corroborating evidence complicates the task of assigning responsibility by shifting attention to victim response; similarly, tendencies to include as evidence possibly damaging information regarding the victim contribute to blaming the victim not the perpetrator. In the 1990s the U. S. federal code identified the intention “to abuse, humiliate, harass, [or] degrade” (18 U. S. § 2245) as essential to the crime of sexual assault, thus emphasizing the ...