We are never told her name. None of the soldiers encircling her would have been interested in such niceties. The only relevant considerations were that she was Vietnamese and a virgin. ‘It was like an animal pack’, recalled one of the participants, adding, ‘We just stood in line and we screwed her’. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the unnamed woman turned toward him, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’, she said in English: ‘Why?... why are you doing this to me?’
Whether in the jungles of Vietnam, in detention centres in Iraq, or inside a cottage in a sleepy hamlet in Cornwall, rape destroys the victim’s trust in the world. The realization that other individuals are impervious to one’s suffering never wanes.
Yet violent sexuality is alarmingly common. Last year, over 13,000 women in Britain reported being raped. And this statistic ignores the fact that most rapes are never spoken about. According to the British Crime Survey, only one in six rapes are even reported to the police. Shame and fear still cripple many women’s lives.
Why do is rape so common? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the fusion of aggression and sexuality continues to appeal to some men. When talking to rapists, it is striking how frequently they situate their abuses in a framework associated with dating culture, bizarrely employing the language of romance in the midst of the assault. When confronted with evidence of pain, they either eroticise that pain or demand a simulation of gratification from their victim. Even more disturbingly, rapists frequently insist that they (not their victims) are in fact traumatised by the assault. During the Vietnam War, for instance, the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was given to servicemen who had suffered the ‘trauma’ of raping and slaughtering other individuals. During the so-called War on Terror, the psychological stress of military service is also being used to justify the sexual torture that took place in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. In this way, the body-in-pain is relocated to the perpetrator of sexual violence.
Sympathy for the abuser is not restricted to war zones. In the UK, there is considerable scepticism expressed towards women who accuse men of rape. In fact, false accusations are less common in rape than in other criminal cases. But any woman with a slightly adventurous history or hailing from a powerless group is right to fear that it is not worthwhile making a complaint.
Furthermore, the chances that a victim will see her alleged abuser convicted is declining. In the 1970s, around one-third of reported rape cases ended in convictions. This dropped to around one-quarter by the 1980s. Today, only five per cent of rapes reported to the police end up with a conviction. In some areas, conviction rates are even lower. Are we to believe that women living in Gloucestershire, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire are particularly prone to lying about rape? In those counties, for every 100 women who report being raped, only two men are ever convicted.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the dramatic advances in rape reform since the 1970s have failed. Of course, no one is denying that the justice system has improved. The times when judges could crack jokes in open court about the colour of a victim’s knickers are over.
However, the gap between law in the books and law in practice is still wide. Informal norms of case processing, judgement, and sentencing have remained substantially unchanged. Legal decisions continue to be profoundly affected by assumptions about what constitutes ‘real rape’.
Rewriting the law has not been enough. Rape myths are still pervasive. In particular, the erroneous belief that victims somehow ‘brought it on themselves’ has been particularly robust. An ICM poll of October 2005 found that one in every three respondents believed that women who acted flirtatiously were partially or totally responsible if they ended up being raped and one in four respondents believed that women who wore sexy clothes were also partially or totally responsible if she was raped. Both men and women proved willing to blame the victim.
In other areas, debate about rape is silenced. Some forms of sexual abuse remain so taboo that victims have great difficulty reporting. Forced sex within marriage is hardly unusual, for instance. The rape of men has also remained out of bounds in the rape debates. The gay community is reluctant to discuss the extent of the problem – perhaps legitimately fearing its link to a homophobic agenda. The abuse of men by women is another deadly secret. The tired mantra of the 1970s according to which all men are ‘rapists, rape fantasists or beneficiaries of a rape culture’ has become mere wishful thinking in the face of what happened at Abu Ghraib. It also ignores the fact that much child sexual abuse is carried out by women.
Not confronting these myths is bad for all of us. The politics of sexual pleasure has been displaced into the politics of sexual fear. Such negative politics leaves no room for anything save the paradox of telling women and other potential victims that they need to purchase freedom by investing in deadbolt locks. At the same time as we reduce tolerance for displays of macho sexual aggression in daily life, we need to educate men into a positive male erotics. Finally, victims of abuse too often feel that they are to blame for their own victimisation. If we are to imagine a world without the spectre of sexual violence hanging over each and every one of us, perpetrators have to be held fully accountable for their deeds. Too many of them been getting away with rape.
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