Term 2, week 1: Rape and rape myths

"a female slave has ... an admitted right, and is considered under a moral obligation, to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to - though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to loathe him - he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations."
- John Stuart Mill (1869), The Subjection of Women

"Women have very little idea of how much men hate them."
- Germaine Greer (1970), the Female Eunuch

Rape is a difficult topic to write about. On one hand, many people would agree with Mill that it is "the lowest degradation of a human being" - worse than violent assault or even torture. (Anyone who starts a fight (or plays rugby) is consenting to being assaulted; masochists consent to being tortured. By definition, it's not possible to consent to being raped.) On the other hand, feminists have identified rape as being part of a spectrum of male violence against women and girls - the extreme end, but it still has something in common with other parts of the spectrum, from soft porn and blonde jokes to abuse and domestic violence. Rape is at once extreme and typical - a crime which is universally denounced, but one which carries a message (men's hatred and fear of women) that is absolutely normal and everyday.

How does a male-dominated society deal with this contradiction? Essentially (feminists would argue), by denying the reality of rape. We looked at some key rape myths in the lecture. Firstly, rape is informally defined along "ideal victim"/"ideal offender" lines. A woman who is raped by a stranger in a dark alley is a real rape victim; a woman raped in her own home by her boyfriend should kick him out and be more careful in future. Secondly, rape is informally defined - and, until quite recently, was legally defined - as something that doesn't happen within a marriage: it was only in 1994 that the law was changed so that a married man could be found guilty of raping his wife. Thirdly, a lot of weight is given to the man's state of mind; the myth here is that a man can only commit rape if he thinks he's committing rape. Again, this is an area where the law has changed relatively recently: until the Sexual Offences Act 2003, a man accused of rape could claim that he "honestly believed" the victim had consented, and this would be a defence against the charge. (The defendant now has to show that he had a reasonable belief in consent, which is a lot more demanding.) Lastly, when a rape case comes to court, there is what you could call a professional myth: the myth that rape can be treated in just the same as any other crime, and that justice will be done in the same way. The reality is that women reporting rape, who have had to get through a massive obstacle course in order to get to court, now face the same obstacles all over again in the form of the first three myths - which live on in the minds of the jury (and can be exploited by defence lawyers), even if they aren't supported any more by the letter of the law.

The feminist analysis is powerful; you don't have to agree with every detail of it (for example, describing everyday forms of sexism as male violence) to think that it can tell us a lot about how rape is dealt with in our society. But, as it often does, the feminist analysis here leaves us with a question: what is to be done? How can the under-reporting, under-prosecution and under-conviction of rape charges be addressed?