Please understand that I do not mean to make light of sexual assault. I am asking to better understand it from a sociological perspective, even if the question is politically incorrect.
Does the severity of the victim’s suffering depend on their expectations of whether it’s likely to happen to them?
In cultures/situations where rape happens often – say, prisons and pillaged villages of the popular imagination – are rape victims less traumatized because it’s happening to everyone else too, more because there’s an increased sense of helplessness and the feeling that justice will never be sought, or does it just not have significant impact on the victim experience?
Sorry I do not understand what you mean by “don’t effectively police it?”
Per this wikipedia chart, USA has the unfortunate distinction of being the third in the world for rape rates. Are you saying
That would be the cultures/situations in the USA/UK/Canada - right ?
This is a dangerous line of thought. This is like saying Jews in the concentration camp were less traumatized because there were other Jews around.
Rape is crime regardless of whether the victim feels traumatized or not - in fact many victims may blame themselves or try to commit suicide. It makes no sense to discuss whether the raped person feels traumatized or not since the person does not have a normal mental state after the crime.
I don’t want this to degenerate into an argument about which country is rapeiest, so yeah, whichever countries, cultures, or situations where rape is more common, and where victims are aware that it happens often – versus places where a rape would make national headlines because it’s so rare, for example. Does a victim’s expectation of their likelihood of getting raped affect their suffering?
Yes, that’s essentially the same question (whether it is less traumatic to suffer alone than with a group of other sufferers, either in their immediate vicinity or in their shared environment/culture), but please, let’s leave the Holocaust out of this. It’s a complex and touchy enough subject as it is.
It is absolutely a crime, and absolutely heinous, and of course the victim is not in a normal mental state afterward, hence the “trauma”. I do not condone rape or wish to defend rapists. But I would still like to learn about the question.
I once talked to someone who worked with women who’d been raped during the Bosnian conflict. She said that the typical American/European therapeutic approach–talk through what’s happened–was wrong for these women. They had no experience of dealing with emotional trauma that way and really didn’t want to discuss their experiences.
That’s not exactly what you are asking about, but it always fascinated me. Looking back, I wish I’d asked whether these were rural women or city dwellers, because you’d expect the populace of Sarajevo to be pretty cosmopolitan.
I think the prevalence of a bad thing happening tends to lessen the reaction to some extent, though the lessened reaction doesn’t mean that the person is in some sort of healthy mental state. So I guess I would guess that the victim is both less and more traumatized. Less by the individual act if they accept it as normal, and more by the surrounding culture so that if they were removed from that culture they would have a tough time being able to live free of the fear and scars that culture leaves behind.
You just restated the same thing. Define suffering? Its like saying, do lobotomy survivors suffer more or less !! They lose the mental capacity to think/feel like a normal human being - they are suffering even if they don’t feel or say it.
I see the Holocaust as very analogous - why leave it out ?
And Rape is not ?
Highlight mine. if the victim is not in a normal mental state - the victim is traumatized - whether he or she says so or not. I think you answered your question.
Thats admirable but the question still does not make sense.
I’m not sure I understand the question -
In cultures where the chastity of women is at a premium, and women who are raped are considered “damaged goods” socially, the trauma is probably stronger, whereas in modern western society the trauma is perhaps a bit less… not because the trauma or violation is less, but because the social support sympathizes and tends to help the victim get past the damage - whereas, in the other societies, it piles on the indignity that society “blames” the victim. Their social prospects are less, people shun them, treat them as unclean, and in extreme cases, the menfolk are so ashamed they actually kill the victim.
With no direct experience, I can only assume the trauma is the same no matter what the circumstances. The only difference is that maybe by the third or tenth offence the victim becomes a bit more numb to the situation. Some women in Bosnia report being raped at gunpoint by a group of their neighbours or former high school classmates. (a particularly nasty war) Others were imprisoned and used as sex slaves for months or years until they were forced to give birth to their rapists’ children. I suppose there is a degree of trauma, but that does not minimize the injury of only a single event vs. a long term event.
Very few human emotions and experiences can be “objectively” described to completeness, but we still try to talk about them to learn about them.
What jsgoddess said is a perfectly valid, and useful, example. (Though I hope there have been bigger sociological studies as well.)
I can’t reduce suffering to a single number, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m not asking whether rape suffering is increased by 7.224 points per 1.37% increase in rape prevalence. It’s a more open-ended question than that, because human beings are more complex than that. But that doesn’t mean we just can’t talk about their experiences at all.
Because it’s off-topic. Yes, it’s analogous, and if you’re that interested in it, please feel free to start another thread and link to it from here. I just don’t want this thread about rape to be hijacked by a discussion about Nazis, any more than I would want a discussion on Nazis to be hijacked by the Rwandan genocide.
I was talking about rape. I meant rape is already a sensitive enough topic without bringing the Nazis into it.
OK. The victim is traumatized regardless. I never doubted that, and if I did not make that clear, I’m sorry. But how is that trauma colored differently depending on rape prevalence? I think that’s a valid question, unless you’re saying that all rape victims experience the exact same response and feelings – which I doubt you believe.
Edit: For example, again, rape is never ok, and is traumatic for the sufferer, but being raped by your father vs being raped by a date is likely to traumatize the victim differently. It’s not quantifiable, but it’s still a difference. I’m asking for similar information on this particular topic.
Also, not to hijack, what about cultures where culturally rape is considered a positive event, or at least a neutral one?
I was in college when I read a story about a culture where people didn’t know where semen came from. They thought it was passed on from person to person and children had to get it from adults. So the male children would fellate the adult males, and swallow the semen. Kind of like how microbiomes are passed from parent to children, I guess they figured you had to swallow some semen before you could produce your own.
I wonder what psychological impact that had because there was a cultural norm promoting that kind of behavior. I assume the children who grow up in these cultures do not feel violated, ashamed, isolated or dirty because of this behavior compared to how they would feel in many other cultures. I’m not trying to justify it, just wondering what role those things play in the psychological damage.
The point is fundamentally, what role does shame, isolation, violation, and feeling defective and divided from society play in the trauma of sexual abuse and how much are those feelings due to the social environment you live in. I honestly don’t know.
Wesley Clark brings up a valid point I have wondered about myself in light of what I have heard anecdotally from a friend of mine serving in Afghanistan and some of things he has seen.
For anyone who has seen the movie or read the book ‘The Kite Runner’, you may remember references to something called Bacha Bazi (Bacha bazi - Wikipedia), which refers to the young boys that often dress up like girls to attract older men of established means and power to have sex with them. I had thought this was an uncommon practice, but my friend who does work all around Kabul with the military assures me he sees it happening even in the cities and it is not a forbidden or unusual activity. He says that while the Quran strictly forbids homosexuality, they define that practically as being in love with a member of the same sex being the problem. Actually having sex with them is fine because that’s just lust.
To hear by friend say it, many boys don’t seem to mind being placed in this position because it gives them a feeling of power over the older men, and the men, in turn, treat them well, shower them with gifts, and their good treatment can extend to additional privileges being given to their families. I’m told it is a great honor for the boy to find a wealthy suitor who wants to exclusively be with him, which is when the boy and his family (who are often poor) ascend in societal rank in addition to getting good treatment, because they are associated with the wealthy individual. He says this is particularly the case with the more tribal areas outside the cities, but to a lesser degree, it can affect business decisions and negotiations even in the cities.
The response to trauma is always highly personal. Just look at something like the death of a loved one. Regardless of how our society looks at death, I’ve seen individual responses all over the map, from people who seem to recover from it easily to people who never get over it.
It depends on the person. Sure there are societal aspects, but they don’t mean shit when it comes to any one person’s response.
Personally, I’ve never understood the “it happens to a lot of people” idea. My own pain has never been diminished by the idea that other people have had to deal with the same thing. The death of my father didn’t hurt less knowing that death is common and the death of a parent is something that most people experience at some point.
Victims of trauma feel how they feel and what “society” has to say about that is meaningless.
I disagree - if a woman lives in a society where all sex outside marriage is forbidden and she can be stoned to death for having been penetrated (“had sex”) during a rape that comes from society, and she’s going to be in a far worse position than a woman living in a society where she might get called a slut for being raped but not stoned to death.
All people who are raped are harmed, but how society reacts to that crime does matter and can add to the trauma.
Careful with charts like those; they’re rates of rape reported to the police. In those cultures in which rape isn’t prosecuted at all, it also isn’t reported.
Having lived through times during which sexual assault was not reported, rarely spoken about, and when spoken about usually presented as a moral failure on the assaulted person’s part, my own personal take is that being able to talk about it and knowing that reporting it will do something else than get me branded a stupid slut is helpful. I’ve heard other people say the same, that being able to talk about it and talk about it publicly helps* but I don’t have any links to actual studies.
among other things, it sends to others the message that they are not alone and that it isn’t they who are at fault; this in turn makes those doing the talking feel like we’re helping someone, not just pouring out the shame and pain.
It depends to some extent on cultural norms. Our current norms are subjective. Many states have age 16 as the age of consent, while historically girls married before age 16 (with all that involves) and this was normal. Although, to be fair, much evidence shows that even places where “weddings” take place at ages like 9 or 10, this is more symbolic and consummation may wait until after puberty. (Samuel Pepys, for example, married his wife when she was 15 but put off consummation for a while - waiting for the right time, which I assumed to be waiting for her to start having periods.) Of course, there are perverts in every society.
Similarly, the classical Greeks had an arrangement not much different than the Afghan description. Hence the jokes about Greeks. Presumably the arrangement did not feel like exploitation.
This goes back to the basic concept of “what is rape?” In many cultures around the world and in history, men and especially women were not given the opportunity to choose their partners. Being forced to marry someone who is not who you want, and being forced to have sex, was “normal” to those women - but the fact that society sanctioned it did not lessen the personal trauma of being sold off to a lecher twice her age who did what he wanted when he wanted with no care to the woman’s feelings.
Yarster
In Kabul it is certainly not that common, not openly visible, and most Afghans openly make fun of boy-lovers / bacha bozi. This word, bacha boz, also designate all forms of homosexuality, not only boys, even though the expression originally meant this.
I think it’s more useful to talk about different types of trauma than to think about “worse” or “less”. Marital rape is a pretty clear example of this. For most of human history, and many places today, “marital rape” was an oxymoron: women were not seen as having the right to refuse consent within a marriage. Given that, there were probably a lot of women having uncomfortable, awkward, boring sex they clearly and openly didn’t really want to have because it never occurred to either them or their partner that they had any right to refuse. We’d call that rape today, but it’s hard to imagine that the women experiencing it interpreted it as such, or found it traumatic in the same way, but it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t traumatic in some way–to have a constant reminder of your utter lack of bodily autonomy would be corrosive. And I am sure that there were also cases of violent, malicious rape within marriages at the same time, and those would have also created a different sort of trauma.
Rape victims don’t suffer from just the rape, but the aftermath.
I think this might be what you’re heading into, taking all other circumstances as read:
Someone is raped by another person where rape is considered wrong
Somewrong is raped by another person where rape may be considered wrong by some people, but lots of other people are also being raped. It’s going to happen to everyone at some point.
The latter person is less likely to be condemned as being “a bad person” who “deserved the rape.” They aren’t going to suffer the exact same trauma as someone who lives in a society where rape is not considered normal. They will suffer trauma, but it will be of a different kind.
During the closing months of WWII the Red Army engaged in a gang rapes on a horrendous scale across Prussia, Poland and East Germany. Before the Ivans arrived there was a tacit agreement among women not to discuss ‘it’. After, it was referred to in code, like ‘I had to concede’.
There was no policing of these crimes, even from the top - in response to complaints about Soviet rapes in Yugoslavia from fellow communists Stalin referred to it as having ‘fun with a woman’. With no help available from either the collapsing Nazi regime or the at best uncaring Soviet conquerors suicide was often the result. Things were especially bad for liberated Russian women, taken during the German advances of 1941 back to Germany only to be disillusioned about their imagined liberators in the worst possible way.
