Such stats vary. The same source (if you look among countries in the article then jump to the article on Sweden) says Sweden has the 2nd highest rape rate, apparently it’s not included in the graph. Many people have specially negative feelings about the US (for whatever reasons) so let’s leave that country aside for a moment. The fact that generally advanced and orderly countries like Canada and Sweden are near the top of the list strongly suggests the obvious issue with reported rape rates as a measure of actual rapes: it heavily depends how likely women in a particular society are to report rapes (and the police to take the crime seriously and encourage such reports). That might vary so widely as to make comparisons of reported rape rates next to meaningless. In any case I don’t think the question was referring to variations in rape frequency among societies in normal circumstances of relative peace and order, but compared to circumstances like war (especially where rape is consciously used as a weapon), slavery (where it’s essentially legal for some people to commit rape), etc.
What’s dangerous is to put questions off limits for reasons of silly political correctness. Eventually that kind of societal self-lobotomizing is going to create real problems IMO.
I don’t know the answer to the question, or if it’s actually answerable. A basic issues would be how to rigorously define degrees of traumatization in comparing even victims who are relatively alike, let alone victims of very different background and experience. However I see the thesis of the question as at least plausible, that victims of serious crimes might be traumatized around the issue of ‘why me?’, which would be more of an issue if the crime is rare than very common or pandemic. OTOH one could postulate reasons it might be the opposite (the trauma might be mainly about fear of recurrence which would weigh more heavily on a victim of a common than a rare crime). Or perhaps the rareness of the crimes just doesn’t matter much in how victims react.
Good point. I was trying to consider how one could quantify degrees of rape trauma. A few ideas came to mind:
Financial impact on victim, e.g. combining lost earnings (e.g. due to time taken off from work due to stress, etc.) and cost of treatment/therapy/etc. One big problem with this is that costs can vary in different areas. E.g. how much do emergency rape crisis services cost in Serbia? How does that compare with the market price for rape crisis services in Turkey? If you have insurance, should you only count your co-pay or does the entire, “true” cost count? If you get scammed into paying too much for low-quality post-rape therapy from clinics in the low-rent district, should the amount you overpaid be imputed to the rapist or to your own gullibility?
Sentence given to rapist. E.g. if Suzie is raped by a rapist who gets 30 years in prison for his crime, and Ann is raped by someone else who, for some reason, only got 25 years for the crime, then Suzie would be deemed to have been more “traumatized” by the rape since obviously the criminal justice system saw that it was more serious than a rape that only deserves a piddling 25 years. Similar problems apply here. Why should we trust political opinions on sentencing? What if someone got a shorter sentence because they expressed remorse during the trial? Does remorse heal the victim in a directly proportional amount to the amount of sentence reduction they get for that remorse?
Some sort of customized psychological rating scale that considers a lot of variables and pops out a number at the end. “Aha, after running the numbers, it turns out you are currently at 34 Rape Crisis Points. At the 30 point level, you qualify as Severely Traumatized under the Benefits for Rape Victims Act of 2017 and are entitled to free therapy at State clinics.” Problem: Where would you begin? Maybe you could do a PhD dissertation just proposing an idea on how this could possibly be done.
Let me preface this reply with the fact that rape is ALWAYS wrong, and I would never dream of making light of anyone’s experience with rape. That said, in an effort to kick-start the common sense of some of the other posters, I’d like to compare this question to another that has been looked at statistically.
The above link answers a very similar question to the OP. If the ability for a victim to be compensated financially for a car accident, how often would those victims complain of injuries?
Replacing subjects in the above question with those from the OP: How does diminishing the ability of a rape victim to complain and/or be compensated and/or have the assailant punished affect the way the victims life proceeds after the assault?
In the US, SOP for a rape victim is to call the police, press charges, have the assailant thrown in jail, etc. The feelings stick around for a while. How would a school girl in Nigeria proceed after being raped? I don’t know, though she would no doubt feel violated. But I can imagine, without any means of having this person answer for his crimes, she would get on with her life because she doesn’t have any other choice.
Interested in others actually answering the OP’s question rather than playing coy with it.
Does it really ask a similar question? Because isn’t some of the difficulty of whiplash the idea that it’s really hard to diagnose other than from someone’s word, so that you have no real objective test for whether it has happened?
I’d think a similar question to the OP is: In places where people lose a lot of children, is the death of a child less traumatic because it’s almost expected or is it more traumatic because of the sense of inevitability and hopelessness?
I agree that’s a better analogy and in fact the OP’s question is a variation on one of the most basic about human existence: is the subjective experience of human suffering at all relative to expectations? To what extent can you ‘get used to anything’?
We all know that life for most humans was way more difficult, scary and often horrible for almost all of history than it is for most people who’d post on a board like this now (and for a large absolute number of people in the world not likely to be posting here, it still is). Did the observation of those people that ‘that’s just the way life is’ make them suffer less anguish? Again, getting an exact answer to this depends a lot on the basically impossible task of quantitatively measuring mental anguish.
But I think it’s fairly obvious that at least to some degree people nowadays with soft and good lives in the rich world (there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s what humanity has striven for for 1,000 of years) would fall apart more easily in the face of the difficulties and horrors most people had to face through most of history and some still do now.
I fall apart dealing with things that my ancestors would have shrugged over, that’s for certain. My suffering muscles are flabby.
But I think a lot of that is the perception that I’m falling from a 9 on the happiness scale down to a 7, where my ancestors might have been operating at a 4 to start with.
Or, maybe that’s really sort of a modernity chauvinism speaking.
I think the story of Pitcairn Island, settled by the descendants of the Bounty Mutineers speaks volumes. Rape was cultural there and no law ever tried to stop it until about 10 years ago when it made national headlines. It was pretty much a fact of life for all women there - they would be raped, starting at a very young age.
I read a book on the subject, and trial and aftermath, and I clearly remember older women (e.g. late middle age) making fun of and belittling the accuser for making such a big deal out of it. So, I’d say that if they had been traumatized at the time, they got over it.
Look it up some time - it’s a pretty horrible place to grow up female.
A possibly similar question: was the death of a child less traumatic 250 years ago, when the average family would have 7 children with 3 surviving to adulthood (or something) than it is today?
I certainly don’t think that’s a prima facie ridiculous idea, although of course it’s the kind of thing that in some light sounds incredibly insulting.
I think that is a great example and in line with how I read the original question. Leaving aside physical trauma, the key thing is that the amount of emotional trauma could vary significantly depending on cultural context.
What Assange is accused of, at least in the case where the woman was asleep at the time of the relevant incident, would have been classified as rape in the UK and Ireland too (don’t know about any other countries). Sweden’s rape laws are actually extremely defendant-friendly - I wrote about this subject here. Its higher reported rape rate may well be due to alleged *victims *applying an usually broad definition, but it is certainly not due to an unusually broad *legal *definition.
I would question whether any such cultures exist from the point of view of the people who are subject to rape (mainly women and perhaps children). Of course, these may not be the same people whose opinion is taken into account in assessing the “cultural view”.
Another thing to consider, especially in situations like Bosnia where mass rape was used to destroy the cultural identity of the victims, or in war torn areas, is that the inhabitants may already be struggling with PTSD, which will make recovery even more difficult.
Like suffering, the ability to recover from a trauma is difficult to gauge objectively, but the medical and scientific communities have started looking into what factors make an individual more resilient. Things to take into account include:
general health, physical and mental, of the victim
family support
community support
health resources available
individual’s sense of control/power over their body and life
The more of these that are available, the better chance the individual has to recover. The more of those items that are lacking, the less chance, and I would expect, more suffering the victim endures.
First a slight hijack. It is absolutely absurd for the compiler to include Saudi Arabia on that chart. Superficially it looks to be one of the safest places on Earth for women. In reality, of course, a country in which the victim herself could well be charged if she reports being raped with the rapist unlikely to be prosecuted (unless four or five Muslim men testify they witnessed the act), any figures for rape are completely meaningless.
Now, retournons a nos moutons. I too don’t completely understand the OP’s question. But any suggestion that rape is somehow less traumatic if everybody’s doing it or having it done to them is just plain wrong. The trauma consists in the act itself, it matters not a jot whether it’s rife in that location and an everyday occurrence.The women in sacked cities in Greek/Roman times knew well that violent rape would be their lot. Think their experience was any more bearable or painful because they knew it was coming? Rape is rape is rape, wherever or whenever or however.
IMHO statements like these are incompatible with human nature as we observe it. Or at least as I observe it, anyway.
People get a lot more riled up about things which violate their expectations or sense of entitlement. People accept things that are part of life. “That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s always been”.
This is why people the beneficiaries of social change frequently end up angrier than they were beforehand - their lives are improved, but their expectations are increased even more, so net-net they end up behind.
I agree. There was a thread weeks/months ago about what people would think if they got transported back in time and a bunch of women, including me, commented how awful it would be. This isn’t because we think that there were never any happy women, but when you know things could be better, it’s pretty hard to settle for worse. If you don’t know? Well, it might make you accept it, or it might make you hopeless.
If this were true, we’d be able to reliably predict how women react to rape. We can’t–some women will go back to work the next day after the horrible event, while others will be incapacitated or even suicidal for months as a result of the trauma.
I think part of the confusion here is that the OP generalized a little too broadly. The question “are rape victims less traumatized” implies that all rape victims are affected equally. A better-phrased question might be, “are rape victims less likely to be traumatized in ways that impact their long-term quality of life…”
This gives us some potential statistical tools we could apply. For instance, we could compare among various cultures the rate of suicides for rape victims relative to the rate for the general population, or frequencies of PTSD diagnoses among rape victims. Naturally, none of these are perfect proxy for “trauma,” and all of them have the same self-reporting biases as every study ever published on the subject. But it at least gives us a foothold to discuss the question scientifically.
No.
Just because some men are beyond asshole does not mean all are. Which means just because most marriages were arranged does not mean women universally disliked or did not enjoy conjugal relations. However…
Even stories from 50 to 75 years ago are replete with stories that even modern marriages in the days before premarital sex was common would lead to unhappy situations, unwanted sex, and marital violence. Even today when divorce is an easy choice there is still spousal abuse.
So not every marriage was an abuse or a rape, even “way back when”, but when you partner was not your choice and divorce or the law was not an option - odds are the incidence was higher. Women “put up with it” just as minorities have put up with NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy, simply because they had no choice.
So you have to ask yourself - based on human nature, how many people/men are instinctively abusive and would take advantage of their better position and better strength? Whatever proportion you come up with - that’s the answer as to how prevalent.
“Things were different then” is just a way of saying the people who were hurt then had no option other than to suffer in silence.
Abuse due to racial discrimination is a good analogy. Do you think the insult and hurt to blacks under Jim Crow and its unspoken offshoots was any less traumatic because it happened to every black person? It think things are more outspoken today about such problems simply because the option of speaking out, and the likelihood someone will listen, is greater.