Lamia
January 14, 2010, 11:54pm
100
Chessic_Sense:
I want to know “what the heck is ‘rape’”. It’s still not clear to me. If you say that the man has to know he’s harming the woman, then it’s 1% to 10%. If you say that it counts even if the man thinks he’s not harming anyone (e.g. We were half naked and about to do it when she passed out) then I think it’s like 35%.
There appear to be a lot of rapists who do not understand that they did in fact harm their victims, even when any reasonable person would recognize the situation as a clear-cut case of violent stranger rape. Many of these rapists seem to consider a woman who eventually stops struggling to be the same thing as a woman who freely consents to sex. I’m going to quote myself here from a GQ thread last month :
There have been studies of convicted rapists indicating that these men often believe (or at least claim) that their victim was consenting. This is true not merely in “date rape” situations, but in cases where the rapist did not know his victim and used a weapon to subdue her.
In Diana Scully and Joseph Marolla’s “Convicted Rapists’ Vocabulary of Motive: Excuses and Justifications” (Social Problems , Vol. 31, No. 5, Jun., 1984, pp. 530-544), 32 out of 114 convicted rapists who were interviewed in the study said that they had engaged in sexual acts with the victim but denied that it had been rape. (Another 35 denied having anything to do with the victim, and 47 admitted that they had committed rape.) But these men’s descriptions of the situation were inconsistent with both victim statements and the police reports – they often left out the fact that they’d pulled a weapon on the victim, that they had seriously injured the victim, or claimed that they knew the victim when they did not – and even in their own words many of these men would sound like rapists to any reasonable person.
Several admitted that their victims had either said “no” or resisted physically, but said they knew the victim had “really” wanted it. One man told a fanciful story about how his victim had stripped off her clothes and enthusiastically invited him to have sex with her – while he was (by his own admission) robbing her home! Of the 32 who said that what they had done wasn’t rape, 22 claimed that “once the rape began, the victim relaxed and enjoyed it”. Even with the convicted rapists who admitted to the researchers that what they had done was rape, 9 of 47 claimed that the victim had enjoyed the experience.
So for some significant number of rapists, it seems that there’s no way for a victim to be “explicit enough”. The rapist chooses to believe that the victim is consenting and having a good time, and the fact that she struggled, said “no”, and/or had to be subdued with a weapon is, in the rapists mind, irrelevant. One “denier” said “All women say ‘no’ when they mean ‘yes’”. This was a man who kidnapped and raped a 15 year old girl at knifepoint. One of the “admitters” said it had taken him years to realize that what he had done really was rape, saying “I just asked her nicely and she didn’t resist.” This may technically have been true, but it was also true that he didn’t merely ask her nicely, he “used a bayonet to threaten his victim, an employee of the store he had been robbing.”