Your continued donations keep Wikipedia running!    

Rape

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Contents

[hide]

 

Rape is, in most jurisdictions, a crime defined as sexual intercourse or penetration without valid consent by both parties. In many jurisdictions, the penetration of the anus or the vagina can be considered rape (although most jurisdictions require the penetration of the vagina by a penis), and many jurisdictions, the penetration of either the vagina or the anus need not be by a penis, but can be by other objects such as a finger or a dildo. Some jurisdictions expand the definition of rape further to include other sexual acts without valid consent, including oral copulation and masturbation. (Therefore, in most jurisdictions, "rape" can only be perpetrated by a male against a female, or a female against a male, while in other jurisdictions male-male and female-female sexual relations can also constitute rape.) The lack of valid consent does not necessarily mean that the victim explicitly refused to give consent; generally, where consent was obtained by physical force, threat of injury, or other duress, or where consent was given by a person whose age was below the age of consent, a person who was intoxicated by drugs or alcohol, or a person who was mentally impaired by illness or developmental disability, the consent is considered invalid. (When the sexual activity involved a person whose age was below the age of consent, the crime defined is often known as "statutory rape," although a number of jurisdictions use terms such as "unlawful sexual intercourse" to avoid the forcible connotation of the word "rape.") The word originates from the Latin verb rapere: to seize or take by force. The Latin term for the act of rape itself is raptus.

Originally, the word rape was akin to rapine, rapture, raptor, and rapacious. Rape could denote abduction as well as forcible sexual activity, and it also referred to the more general violations, such as looting, destruction, and capture of citizens that are inflicted upon a town or country during war, eg. the Rape of Nanking. Today, some dictionaries still define rape to include any serious and destructive assault against a person or community. This article, however, focuses on sexual assault.

History

The concept of rape, both as an abduction and in the sexual sense, makes its first appearance in early religious texts. In Greek mythology, for example, the rape of women, as exemplified by the rape of Europa, and male rape, found in the myth of Laius and Chrysippus, were mentioned. Different values were ascribed to the two actions. The rape of Europa by Zeus is represented as an abduction followed by consensual lovemaking, similar perhaps to the rape of Ganymede by Zeus, and went unpunished. The rape of Chrysippus by Laius, however, is represented in darker terms, and was known in antiquity as "the crime of Laius", a term which came to be applied to all male rape. It was seen as an example of hubris in the original sense of the word, i.e. violent outrage, and its punishment was so severe that it destroyed not only Laius himself, but also his son, Oedipus.

In antiquity and until the late Middle Ages, rape was seen in most cultures less as a crime against a particular girl or woman than against the male figure she "belonged" to. Thus, the penalty for rape was often a fine, payable to the father or the husband whose "goods" were "damaged". That position was later replaced in many cultures by the view that the woman, as well as her lord, should share the fine equally.

In some laws the woman might be married to the rapist instead of his receiving the legal penalty. This was especially prevalent in laws where the crime of rape did not include, as a necessary part, that it be against the woman's will, thus dividing the crime in the current meaning of rape, and a means for a man and woman to force their families to permit marriage.

In pagan Rome, it was expected that an honorable woman, being raped, would like Lucretia remove the stain on her honor by committing suicide. The failure of Christian women, having been raped in the sack of Rome, to kill themselves was commented on by pagans with shock and horror; St. Augustine dedicated an entire book of The City of God to defending these women's honor and chastity. Early Christianity also maintained, as paganism did not, that slave women were entitled to chastity, and that therefore a slave woman could be raped, and honored as martyrs slave women who resisted their masters.

In Roman law, the crime of rape was not defined by the lack of consent of the woman, but by her removal from her family; the change was described by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England:

The civil law [of Rome] punishes the crime of ravishment with death and confiscation of goods: under which it includes both the offence of forcible abduction, or taking away a woman from her friends, of which we last spoke; and also the present offence of forcibly dishonoring them; either of which, without the other, is in that law, sufficient to constitute a capital crime. Also the stealing away a woman from her parents or guardians, and debauching her, is equally penal by the emperor's edict, whether she consent or is forced: “five volentibus, five nolentibus mulieribus, tale facinus fuerit perpetratum.” And this, in order to take away from women every opportunity of offending in this way; whom the Roman laws suppose never to go astray, without the seduction and arts of the other sex: and therefore, by restraining and making so highly penal the solicitations of the men, they meant to secure effectually the honor of the women... But our English law does not entertain quite such sublime ideas of the honor of either sex, as to lay the blame of a mutual fault upon one of the transgressors only: and therefore makes it a necessary ingredient in the crime of rape, that it must be against the woman's will.

Rape, in the course of warfare, also dates back to antiquity, ancient enough to have been mentioned in the Bible.

The Greek, Persian and Roman troops would routinely rape women and boys in the conquered towns.

Rape, as an adjunct to warfare, was prohibited by the military codices of Richard II and Henry V (1385 and 1419 respectively). These laws formed the basis for convicting and executing rapists during the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453).

Since the 1970's many changes have occurred in the perception of sexual assault due in large part to the feminist movement and its public characterization of rape as a crime of power and control rather than purely of sex. In some countries the women's liberation movement of the 1970's created the first rape crisis centers. This movement was led by the National Organization for Women (NOW) ([1]). One of the first two rape crisis centers, the D.C. Rape Crisis Center ([2]), opened in 1972. It was created to promote sensitivity and understanding of rape and its effects on the victim.

Marital rape first became a crime in the United States in the state of South Dakota in 1975. Marital rape is not a crime at common law. In the 1980s, date or acquaintance rape first gained acknowledgment. On July 5, 1993, marital rape became a crime in all 50 states, under at least one section of the sexual offense codes. An important part of the history of rape is the foundation of RAINN in 1994 by Tori Amos and Scott Berkowitz. RAINN is central to the modern history of the rape crisis movement as it founded the national sexual assault hotline and provides statistics and information to the media.

On September 2, 1998 the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda made sexual violence a war crime. Current topics being debated are the peripheralized victims of rape — male rape victims of both male and female rapists, female-female rape and parental-rape incest victims, LGBT domestic violence and rape victims, marital rape victims and child sexual abuse victims. Other emerging issues are the concept of victim blame and its causes, male rape survivors, male-male rape, female sexual aggression, new theories of rape and gender, date rape drugs and their effects as well as the psychological effects of rape trauma syndrome.

Non-sexual usage of term

English rape was in use since the 14th century in the general sense of "seize prey, take by force," from raper, an Old French legal term for "to seize", in turn from Latin rapere "seize, carry off by force, abduct". The Latin term was also used for sexual violation, but only very rarely. The legendary event known as the "Rape of the Sabine Women", while ultimately motivated sexually, did not entail sexual violation of the Sabine women on the spot, who were rather abducted, and then implored by the Romans to marry them (as opposed to striking a deal with their fathers or brothers first, as would have been required by law).

Though the sexual connotation is today dominant, the word "rape" can be used in non-sexual context in literary English. In "the rape of the Silmarils" in J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Silmarillion", the word "rape" is used with its old meaning of "seizing and taking away". In Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, the word "rape" is used hyperbolically, exaggerating a trivial violation against a person. Compare also the adjective rapacious which retains the generic meaning.

Sometimes, the word rape is used colloquially to dysphemistically describe forms of non-sexual unwelcome conduct ("My team got raped on the field yesterday"), or metaphorically as in "the rape of the Earth" referring to environmental destruction, implying a female gender of the Earth (Gaia). Other than in literary usage discussed above, this use of the term is unrelated to the original sense of "abduction" or "carrying off" and implies a comparison with sexual violation. In "The Rape of Nanking" actual mass rape and mass murder is summarized by naming the city as the object of the rape.

Law

Common law

In the common law of the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, rape traditionally describes the act of a man who forces a woman to have sexual intercourse with him. Until the late 20th Century, a husband forcing sex on his wife was not considered "rape", since a woman (for certain purposes) was not considered a separate legal person with the right of refusal, or sometimes was deemed to have given advanced consent to a life-long sexual relationship through the wedding vows. However, most Western countries have now legislated against this exception. They now include spousal rape (vaginal intercourse), and acts of sexual violence, such as forced anal intercourse which were traditionally barred under sodomy laws, in their definitions of "rape". The term "rape" is sometimes considered "loaded", and many jurisdictions recognize broader categories of sexual assault or sexual battery instead.

There is a clear mens rea element in the law regarding rape i.e. the accused must be aware that the victim is not consenting or might not be consenting. However, different jurisdictions vary in how they place the onus of proof with regards to belief of consent.

Under English law, until May 2005, a "genuine" belief that the victim was consenting, even if unreasonable, was sufficient. The law was changed so that belief of consent is now only a defense if the belief is both genuine and reasonable.

U.S. law

There is no national rape law in the United States. Each state has its own laws concerning sexual aggression. More than half the states use narrowly defined, traditional laws that focus on the institutional, gender-specific (male perpetrator/female victim), and sexual nature of the crime. The other states use liberalized laws that place greater emphasis on the individual, gender-neutral, and violent nature of sexual coercion. However, current laws in approximately 12 states still have not acknowledged female-perpetrated sexual coercion as a potential variation of sexual aggression. Thus there is no single, universal, gender-neutral legal classification about what constitutes rape in the United States in 2006.

English law

Under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which came into force on May 1, 2004, rape in England and Wales was redefined from non-consensual vaginal or anal intercourse, and is now defined as non-consensual penis penetration of the vagina, anus or mouth of another person. The changes also made rape punishable with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. They also altered the requirements of the defence of mistaken belief of consent so that one's belief must be now both genuine and reasonable (see above under common law)

Although a woman who forces a man to have sex cannot be prosecuted for rape under English law, if she helps a man commit a rape she can be prosecuted for the crime. A woman can also be prosecuted for causing a man to engage in sexual activity without his consent, a crime which also carries a maximum life sentence if it involves penetration of the mouth, anus or vagina. The statute introduces a new sexual crime, "assault by penetration", with the same punishment as rape. It is committed when someone sexually penetrates the anus or vagina with a part of his or her body, or with an object, without that person's consent.

United States: rape reporting

According to USA Today reporter Kevin Johnson, "no other major category of crime - not murder, assault or robbery - has generated a more serious challenge of the credibility of national crime statistics" as has the crime of rape. He says:

"There are good reasons to be cautious in drawing conclusions from reports on rape. The two most accepted studies available - the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report and the Justice Department's annual National Crime Victimization Survey - each have widely acknowledged weaknesses."

The FBI's report fails to report rapes with male victims, both of adults and children, fails to report non-forcible rapes of either gender by either gender, and reflects only the number of rapes reported to police. The Justice Department's survey solicits information from people 12 and older, excluding the youngest victims of rape (and incest). However, by using a random national telephone survey of households, the National Crime Victimization Survey could pick up rapes unreported to the police. In addition, since both official reports collect rape data from states with widely divergent standards and definitions on what constitutes rape, uniform reporting is impossible.

The latest official attempt to improve the tracking of rape, the National Violence Against Women survey was first published in 1998 by the National Institute of Justice and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its authors have acknowledged that they used different methodologies with "relatively high" margins of error. The 2000 report notes that "because annual rape victimization estimates (nationwide) are based on responses from only 24 women and 8 men (emphasis added) who reported being raped, they should be viewed with caution." The report goes on to note that it fails to report rapes perpetrated against children and adolescents, was well as those who were homeless, or living in institutions, group facilities, or in households without telephones.

In addition, since there is no national standard, much less a uniform national standard for defining and reporting male-male and female-perpetrated rapes, since more than half the states use traditional gender-specific (limited to male perpetration against females) rape law, and since rape laws in approximately 12 states do not even acknowledge the possibility, much less the occurrence, of female-perpetrated rape, the occurrences of these types of rape are likely to be significantly underreported as compared to the well-known but biased reports of rapes perpetrated by men against women.

United States: rape statistics

Rape crisis statistics can be found from the FBI and the Bureau of Justice as well as the CDC and RAINN (who uses those resources as a source).

Types of rape

Rape of children by parents, elder relatives, and other responsible elders

This form of rape is incest when committed by the teen's parents or close relatives such as grandparents, aunts and uncles. It is considered incestuous in nature but not in form when committed by other elders, such as priests, nuns or other religious authorities, school teachers, or therapists, to name a few, on whom the child is dependent. Psychologists estimate that 40 million adults, 15 million of those being men (Adams 1991), in the United States were sexually abused in childhood often by parents, close relatives and other elders — of both genders — on whom they were dependent.

Children, including but not limited to adolescents, raped by their parents and other close elders are often called 'secret survivors' by psychologists, as they often are unable or unwilling to tell anyone about these rapes due to implicit or explicit threats by the adult rapist, fear of abandonment by the rapist, and/or overwhelming shame. Since the signs of these insidious rapes are usually invisible except to trained professionals these children often suffer ongoing offenses in silence until independence from the adult rapist is attained. By that time, the statute of limitations is often long-expired, the adult victim's repressed memories are often considered inadmissible as evidence and the teen-rapist is able to escape justice. (It should be noted that repressed memories are a hotly debated topic in the psychological community, and many psychologists do not believe in their existence. For more information, see the "repressed memories" article.) In addition, rapists who rape their own children are considered less culpable, legally, than other rapists in most US states.

Statutory rape

Main article: Statutory rape

National and/or regional governments, citing an interest in protecting "young people" (variously defined but sometimes synonymous with minors), treat any sexual contact with such a person as an offense (not always categorised as "rape"), even if he or she agrees to the sexual activity. The offense is often based on a presumption that people under a certain age do not have the capacity to give informed consent. The age at which individuals are considered competent to give consent is called the age of consent. This varies in different countries and regions, and in the US ranges from 12 to 21. Sex which violates age-of-consent law, but is neither violent nor physically coerced, is sometimes described as "statutory rape", a legally-recognized category in the United States. The French film Strayed, screened in 2003, depicts a rarely-shown example of what would be classified statutory rape in some US states by an adult woman against a 17-year-old male adolescent.

Acquaintance ("date") rape

The term, "acquaintance rape" (or "date rape") refers to rape or non-consensual sexual activity between people who are already acquainted, or who know each other socially — friends, acquaintances, people on a date, or even people in an existing romantic relationship — where it is alleged that consent for sexual activity was not given, or was given under duress. The vast majority of rapes are committed by people who already know the victim. [3] Different countries have different rape laws. In many countries it is not possible to commit the crime of rape against one's own wife. If two people are regularly sexually intimate, in many countries it is not a crime for one partner to have sex with their sleeping or drunk partner even though that partner did not give express consent. In fact, rape laws vary greatly from country to country.

Spousal Rape

Research has established many times over that partner rape on women by men takes place at a high frequency:

In 1975, the results of an American study on many rape situations were published. Diana E.H. Russell was so appalled by her findings on rape in marriage that she decided to conduct a research project on this area alone. From the 930 interviews conducted with women from a cross section of race and class, Russell concluded that rape in marriage was the most common yet most neglected area of sexual violence (Russell, Diana E.H. 'Rape in Marriage' MacMillan Publishing Company, USA 1990)

In 1994, Patricia Easteal, then Senior Criminologist at the Australian Institute of Criminology, published the results of survey on sexual assault in many settings. The respondents were survivors of numerous forms of sexual assault. Of these, 10.4% had been raped by husbands or de-factos, with a further 2.3 per cent raped by estranged husbands/defactos. 5.5 percent were raped by non-cohabiting boyfriends (Easteal, P. "Voices of the Survivors", Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, 1994).

David Finkelhor & Kersti Yllo's famous 1985 study estimated that 10 to 14 per cent of all married American women have been or will be raped by their spouses . (Finkelhor, D. and Yllo, K., "License to Rape", The Free Press, New York 1985)

In the UK, statistics disseminated by the Rape Crisis Federation yield the information that the most common rapists are current and ex-husbands or partners (Myhill & Allen, Rape and Sexual Assault of Women: Findings from the British Crime Survey)

Other figures estimate that one in seven women is raped by a sexual intimate. For a brief overview view of partner rape, see STAR Library - Marital Rape

Spousal rape also occurs in lesbian and gay relationships. It is not known to what extent women sexually assault male partners.

Due to popular stereotypes of "real" rape, it is often assumed that if a couple have been sexually intimate, a partner rape is not as traumatic as other types of rape. However the research of Finkelhor and Yllo (1985) and Bergen (1996) reveals that victims of marital/partner rape suffer longer lasting trauma than victims of stranger rape. One reason for this is thought to be the lack of social validation that prevents a victim from getting access to support. Domestic violence services have made inroads in addressing this problem.

Gang rape

Group rape (also known as "gang" or "pack" rape) occurs when a group of people participate in the