Section 4: Normalizing Bodily Violations

Part II: Rape and Battering
Rape is an issue nested in our daily lives. Whether you personally have been raped or sexually assaulted in some way, or you know someone who has, or even if you only hear about it through the news, rape is a recurring issue in our society. Like many, someone very close to me was raped. It really isn’t my story to tell, and so I won’t go into specifics . . . but suffice to say, it was a jarring experience for everyone involved. When I was told, I had no idea what to do, or how to respond. I was 16 at the time, and I remember feeling frozen with shock and the fear of mistreating the situation. Even in her own family, there were some who didn’t believe her, or chose to remain silent and act like it had not happened. Like many victims of rape, she attempted to kill herself. Thankfully she did not succeed, but long after recovering from her attempt, she still bears the psychological scars of her terrifying experience. As we learned in the documentary Rape Is, rape “psychologically kills” its victims.
One of the chief problems with rape recovery is that many people do not know how to respond when someone they know has been raped, or even how to respond when they themselves have been raped. It is a common for the victims themselves to be blamed, or for the victim to place the blame on themselves. More often than should be, a victim will confess what has happened to him/her, and is met with skepticism and disbelief. In fact, just last week the Washington Post ran an article regarding a Maryland legislator who “invoked a 17th-century English jurist who instructed juries to be suspicious of women’s claims of rape.” ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/05/AR2007040502278.html )
Further adding to the confusion, in Acquaintance Rape: Revolution and Reaction, Paula Kamen discusses the anti-feminist backlash regarding the statistic that one in four college women are victims of rape or attempted rape. I was appalled to read that one explanation of the statistic was young women “mislabeling a wide array of normal, often unpleasant, sexual experiences as rape.” What exactly is normal about being forced into a sexual act?
In Battering: Who’s Going to Stop It?, Ann Jones outlines the true problem of why men’s abuse and raping of women is so prevalent: simply because they can. “There is no reason for a man who uses violence to change his behavior unless he begins to suffer some real consequences . . . right now, most batterers suffer no social or legal consequences at all for their criminal behavior.” There is no better example of this than the recent sentencing of Eugene Marriott, a minister from Maryland who was tried in a Fairfax county court for the brutal beating and rape of his ex-girlfriend behind a hotel. Though he initially faced a minimum 20-year sentence, his actual conviction whittled jail time away to a mere sixteen months—and it was not his first time being charged with a violent crime against a woman. Even more unbelievable is that, according to the Washington Post, “[the judge] had sentenced two burglars in a previous case to 18 months and 20 months in prison.”
The Post also quoted Mary Lou Leary (executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime) as saying, "When offenders avoid responsibility in these kinds of cases, it has a chilling effect on victims across the board, particularly sex crime victims. Sexual assault is a crime of domination and control, and this kind of reinforces that message, that it's completely out of the victim's control." (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/16/AR2007031601574.html )
I completely agree with Ann Jones—to prevent rape, we have to take it seriously. We can’t remain silent, we can’t blame the victim or ride it off as an “unpleasant sexual experience”, and we can’t allow punishment for rape to be so minimal. I have been very grateful for this section, because it has helped me to better understand the issues of rape, and perhaps more importantly what I can do to help people in situations of rape and sexual assault. Perhaps if this knowledge becomes more readily taught in schools and displayed in the media, the process of transformation and recovery out of our “rape culture” can finally begin.