Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (39 page)

The typical American rapist might be the boy next door. Especially if the boy next door happens to be about
19
years of age and the neighborhood you live in happens to fit the socioeconomic description of lower class or bears the appellation of "ghetto." That is what the statistics show.

One must approach all statistics with caution if one is going to make generalizations, particularly statistics regarding violent crime. Statisticians of crime are routine fact gatherers, and the raw mate rial they work with is usually mined from police-precinct arrest records or from records of convictions. Since there are many acts of rape, few arrests and still fewer convictions, a huge gulf of unavail able information unfortunately exists.

Police in every town and city compile their figures based on those offenders they manage to catch: height, weight, age, race, modus operandi, previous arrest record,
etc.
These figures are for warded yearly to Washington, fed into computers and ground out again as the most comprehensive national statistics on forcible rape that we have: the Uniform Crime Reports put out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Uniform Crime Reports and a few intensive studies done by a handful of criminologists allow us to draw up a profile of the All-American rapist.

Before we go any further let us remember that we are traveling on a road marked with cautionary blinking lights. A feminist defi nition of rape goes beyond the legal, criminal definition with which

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  174
  

  THE POUCE-BLOTTER RAPIST
  I
  175
  

  the nation's system of jurisprudence concerns itself, and later on in this book we will deal with an extended definition of rape and rapists. 'Then, - according tc;> ':th. RBI >itself,,,forcible
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  tiQs Further, a provable bias by police and juries against the word of the female victim--1and' .particularly :the wor(i}
  p.f;a
  bfack1female:.vi
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  ctitW-drastically cuts down on the number of cases available for study. On a national average, police say that
  1
  5 percent of all rape cases reported to them turn out on cursory investigation to be "unfounded"-in other words, they didn't be lieve the complainant.
  In
  reported rape cases where the: police,do believe: the
  .
  victi01, only .
  51
  percent of the offenders
  ·
  are actually pprehended, and of these,
  76
  percent are prosecuted, and
  _
  of these,
  

  -
  47:-
  percent are acquitted
  _
  or - have their case dismissed.• ( In some locales the conviction rate based on arrests is a shocking 3 percent.)
  

  In
  1973
  the FBI reported
  51,000
  "founded" cases of forcible rape and attempted rape across the United States, a rise, it noted, of
  10
  percent over the previous year and a rise of 62 percent over a five-year period. Its figures did not include statutory rape offenses. Seventy-three percent of the FBI's reported cases were completed rapes and the remaining ones were assaults or attempts to commit rape that fell short of completion.
  If
  we say conservatively that only one in five rape incidents was actually reported, we arrive at a figure of
  2 55,000
  rapes and attempted rapes in these United States in
  1973,
  a figure that I consider to be an unemotional, rock-bottom minimum. For purposes of comparison we should note that during the same year the FBI reported
  19,510
  murders,
  416,270
  aggra vated assaults and
  382,680
  robberies .
  

  .Murder, assault, rape and robbery are the Big Four of violent
  

  

  1
  9rimes, - an¢l
  _
  rape
  _
  .is the (a,stest-rising. The volume of rapes has increased
  62
  percent over a five-year period as compared with a
  45
  percent rise for the other criminal acts. Not given to speculation, the FBI does not venture as to why. It might mean that there has been a rise in the reporting of rapes by victims who have gained courage to speak out from the women's movement-this is most likely-or it could mean a significant rise in hostility and violence directed at women. We simply cannot say for certain.
  

  

  176
  AGAINST OUR WILL
  

  Of the 51,000 rape cases that the police believed and reported on to the FBI in 1973, they managed a "clearance"-in other words, they made an arrest-in 51 percent of the crimes. Compara tively, the police clearance rate was 79 percent for murder, 63 percent for aggravated assault and 27 percent for robbery offenses. In the field of violent crime, only robbery has a lower clearance rate than rape.
  

  Who, then, are the police-blotter rapists who form the raw material for the Uniform Crime Reports analysis? Sixty-one per cent are under the age of 25; the largest concentration of offenders is in the 16-to-24-year age range. According to the FBI, 47 percent are black and 51 percent are white, and "all other races comprised the remainder."
  

  Evan Connell, a novelist of some repute, wrote a tour de force some years ago entitled
  The
  Diary of a Rapist. Connell's pro tagonist, Earl Summerfield, was a timid, white, middle-class civil service clerk, age 27, who had an inferiority complex, delusions of intellectual brilliance, a wretched, deprived sex life, and an older, nagging, ambitious, "castrating" wife. Connell's book made grip ping reading, but the portrait of Earl Summerfield was far from an accurate picture of an average real-life rapist. In fact, Connell's Diary contains almost every myth and misconception about rape and rapists that is held in the popular mind. From the no-nonsense FBI statistics and some intensive sociological studies that are be ginning to appear, we can see that the typical American rapist is no weirdo, psycho schizophrenic beset by timidity, sexual deprivation, and a domineering wife or mother. Although the psycho rapist, whatever his family background, certainly does exist, just as the psycho murderer certainly does exist, he is the exception and not the rule. The typical American perpetrator of forcible rape is little more than an aggressive, hostile youth who chooses to do violence to women.
  

  We may thank the legacy of Freudian psychology for fostering a totally inaccurate popular conception of rape. Freud himself, remarkable as this may seem, said nothing about rapists. His con federates were slightly more loquacious, bu t not by much. Jung mentioned rape only in a few of his mythological interpretations. Alfred Adler, a man who understood the power thrust of the male and who was a firm believer in equal rights for women, never mentioned rape in any of his writings. Deutsch and Horney, two
  

  

  brilliant women, looked at rape only from the psychology of the victim.
  

  In the nineteen fif ties a school of criminology arose that was decidedly pro-Freudian in its orientation and it quickly dominated a neglected field. But even among the Freudian criminologists there was a curious reluctance to tackle rape head on. The finest library of Freudian ,and Freudian-related literature, the A.
  A.
  Brill Collection, housed at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, con tains an impressive number of weighty tomes devoted to the study of exhibitionism ( public exposure of the penis) yet no Freudian or psychoanalytic authority has ever written a major volume on rape. Articles on rape in psychology journals have been sparse to the point of nonexistence.
  

  Why the Freudians could never come to terms with rape is a puzzling question.
  It
  would not be too glib to suggest that the male bias of the discipline, with its insistence on the primacy of the penis, rendered it incapable of seeing the forest for the trees. And then, the use of an intuitive approach based largely on analysis of idiosyncratic case studies allowed for no objective sampling. But perhaps most critically, the serious failure of the Freudians stemmed from their rigid unwillingness to make a moral judgment. The major psychoanalytic thrust was always to "understand" what they preferred to call "deviant sexual behavior," but never to condemn.
  

  "Philosophically," wrote Dr. Manfred Guttmacher in
  1951,
  "a sex offense is an act which offends the sex mores of the society in which the individual lives. And it offends chiefly because it gener ates anxiety among the members of that society. Moreover, prohib ited acts generate the greatest anxiety in those individuals who themselves have strong unconscious desires to commit similar or related acts and who have suppressed or repressed them. These actions of others threaten our ego defenses."
  

  This classic paragraph, I believe, explains most clearly the Freudian dilemma.
  

  When the Freudian-oriented criminologists did attempt to grapple with rape they lumped the crime together with exhibi tionism ( their hands-down favorite!) , homosexuality, prostitution, pyromania and even oral intercourse in huge, undigestible volumes that sometimes bore a warning notice on the flyleaf that the mate rial contained herein might advisably be restricted to adults.
  

  

  17
  I
  AGAINST OUR WILL
  

  Guttmacher's Sex Oflenses and Benjamin Karpman's The
  Sexual
  Oflender and His Oflenses were two such products of the fif ties. Reading through these and other volumes it is possible to stumble on a nugget of fact or a valuable insight, and we ought to keep in mind, I guess, how brave they must have seemed at the time. Af ter all, they were dealing not only with s-e-x, but with aberrant s-e-x, and in their misguided way they were attempting to forge a new understanding. "Moral opprobrium has no place in medical work," wrote Karpman. A fine sentiment, indeed, yet one hundred pages earlier this same Karpman in this same book defined perversity as "a sexual act that defies the biological goal of procreation."
  

  By and large the Freudian criminologists, who loved to quibble with one another, defined the rapist as a victim of an "uncontrollable urge" that was "infantile" in nature, the result of a thwarted "natural" impulse to have intercourse with his mother. His act of rape was "a neurotic overreaction" that stemmed from his "feelings of inadequacy." To sum up in the Freudian's favorite phrase, he was "a sexual psychopath." Rapists, wrote Karpman, were "victims of a disease from which many of them suffer more than their victims."
  

  This, I should amend, was a picture of the Freudians' favorite
  

  ·
  rapist, the one they felt they might be able to treat. Dr. Gutt macher, for one, was aware that other types of rapists existed but they frankly bored him. Some, he said, were "sadistic," imbued with an exaggerated concept of masculine sexual activity, and some seemed "like the soldier of a conquering army." "Apparently," he wrote, "sexually well-adjusted youths have in one night committed a series of burglaries and, in the course of one of them, committed rape-apparently just as another act of plunder."