Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (80 page)

I got up, turned on the lights and took a bath in alcohol. I was living alone. I had to get out of the apartment. I set off with
my
coat on and then I realized the man had gotten in my purse and lef t me without a penny. Apparently he had been in the apartment for some time before I woke up because I saw he had gagged me with my own dishtowel.
It
was then that I thought to call the police.

Stranger-rape has clearly been the preferred category from the point of view of the police precinct, the category most likely to win the determination of "founded." When a woman is raped by a total stranger, her status as victim is clean and untarnished in the station-house mentality.
In
Brenda Brown's 1973 Memphis study,

73 percent of all founded rapes were committed by strangers, and Brown reported, "The closeness of the relationship was a fre quently used reason for categorizing cases as unfounded." Accord ing to the Uniform Crime Reports, unfounded cases are "frequently complicated by a prior relationship between victim and offender."

For this reason it remains difficult to assess the true percentage of rapes committed by strangers. As the women's movement con tinues to press a greater understanding of the crime of rape on the general public, women who have been assaulted by men they know will feel freer to report the crime and these reports will begin to be treated with the seriousness they deserve. At the present time, police precincts still operate from the assumption that a woman who has been raped by a man she knows is a woman "who changed her mind afterward."

TESTIMONY:
I
was raped when
I
was
17
by my fiance the night before he was due to ship out with the Navy. Up to then
I
had tried to be everything he wanted according to the religious, social and moral codes by which both of us had been raised.
I
played the ex pected role throughout our engagement, deferring to him in judg ment, in conversation, even in the way
I
dressed.
I
was sedate, de mure, humble, submissive-and a virgin. He kept begging me to have intercourse and
I
kept saying, "No, not yet. It's not right." On our last date he pushed me in the back of his car and held me.
I
just gave up. After all, wasn't
I
supposed to defer to him in everything?

TESTIMONY: In psychiatric literature they always write that struggle is a component of the sex act.
I
think in college
I
must have met
15
men in my senior year who were really into that. The more you protested, the more determined they were to make love to you in the Sig Ep house parking lot. What do you do? Do you get out and run away at two o'clock in the morning? Yes, if you're smart. But a lot of girls can't.

TESTIMONY:
I
was
19,
working in a bar as a waitress.
I
had a couple of dates with this guy who used to come into the bar. He was okay then, he never tried anything funny. Then he invited me to go out with him and two other couples on my day off.

There were two fellows already there when
I
got into the car, and we drove to places where we were supposed to pick up the other girls. But each time the fellows came back alone with some story

about how the girls couldn't make it. We were way out in the coun try by this time. Then my date stopped the car and started messing around. So there I was, out in the middle of nowhere with three guys. who all had their minds on one thing.

I kept struggling with my date and finally when he said,
"If
you don't let me, I'll put it in your mouth," I gave in. Then the other fel1ows took their turn. I wasn't screaming or fighting anymore. I just wanted to get it over with and not have anything worse happen to me. When they were a1l through they drove me home.

I tried to tell some older men in the bar about it a few days later. They asked me if I was hurt and when I said I wasn't they told me to forget about it.

When a potential victim and a potential offender are thrown together by the forces of fate, a complete process is inexorably set in motion. Each word, act and gesture on the part of the potential victim serves to either strengthen or lessen the resolve of the potential rapist, and hinder or help him commit his crime.

Victim precipitation is a new concept in criminology.
It
does not hold a victim responsible, but it seeks to define contributory behavior. Victim precipitation says, in effect, an unlawful act has been committed but had the victim behaved in a different fashion the crime in question
might have
been avoided. Part a priori guess work and part armchair-detective fun and games, the study of victim precipitation is the least exact of the sociological methods, for it rests in the final analysis on a set of arbitrary standards.

TESTIMONY:
We were living in Houston.
My
husband was at work and the children were at school.
It
must have been, oh, two o'clock in the afternoon. The doorbell rang and this young man asked if he could rake the leaves for a couple of dollars. I said, "Wonderful, how terrific." Well, he raked the leaves and then he came to the door and asked if he could have a glass of water. I was quite conscious of being alone in the house, but a glass of water did not seem like an unreasonable request. He finished the water and then asked for another glass. Of course I gave it to him. We were chatting about this and that and I wanted him out of my living room but I didn't know quite how to cut him off. I was also won dering if perhaps I was overreacting to be a little nervous. He was black and I had been very involved in the first stages of the civil rights movement, and af ter all, he was only asking for water. He

must have had four glasses of water before he made his move. He broke my jaw in the process.

While
most
rational people might be able
to
agree on what constitutes rash, reckless or precipitant behavior leading to a homi cide, in rape the parameters are indistinct and movable. Some men might consider a housewife who lets a strange man into her house for a glass of water guilty of precipitant behavior, and more men would consider a female hitchhiker who accepts a ride from an unknown male guilty of precipitant behavior. Rape-minded men would consider both actions tantamount to an open invitation. I, on the other hand, would consider the housewife and the hitch hiker insufficiently wary, but in no way would I consider their actions provocative or even mildly precipitant. Similarly, most men seem to consider a woman who engages in sex play but stops short of intercourse guilty not only of precipitant behavior, but of cruel, provocative behavior with no excuse, yet I and my sister feminists would argue that her actions are perfectly allowable and quite within the bounds of human decency and rational decisions.

Those who worked for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence came up with their own defi nitions of victim precipitation, and because it is their statistics I am going to quote, it is their definitions that need
to
be expressed.

In
criminal homicide: "Whenever the victim was the first to use physical force against his subsequent slayer."

In
aggravated assault: "When the victim was the first to use either physical force or insinuating language, gestures,
etc.
against his attacker."

In
forcible rape: "When the victim agreed to sexual relations but retracted before the actual act or when she clearly invited sexual relations through language, gestures, etc."

In
armed and unarmed robbery: "Temptation-opportunity situations in which the victim clearly had not acted with reason

able self-protective behavior in handling money, jewelry, or other valuables . . . e.g., a robbery victim flashes a great deal of money at a bar and then walks home alone along a dark street late at night."

Armed with these working definitions, however vague, for its seventeen-city survey, the commission task force found that the

VICTIMS: THE CRIME
I
355

percentage of discernible victim precipitation in crimes of violence looked like this:

Homicide Assault Rape

Armed Robbery Unarmed Robbery

22.03

14.43

4.43

10.73

6.13

Across the board, rape victims were responsible for less precipitant behavior than victims of other kinds of violent crime.*

The behavior of women in a pre-rape situation is a critical area that deserves more study. Equally critical is the behavior of women within the actual act. Do women fight back, and can women fight back successfully? According to the FBI's i973 figures, more than one-quarter of all reported rape offenses were not completed. They were recorded on the precinct level as attempted rapes or as as saults with intent to commit rape.
t
Viewed from a positive angle, this is rather an astonishing figure. Surely the would-be rapists had a completed act in mind. What stopped them?

TESTIMONY:
My child was sick and so was I, and I had to go to the store to get some medicine. I suppose people would say it was my own fault for doing such a dumb thing, but I took a short-cut

*
The commission's staff was at pains to point out that these results differed dramatically from the only other study of victim precipitation in rape, the calculations of Menachem Amir in his
i958/ 1960
Philadelphia study. Amir believed that a stunning
19
percent of all rape cases he examined had been victim precipitated and he concluded that for the women in question, "The contingencies of events may not make the victim solely responsible for what becomes an unfortunate event; at least she is a complementary partner, and victimization is not, then, a wholly and genuinely random affair." From my reading of the Philadelphia study I gather that Amir's definition of precipita tion was more generous to the rapists. He added "risky situations marred by sexuality" and other, indefinite generalizations to his criterion.

t
In
the eyes of the law a completed rape does not require emission, only a

degree of penetration. One inch is the usual standard. Of course, evidence of emission makes a stronger case in court, but sperm smears must be taken im mediately since, according to the best medicolegal evidence, traces of sperm may totally disappear with.in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. An attempted rape falls short of penetration.

through the alley in back of my house.
It
was around dinner time and there he was, in the alley, waiting for me.

Initially, I think, he was after my purse. He knocked me down and we struggled. I wasn't scared. Af ter all, I'm a black woman and you learn early when you're black and a woman. Anyway, this char acter wasn't all that impressive physically. He was about my size, a black man, tall and lean. Since he was dumb enough to jump me under the light he got scared and kept saying, "You seen me, you seen me!" Then I got mad and bit his hand. 'Ibat made him mad, and he backed me up against the wall, tore down my jeans and tried to have intercourse. He kept trying but I figured as long as I'm fighting him standing up he couldn't do it.