by Anne Summers
A further myth, which lessens the man’s responsibility for his crime, is the prevalent notion that men cannot help themselves, that they are subject to sudden, uncontrollable sexual urges, which are generally provoked by the sight of a woman acting in one of the ways mentioned above. Here the rapist is excused by a combination of biological determinism and allotting the victim a share of responsibility for the attack. It is salient that there are no corresponding myths about other violent crimes in which men can be victims. There is no myth, for example, that it is impossible to be robbed, that all men secretly want to be murdered, or that men enjoy being bashed. Nor are child victims of sexual assaults ever accused of provoking their attacks, of perhaps enjoying the violation of their bodies or of having desired the assault. It is only women who are held to be at least partly responsible for the one crime in which they are always the victim.
A further way in which the supposed horror in which rape is held is shown to be false is the preponderance of jokes about rape. These jokes utilise the myths, underscoring the wide social recognition they enjoy, but more importantly, lessening and even negating the horror and the terror and the violence and the violation that rape is. Rape jokes are not those ironic devices people develop to ease pain or to make an horrific situation or memory bearable. Rape jokes all suggest that rape is a joke, and are yet another way of absolving rapists from culpability. The way the law collaborates in hiding the huge incidence of rape, the myths that exonerate the rapist and the humour that hides its criminality all highlight the contradictory attitudes to rape that exist in Australian society. Despite the public profession of horror, rape is condoned and even encouraged and for many men it is seen as perfectly normal male behaviour. Criminologists Greg Woods and Paul Ward found in their study of pack rapists that few considered that they had committed a crime: ‘The “pack” make no attempt to hide their indentities and on apprehension seem surprised by the fuss made about a “normal” activity’.9
Everyone is against rape. Even rapists. They exonerate themselves by calling it something else, by employing those myths that can ease whatever conscience they may have, or they can hide behind the law that says that forcing your wife to have sex is not rape. Or they exploit the sexist stereotypes to denigrate their victims and implicate them in the crime. Unless a raped woman is very young, very old, a virgin, demonstrably respectable (a nun, for instance) or has incurred severe physical injuries, she is not automatically seen as a victim and is even blamed for the attack she suffered. This view has been given the authority of judicial sanction in many rape trials and has resulted in rapists either being discharged or receiving very lenient sentences.
One case that was heard in Sydney in October 1973 before Mr Justice Lee involved two trainee nurses who had been trying to get back to their hospital for duty at midnight. The hospital in question is in a remote part of Sydney, which is ill-serviced by public transport and after being unable to catch a bus, the two women had accepted a ride in a car containing three men. Instead of taking them to the hospital, the men drove the girls to isolated bushland where, after threatening them, they raped them. When passing sentence Mr Justice Lee said that the law went to great lengths to protect women. He then pronounced:
It is a serious question to ask, however, when two intelligent young women who get into a car in the early hours of the morning with three totally strange men, really deserve much sympathy when the inevitable happens and they get raped … These young women, who are prepared to get into a car late at night, or in the early hours of the morning, are so often seen by young men as an invitation to take liberties. It is like placing a saucer of milk before a hungry cat and expecting it not to drink it.10
The one man who was being tried received a two-year sentence with a non-parole period of six months.
In another case heard in Perth before Mr Justice Virtue in July 1974, a woman who had ‘streaked’ through a nightclub, gone moonlight swimming with two men and was then raped by them, was said by the judge to have ‘asked for trouble’. The woman had run through the nightclub wearing only her panties and had then accompanied the two men to a hills reservoir where all three had stripped for a swim; the two men then each raped the woman twice. The judge said:
The woman’s loose and abandoned behaviour both at the nightclub and after she had accepted without demur the suggestion of an early morning frolic in the hills was clearly calculated to encourage you both to conclude that she would not be averse to accepting advances from either of you. On the contrary, they were calculated to arouse your passions to an extent that not surprisingly though reprehensibly, you would not take ‘no’ for an answer.11
The men were placed on a three-month good-behaviour bond.
In both these cases the judges disapproved of the women’s actions. In the latter case, the judge apparently found it inconceivable that people could swim naked together without this being regarded as lascivious conduct. What judgement would he have reached, I wonder, if the woman had become so sexually aroused at the sight of the men’s naked bodies that she attacked one of them? In the first case, the judge showed no consideration for the inequalities of women’s social and economic situation, which so often leaves them vulnerable to attack by a rapist. Most women do not own cars and if taxis or public transport are not available, how are women to get to work or to wherever they might need to go?
The situation of women being stranded without transport is exceedingly common. For instance, there is no public transport to Sydney’s Macquarie University, and students without cars or unable to make transport arrangements with other students are literally forced to hitchhike to and from university each day. I know several women students in this position and two of them have been raped while trying to get to university. In fact there is evidence that a number of men who are aware of the students’ predicament deliberately prey upon it and cruise past the university each day looking for young women hitchhikers.
It is clear from these judicial statements – and they merely reflect widely held social opinions – that the supposedly hallowed prerogative of a woman to refuse a sexual invitation has all sorts of qualifications attached to it. It is not, as women are led to believe, an absolute prerogative but is a privilege afforded to women who unprotestingly acquiesce in their colonisation. Even then a woman is not protected from rape: she is merely afforded the right to be considered a victim rather than a provocateur if she is raped by a stranger. This is a petty reward for having submitted to a colonised state and it in no way lessens the enormous incidence of rape. What it does contribute to, however, is disguising the political nature of rape. If we examine the effects that rape itself, and the fear of rape, have on women we can see that, rather than being merely an outrageous criminal offence, rape is a political weapon of the colonisers. It is used to reinforce patriarchy, to confine and curb women and, finally, to punish those who have refused to conform to the God’s Police role.
Patriarchy denies women a separate and independent existence: they are the property of and appendages to men. First their fathers, and then their husbands, are the formal custodians of women. The father’s duty is to protect his daughter’s virginity so that she can be given away intact at the marriage ceremony. The husband receives the wife in a ceremony which legitimises his having total access to her body and to her labour. Only in a society where women are regarded as property and as chattels, could men exchange women among themselves in this way. The myths of love and the cultural value attached to marriage simply disguise the basic nature of the transaction. Because men view women as their property, they take it as a personal outrage and affront if a woman who belongs to them is raped. They feel it is incumbent upon them to avenge the act and if they can find the offender are likely to take some kind of vigilante action against him. This reaction takes little account of the woman’s suffering, humiliation or shame; it is the reaction of a property owner who finds his property has been tampered with and his proprietorship challenged. When the police de
cide to take up a rape case and press charges against a rapist, they are often acting from similar motives; they can be seen as agents of the father or husband of the raped woman. They sometimes take violent revenge upon the rapist themselves, by beating him up while he is in the police cells, or they will invite the male relatives of the victim to do so if they wish. Yet if their motives were purely and simply outrage and anger at what the woman had had to endure, they would not prolong her ordeal by subjecting her to brutal and prurient questioning as they do.
Where rape is viewed as an outrage against the male relatives of the women who are violated, rape becomes a weapon men can use against each other. Men rape women in order to assert their power over the other men. This occurs most commonly in wartime when invading armies engage in mass rape of the women of the city or territory they are invading in order to underscore their defeat of the defending army. Often the women victims of these rapes are ostracised by their families and fellow citizens and are relegated to ignominious isolation, forced to endure their shame – and, very often, to care for the resultant children – alone. The mass rape of the women in Bangladesh was given very wide publicity because those women were treated as pariahs, but this was simply a very wide-scale instance of a very common wartime occurrence. The fact that invading armies seek out to violate women who, in other circumstances, would be relatively immune from rape (such as nuns, very young girls, wives of prominent men etc.) shows that their actions are not motivated merely from the lust that undoubtedly results from long periods of sexual deprivation, but by a desire to assert their military power in a way that every individual soldier and citizen can understand and suffer from.
The fear of rape, and the knowledge that a rape victim who does not have a male custodian is so often seen as having provoked or deserved the rape, impels women to seek male protectors. Marriage does not protect a woman from being raped by her husband, but it lessens her exposure to petty and fraudulent rape, and while it cannot guarantee her immunity to illegal rape, it reduces her risk and ensures that if it does happen, she will have some legal redress. She is also far less likely to be accused of having deserved to be raped. In this way, the existence of rape reinforces patriarchy by making it necessary for women to have protectors.
It is necessary to ask why it is that only one form of rape, what I have called illegal rape, is widely accepted as such. Why are the three other kinds of rape described in this chapter condoned or overlooked and one form, the least frequently perpetrated form, singled out, labelled as rape and pronounced as being the most terrible deprivation of a woman’s integrity, when women’s bodies are being violently invaded daily by other kinds of rape which are accepted as normal patterns in our sexual mores? The immediate and obvious answer is that colonisers never label their actions as such, but always disguise their intentions with a variety of subterfuges which are intended to increase the potency and success of colonisation by making it acceptable to a majority of the colonised people.
The existence and increasing incidence of illegal rape are used by the colonisers to keep women confined so that they will perform the work required of them, and will do it without too much resistance or complaint. If they want to avoid illegal rape, women must be constantly wary. They can try to avoid it by not walking in the streets at night, by not hitchhiking, by not wearing tight or revealing clothes. In effect, women must observe an unproclaimed curfew and obey unofficial ordinances. Like any colonised group, their movements are restricted and their activities regulated. Women do not have the freedom of the streets, or the freedom to wear what they like, or the freedom to meet new people in unfamiliar surroundings. Women cannot travel cheaply (and few can afford, therefore, to travel at all), they cannot go into a pub alone for a drink. Men can hitchhike round the country, walk into any pub, talk to anyone they choose, wear whatever they want to, say and do whatever they feel like. If women do any of these things, they are said to be inviting rape.
The fear of rape is instilled in women so that they will remain indoors. If a known illegal rapist is active in a particular area, police issue warnings to women to remain indoors and to lock their doors and windows. This is obviously a wise safety precaution, but it nevertheless means that women are locked up, virtually imprisoned, because of the actions of one man. Yet even if women remain inside they are not fully protected from rape. Marital rape occurs, by definition, within a woman’s home, and so can any of the other three forms of rape. The professed intention of the curfew is evidently a camouflage for some other object. Why, we might ask, should women have to remain locked away when it is men who rape? If the objective were to protect women from rape, surely this would be more likely to be accomplished if a curfew were imposed upon men and they were prohibited from engaging in such predatory behaviour as prowling the streets in cars. Instead the proffered rationale links, and thereby suggests a connection between two distinct things: preventing rape and confining women. It seems obvious that it is the latter that is intended.
If men ceased to rape, if they elected not to exercise their pre-emptive strike capacity upon reluctant or unwilling women, there would be no need for women to be confined. If women had no reason to fear rape they could enjoy the freedom of movement now possessed by men. This would mean that women could have more choice about what they did with their lives. It might mean that many women would decide that they did not wish to devote their lives to bearing children and maintaining families. If rape were not a threat, women would have less motive to marry. The patriarchal system derives considerable benefit, then, from the existence of rape and it is able to use this to confine women. It instils in women a fear of rape, a fear that is realistic in terms of the risk women are at, but one that is extremely hypocritical since it does not acknowledge the most frequently perpetrated kinds of rape. But the fear is there and it does keep women in line, it does restrict their movements and their actions.
Conversely, rape can be used as a weapon to punish women who do not conform and, as the judicial statements quoted earlier made clear, such refractory women obtain little sympathy if they are raped. One judge said that rape was ‘inevitable’ if women acted in certain ways. It seems that men feel free to abuse and punish women who, in their eyes, are acting in a way that is contrary to the God’s Police role. The steep increase in reported rapes in the past few years could be accounted for in this way. In the last seven or eight years, more and more women have elected to ignore the confining feminine role and have tried to live their own lives without the protectorship of a man. Such women are seen as a challenge and a threat to the patriarchal system: if these women can get by without men and can try to control their lives and their bodies, they could become an inflammatory example to other women. Rebellion could spread. The institutions of patriarchy could be endangered. To prevent this, women who try to be independent of men are punished in various ways. Chapter Five showed how they invariably have to endure poverty. It can also be suggested here that another thing they have to endure is the threat of rape.
It is generally admitted by police, criminologists and others who concern themselves with illegal rape that only a tiny fraction of the illegal rapes that take place are reported to the police. As will be pointed out later in this chapter, there are several good reasons why women are reluctant to press charges if they are raped. There has been no reason for women to become more willing to do so in recent years, for police procedures have not changed appreciably and nor have social attitudes towards rape victims. Yet there has been a discernible increase in the number of rapes reported in Australia – with a corresponding decrease in the number of convictions obtained – so it can be inferred that the incidence of illegal rape has considerably increased.
Rapes reported and cleared, Australia, 1966–7212
The singling out of illegal rape as a crime, and the pious pronouncements of horror that accompany it, also serve to de-emphasise other forms of rape. These other forms of violation are not rape, women are persuaded, and a whole ra
nge of individual and social reasons are advanced to justify why one form of sexual violation is rape while an identical form is, because of a slightly different circumstance, normal sexual intercourse. After all, he’s not a rapist – he’s your husband, and he is entitled to demand sex from you. Or, you should not have gone out with that man, you must have heard of his reputation for taking ‘no’ to mean ‘yes’. So we have the situation where the form of rape that women are least likely to experience is treated seriously while the others, which they encounter or risk every day, are seen either as trivial or as ordinary, and certainly not illegal, sexual activity.
The occasional much-publicised rape trial, with its ritualised pronouncement of (a usually light) sentence on one rapist while thousands of other known rapists walk the streets is rampant hypocrisy. Such trials are probably thought to be good public relations for patriarchy, meant to persuade women that most men mean them no harm and that the odd ‘deviant’ one who attacks women will be punished. It is like the trial of Lieutenant Calley for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam; neither he, nor probably the violated Vietnamese, could quite understand why one man was being tried for something that was regarded as normal wartime behaviour on the part of the invading troops. While that trial proceeded, the Americans continued to saturate the country with bombs, to kill and to capture Vietnamese. The trial was a hollow, hypocritical sham, which did nothing to stop the war. Similarly, rape trials single out the odd rapist – in many cases men who cannot afford to buy their way out of the charges – as a scapegoat for the system, but they do nothing to stop rape.