Although the proper definition of ‘rape’ is itself amatter of some dispute, rape is generally understood to involve sexualpenetration of a person by force and/or without that person’sconsent. Rape is committed overwhelmingly by men and boys, usuallyagainst women and girls, and sometimes against other men and boys.(For the most part, this entry will assume male perpetrators andfemale victims.)

Virtually all feminists agree that rape is a grave wrong, one toooften ignored, mischaracterized, and legitimized. Feminists differ,however, about how the crime of rape is best understood, and about howrape should be combated both legally and socially.

• 1. Common Themes and the Liberal-to-Radical Continuum
• 2. Criteria: What Counts?
  • 2.1 Consent
  • 2.2Mens rea
  • 2.3 Force
  • 2.4 Other approaches
• 3. The Wrongs and Harms of Rape
  • 3.1 Harms to individual victims
  • 3.2 Harms to women
  • 3.3 Rape and racism
  • 3.4 War rape and genocidal rape
• 4. Conclusion
• Bibliography
  • Works Cited
  • Other Important Works
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Common Themes and the Liberal-to-Radical Continuum

Virtually all feminist thinking about rape shares several underlyingthemes. First among these is feminists’ emphasis on“breaking the silence” around rape. Feminist thought andactivism have challenged the myth that rape is rare and exceptional,showing that it is in fact a common experience in the lives of girlsand women. In recent decades, this awareness emerged in feminist“speakouts” and consciousness-raising groups, where womenshared their experiences of rape and other forms of abuse. It has nowbeen amply confirmed by research: according to one study of over16,000 Americans, 18.3% of women report having been victims of rape orattempted rape at some time in their lives (Black et al., 2011). Ofthese women, 42.2% were under age eighteen when they were first raped;an earlier study showed that these women were twice as likely toreport having been raped as adults (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000).Indeed, many women suffer multiple rapes in their lives: in the sameearlier study, among those who reported having been raped in the pastyear, the average number of rapes per woman during that time periodwas 2.9.

An accurate estimate of rape’s frequency requires a clearunderstanding of rape itself and of the varied circumstances in whichit occurs. Often contributing to the underestimation of rape’sfrequency is a narrow and stereotypical conception of what rape is:for instance, the image of a stranger jumping out from behind thebushes, brandishing a weapon at a woman he has never seen before.While such rapes do occur, the great majority of rapes are committedby a man or men known to the victim: dates, relatives, friends,bosses, husbands, neighbors, co-workers, and more. (For this reason,again contrary to stereotype, most rapes are intraracial.) In thestudy of over 16,000 Americans mentioned above, 51.1% of femalevictims were raped by an intimate partner, and 40.8% by anacquaintance (Black et al., 2011). Remarkably few assailants arepunished: with estimated U.S. state conviction rates of two to ninepercent of total rapes (Kim 2012, 264), “ninety-four toninety-eight percent of total rapists and approximately eighty-fourpercent of reported rapists go free” (Kim 2012, 272).

Perhaps the most basic challenge that feminists have posed totraditional views of rape lies in the recognition of rape as a crimeagainst the victim herself. For much of recorded history women werethe property of men, with their value as property measured largely bytheir sexual “purity.” In this context, rape was regardedas a property crime against a woman’s husband or father(Burgess-Jackson 1996, 44-49). A raped woman or girl was less valuableas property, and penalties for rape often involved fines or othercompensation paid to her husband or father (Burgess-Jackson 1996, 68).The marital rape exemption in law, which survived in the U.S. into the1990’s, is clearly a remnant of this approach, assuming as itdoes that no crime is committed when a man forces intercourse upon hiswife, since she is his own property; the property status of enslavedAfrican-American women was also thought to entitle their owners to thewomen’s unrestricted sexual use. A further corollary of thisview was that women who werenot the private property of anyindividual man—for instance, prostitutes—were unrapeable,or at least that no one important was harmed by their rape (Dworkin1997, 196–202, Burgess-Jackson 1996, 46-47, 69). Given thisentrenched historical and cultural legacy, feminists’redefinition of ‘rape’ as a crime against the womanherself is nothing short of revolutionary.

Sadly, the rate of rape reporting remains low; studies using randomsample surveys of large numbers of women find reporting rates rangingfrom 16% to 36% (Anderson 2003, 78). Rates of conviction, too, remainsubstantially lower than for other violent crimes; some studiesestimate a conviction rate of 5% (Caringella 2008) in the U.S.Feminists’ recognition of the severity and pervasiveness ofrape’s harms, and of how infrequently victims receive justice,has inspired decades of activism for social and legal change.Feminists in many U.S. states have succeeded not only in changinglegal definitions of rape (see below), but also in ending manydamaging and sexist practices in rape trials. For instance,“rape shield” laws now restrict the admissibility ofevidence about a victim’s sexual history, and most jurisdictionshave eliminated the “prompt reporting” requirement, thecorroboration requirement, and the reciting of the traditional“cautionary rule” (that rape is a charge easy to make andhard to disprove). All of these practices reflect sexist and falseassumptions—for instance, that rape only happens (or onlymatters when it happens) to sexually “pure” or“virtuous” women, and that women are likely to lie abouthaving been raped—while increasing the trauma of rape trials forvictims and decreasing the likelihood of convictions. In addition topressing for changes in law and in police and prosecutorial practices,feminists have founded and staffed rape crisis centers and hotlines tosupport victims, whether or not they choose to pursue charges againsttheir attackers.

Feminist views of rape can be understood as arrayed on a continuumfrom liberal to radical. Liberal views tend to regard rape as agender-neutral assault on individual autonomy, likening it to otherforms of assault and/or illegitimate appropriation, and focusingprimarily on the harm that rape does to individual victims. Moreradical views, in contrast, contend that rape must be recognized andunderstood as an important pillar of patriarchy. Johnson definespatriarchy as a social system in which men disproportionately occupypositions of power and authority, central norms and values areassociated with manhood and masculinity (which in turn are defined interms of dominance and control), and men are the primary focus ofattention in most cultural spaces (2005, 4-15). Radical feminists seerape as arising from patriarchal constructions of gender and sexualitywithin the context of broader systems of male power, and emphasize theharm that rape does to women as a group.

In addition, radical feminist approaches to rape often share one ormore of the following three features. First, they regard thedeprivation of women’s bodily sovereignty—in particular,male control over the sexual and reproductive uses of women’sbodies—as a central defining element of patriarchy (Whisnant2007). As a result, they analyze rape as one of multiple forms ofmen’s sexual violence and exploitation, looking at theirinterconnections and how they work in concert to maintain andreinforce women’s oppression. Second, they expand the definitionof ‘rape’ to encompass more than just overt physical forceand violence (or the explicit threat thereof). Recognizing the ways inwhich broad patterns of male power systematically compromisewomen’s bodily and sexual freedom, and challenging the equationof female submission with meaningful consent, they tend to see a kindof continuum (rather than a bright dividing line) between rape andmuch “normal” heterosexual activity. Third, the focus ongroup-based oppression has also led many radical feminist thinkers toexamine the role of rape itself, and of ideologies about rape, increating and reproducing not only patriarchy but multiple systems ofdomination, including racism and colonialism.

2. Criteria: What Counts?

Feminists are committed to ensuring that women’s andgirls’ experiences of sexual violation are taken seriously assuch, that the harm they suffer therein is recognized, and that thosewho inflict that harm are held accountable. Achieving these goals hasoften involved arguing that certain kinds of encounters that havepreviously not been socially or legally recognized as rape should beso recognized—thus, challenging overly restrictive ideas (oftenencoded in law) about what counts as rape (Burgess-Jackson 1996,77-86; Sanday 1996, 161-183; Bevacqua 2000). Obvious examples includethe abolition of marital-rape exemptions and the recognition of dateand acquaintance rape. Feminists have also challenged the idea(derived from English common law) that, in order for an encounter tocount as rape, the victim must have displayed “utmost” (oreven any) physical resistance, as well as the assumption that rapemust involve vaginal penetration by a penis (victims are raped orally,anally, and/or with fingers or objects).

There are varying feminist views about whether and how the concept ofrape, and hence its framing in the law, requires further renegotiationor expansion.

2.1 Consent

Both social and legal understandings of rape are typically based atleast partly on the notion of consent. (Many laws also include a forcerequirement, about which more below.) To consent to something is toreverse aprima facie supposition about what may and may notbe done. In most contexts, there is a standing presumption that onedoes not have access to and may not make use of another’s body,property, personal information, or other elements of his or herpersonal domain. This presumption is reversed, however, when (and foras long as) the other consents to such access. Consent thus alters thestructure of rights and obligations between two or more parties.

Assuming for the moment that, in sexual encounters, rape exists whereconsent is lacking, the question then becomes what counts as consent.Women’s sexual consent has in many instances been understoodquite expansively, as simply the absence of refusal or resistance;feminists have criticized this approach on the grounds that, among itsother untoward implications, it regards even unconscious women asconsenting (MacKinnon 1989b, 340; Archard 1998, 85). Furthermore, ithas too often been assumed that a woman’s appearance, attire,status, location, prior sexual history, or relationship to the man inquestion either function as stand-ins for consent (that is, as“asking for it”) or render her consent irrelevant orunnecessary. A vital task on the feminist agenda has been to challengeand discredit such ideas—to deny that what a woman wears, whereshe goes and with whom, or what sexual choices she has made in thepast have any relevance to whether she should be seen as havingconsented to sex on a particular occasion.

Consent in general may be understood as either attitudinal orperformative (Kazan 1998). Attitudinal accounts see consent as amental state of affirmation or willingness, while performativeaccounts see it as a certain kind of action or utterance (forinstance, saying “yes” or nodding). Because the kinds ofbehaviors mentioned above (such as wearing revealing clothes, goingsomewhere alone with a man, or engaging in heavy petting) have oftenbeen claimed by perpetrators to constitute evidence that a woman wasin a mental state of willingness to have intercourse, feminists haveoften rejected attitudinal accounts in favor of performative ones;with a performative account, in contrast, a defendant can bechallenged to articulate exactly what the woman said or did thatconstituted her consent to intercourse. An added advantage of aperformative account is that it suggests that sexual consent is not awoman’s implied default state, but rather must be actively andaffirmatively granted. Again, this is in contrast to traditionalpatriarchal views, which often assumed that unless a woman physicallyresisted—again, even “to the utmost”—aman’s attempt to have intercourse, she was consenting (or atleast he was justified in proceeding on that assumption).

One limitation of a purely performative account of consent is that itdoes not take into account the context in which the relevant behavioror utterance occurs. For instance, if a woman says “yes”or even feigns sexual enthusiasm in order to keep a knife-wieldingattacker from becoming angry and hurting or killing her, it would beabsurd to regard her behavior or utterance as consent (or at least asmeaningful consent). The question is what other contextual constraintsand pressures may also undermine the validity of a woman’s(apparent) consent. To put the point another way, having granted that“no” always means no, we must recognize that, in somecases, “yes” also means no. There are many kinds ofexplicit and implicit threats that render a woman’s consent tosex less than meaningful: the man may threaten to sue for custody oftheir children, to derail her green card application, to evict her, orsimply to sulk and make her life miserable for days should she refuseto have sex. Which (if any) such nonviolent coercive pressures shouldbe regarded as rape, either morally or legally, is a matter of somecontroversy (Schulhofer 1998; Burgess-Jackson 1996, 91-106).

The question is especially important from a feminist point of view,since it is to be expected that in a patriarchal society menfrequently hold positions of social, legal, and/or institutional powerover women and are thus positioned to withhold important benefits fromwomen who refuse them sexual access, in addition to threatening harmsand penalties. Viewing at least certain kinds of nonviolent coercivepressures as incompatible with meaningful consent may yield theconclusion that somequid pro quo sexual harassment is alsorape (Falk 1998). Furthermore, some radical feminists’description of prostitution as “commercial sexualviolence” (Jeffreys 1997) reflects an expansive understanding ofthe economic and other coercive pressures that often compelwomen’s consent to sexual acts in prostitution (even wherephysical violence does not play a role).

2.2Mens rea

A further complicating question is whether the criminal law’susual requirement ofmens rea (or “guilty mind”)should apply to rape and, if so, how that requirement should beinterpreted. In the most general terms, amens rearequirement means that the prosecution must show not only thatnonconsensual sex occurred, but also that the man was in a certainstate of mind with regard to the woman’s lack of consent. Justwhat that state of mind is—what counts asmens rea incases of rape—is a matter of some dispute (Burgess-Jackson 1996,137–161).

The most conservative position—defended most famously in the1976DPP v Morgan decision (Baron 2001,9–14)—holds that a man hasmens rea only if hebelieves the woman is not consenting (or that she is at least probablynot consenting). On this view, a man who sincerely believes that thewoman is consenting is not guilty of rape, no matter how unreasonablehis belief may be under the circumstances. A more moderate view isthat a man hasmens rea if he either believes the woman isnot consenting or believes unreasonably that she is consenting. Thus,in jurisdictions where this understanding ofmens rea is inforce, the question of whether the woman actually consented oftengives way—particularly in cases of date and acquaintancerape—to the question of whether the man reasonably believed sheconsented.

Theorists have different views about the conditions under which it isreasonable for a man to believe that a woman is consenting to sexualintercourse. Husak and Thomas (1992) argue that there are social andbehavioral conventions (or “courtship rituals”) by whichwomen manifest their willingness to have sex, and that where a womanhas engaged in such conventions, it is reasonable for a man to believeshe is consenting to sexual intercourse. Archard (1997) arguesforcefully against this view, however, pointing out that any suchconventions are likely to be ambiguous and not universally understood(particularly since research shows that men routinely interpretwomen’s behavior in more sexual terms than women mean orintend), that a man risks doing serious harm by relying on his beliefsabout such conventions, and that there is a ready alternative torisking such harm, namely, inquiring explicitly as to hispartner’s consent or lack thereof.

One influential interpretation of “reasonable belief” insexual consent is that of Lois Pineau (1989), who points out thatjudgments of reasonableness in this area must be based on somenormative conception of healthy, normal sexual interaction. Theprevailing conception, which she calls the“aggressive-contractual model,” holds that women’ssexually provocative behavior generates enforceable agreements to havesex, that male sexuality is uncontrollable past a certain point, andthat women are not to be trusted in matters of sexuality. Pineaubelieves that this model is the backdrop against which many peoplebase their judgments about reasonable belief in rape cases. Theaggressive-contractual model should be replaced, she argues, with amodel of “communicative sexuality,” one that emphasizes“an atmosphere of comfort and communication, a minimum ofpressure, and an on-going checkup on one’s partner’sstate” (1989, 231). Communicative sexuality is most likely to berewarding for both parties, allows them to promote each other’ssensual ends non-manipulatively and non-paternalistically, andobserves norms appropriate to friendship and trust. Because it isthrough communication that one gains knowledge of one’spartner’s desires or lack thereof, Pineau contends that“where communicative sexuality does not occur, we lack the mainground for believing that the sex involved was consensual.” Shecontinues:

where a man does not engage in communicative sexuality, he acts eitherout of reckless disregard, or out of willful ignorance. For he cannotknow, except through the practice of communicative sexuality, whetherhis partner has any sexual reason for continuing the encounter. Andwhere she does not, he runs the risk of imposing on her what she isnot willing to have. All that is needed, then, in order to providewomen with legal protection from date rape is to make both recklessindifference and willful ignorance a sufficient condition ofmensrea, and to make communicative sexuality the accepted norm of sexto which a reasonable woman would agree. (239–40)

In short, if a man does not engage in communicative sexuality, then hedoes not really know whether his partner is consenting; thus, if henonetheless believes that she is consenting, then that belief isunreasonable.

Finally, some feminists have argued that rape should be a strictliability offense, that is, one with nomens rea requirementat all. According to MacKinnon, amens rea requirement meansthat “the man’s perceptions of the woman’s desiresdetermine whether she is deemed violated,” and this approach isproblematic because “men are systematically conditioned not evento notice what women want” (1989, 180–81). Adopting a“reasonable belief” standard does not help, in her view,because the standard for “reasonableness” masquerades asobjectivity while almost inevitably relying on patriarchal andpornographic assumptions; thus “measuring consent from thesocially reasonable, meaning objective man’s, point of viewreproduces the same problem under a more elevated label”(181).

Here MacKinnon speaks to a broader debate in feminist legal theory, inwhich some feminists have argued for the adoption of a“reasonable woman standard” in matters ranging from sexualharassment to stalking, battering, and rape. Proponents of thisapproach believe that a gender-neutral standard of reasonableness isimpossible given the differences between men’s and women’ssocial positioning. They point out, for instance, that men havegreater social and (in most cases) physical power than women and,relatedly, that women’s beliefs and reactions are shaped by theconstant threat of male violence with which women live (Kerns 2001).Because of these differences, women and men often have divergentperceptions of interpersonal behavior (Scheppele 1991, 45): forinstance, behavior that men see as merely flirtatious may beexperienced by women as offensive or even threatening, and women maysee advances as physically intimidating that men see as aggressivelyamorous. Proponents thus contend, in the words of Hubin and Haely (whoreject this approach), that “when we seek to determine whetherthe actions and words of the victim constitute or indicate consent tosexual intercourse – it is the standard of the reasonablewoman we must employ” (1999, 119). Thus, for example,in assessing the reasonableness of an alleged victim‘s judgmentthat it would be dangerous to resist a particular sexual advance, ajury would ask whether a reasonablewoman in that situationwould so judge. Opponents of the reasonable woman standard contendthat it is both possible and desirable to account for commondifferences between men’s and women’s physiologies, socialexperiences, and perceptions without importing gender into thedefinition of reasonableness itself. For instance, while granting thata reasonable person standard should often yield different conclusionsfor men than for women, Hubin and Haely contend that “this isnot because the reasonable person standard fails to present a single(gender neutral) standard, but because the standard we are employingis sensitive to features of the agent and the situation that arecorrelated with gender” (1999, 133).

2.3 Force

In many jurisdictions, the law defines the crime of rape as comprisingtwo separate elements: force and lack of consent. As West observes, insuch jurisdictions

sex that is undeniablyforced is, nevertheless, not rape ifthe victim “consented” to it; and … sex that isundeniably nonconsensual is, nevertheless, not rape if there was noforce used to obtain it. (1996, 233)

West explains that, historically, rape law has seen two kinds offorced sex as consensual: first, the sex that a man forces on his wife(since she was thought to have “consented” permanently andirrevocably to sex by getting married); and second, submission oracquiescence in the face of a show of force and/or a threat of moreviolence to come. Furthermore, she points out, women are oftenportrayed in both pornographic and mainstream media as enjoying, and(the assumption is) therefore consenting to, forceful and even violentsex; such assumptions often derail rape cases, as when a defendantclaims that the encounter was simply “rough sex” that wasenjoyed by the victim. Underlying the inclusion of a nonconsentrequirement over and above the force requirement, according to West,is the view that “women consent to forced sex all thetime—so forced sex alone can’t be rape” (239). Casesof nonconsensual but unforced sex, on the other hand, include those inwhich the victim is induced to have sex through fraudulentmisrepresentation (for instance, a doctor telling her that sex withhim is necessary for her cure), and those in which she is coercedthrough nonviolent means (for instance, a professor telling her thatshe must have sex with him to pass the course). The tendency of thelaw to see such encounters as meaningfully consensual departsstrikingly from how consent is understood in other areas; as Westobserves, “fraud or coercion that vitiates consent innonsexual contexts constitutes either criminal or tortiousactivity” (240).

Most feminists see the dual requirement of force and nonconsent asredundant at best and, at worst, as defining many rapes out ofexistence. Feminists differ, however, as to how rape laws shouldideally be structured. Perhaps the most common view is that the forcerequirement should be eliminated, and rape defined simply asnonconsensual sex, with differing degrees of severity depending onwhether and how much force and violence are employed (Estrich 1987).While some state statutes are now written this way, they often buildphysical force into the definition of non-consent; thus in practicethey function very much like the dual requirement of force andnon-consent (Anderson 2005a, 630).

Another alternative is to eliminate the nonconsent requirement,defining rape simply as forced sex. MacKinnon defends a variant ofthis strategy, contending that “Rape should be defined as sex bycompulsion, of which physical force is one form. Lack of consent isredundant and should not be a separate element of the crime”(1989, 245). This approach has the advantage of focusing on what theperpetrator did, rather than on how the victim responded (that is, onwhether her behavior constituted, or could reasonably have been seenby the perpetrator as constituting, consent).

A third approach is to separate the two elements into two separatecrimes, one based on the use of force and the other on the lack ofconsent. McGregor defends this idea, proposing that:

If either the offender engaged in sexual activity through the use offorce or he failed to secure meaningful consent, then [he] hascommitted an offense …. Rather than requiring both conditions,as the current statutes do, or attempting to pack all cases into oneor the other of the conjuncts … this approach recognizes thatthere are at least two different offenses … for which there aredifferent conditions and different levels of seriousness. (1996, 190)

Schulhofer (1998) argues, in a similar vein, that the law shouldrecognize two different offenses: sexual assault, which involves theuse of “physical force to compel another person to submit to anact of sexual penetration” (283); and sexual abuse, a lesser(though still felonious) crime, which involves sexual penetrationwithout the other person’s affirmative and freely given consent.Some commentators have observed that developing such a lesser offensemay aid in winning convictions, as juries are reluctant to convictnonviolent offenders of rape. Anderson (2005a) criticizes thisapproach, however, pointing out that survivors of what she calls“all-American rape” (nonconsensual sex without extrinsicforce or violence, usually committed by an acquaintance) suffer traumaat least as severe as do survivors of forceful rape. She contends that“all-American rape” should retain the powerful label (andpotentially severe penalty) of rape, while rapists who employ violenceextrinsic to the rape itself should be charged with rapeandother offenses (such as kidnapping or aggravated assault) asappropriate.

2.4 Other approaches

Recent scholarship includes some novel approaches to the legaldefinition of rape. MacKinnon, for instance, has recommended that abroadened understanding of force (as including hierarchies of power)should be supplemented not by a nonconsent requirement, but by astandard of “welcomeness.” A consent standard, sheobserves, incorporates gender hierarchy by assuming that men initiatesexual contact which women then either accept or refuse, whereas awelcomeness standard suggests the centrality of “choice,mutuality, and desire” (2005, 243). She explains her approach asfollows:

The idea here is not to prohibit sexual contact between hierarchicalunequals per se but to legally interpret sex that a hierarchicalsubordinate says was unwanted in the context of the forms of forcethat animate the hierarchy between the parties. To counter a claimthat sex was forced by inequality, a defendant could (among otherdefenses) prove the sex was wanted—affirmatively and freelywanted—despite the inequality, and was not forced by thesocially entrenched forms of power that distinguish the parties.(247–48)

MacKinnon also recommends the passage of new, sex-equality-based civilrights laws that sexual assault victims can use against theirattackers. Such laws, in her view, would offer survivors a kind ofdignity and control that criminal prosecutions often do not, whileattaching the “stigma of bigotry” to perpetrators(248).

Anderson (2005b) urges the elimination of both the force requirementand the nonconsent requirement, and the adoption in their place ofwhat she calls the “negotiation model.” She contrasts herapproach with the two most common “reform” positions,which she calls the No Model and the Yes Model. According to the NoModel, a sexual act is consensual unless the victim says no or resistsphysically. According to the Yes Model, a sexual act is rape unlessconsent is affirmatively granted (by verbal or physical behavior).Against the No Model, Anderson points out that many victims sufferperitraumatic paralysis and/or dissociation—that is, conditionsat the time of trauma that render them unable to protest or resist.Furthermore, both the No and Yes models rely heavily on men’sability to interpret women’s nonverbal behavior, despite strongevidence showing that men routinely fail in this endeavor: the NoModel, for instance, allows a man to infer consent from awoman’s silence and lack of physical resistance. Finally, bothmodels in practice tend to assume that a woman’s willingparticipation in non-penetrative sexual activity is a reliableindicator of her consent to penetration (for instance, Anderson pointsout that according to Schulhofer, an advocate of the Yes Model, awoman’s engaging in heavy sexual petting typically indicates heraffirmative willingness to have intercourse). This assumption,Anderson emphasizes, is not only often untrue but, in the age of AIDS,especially dangerous.

Like MacKinnon, Anderson sees a fundamental problem in the notion ofsexual consent as “a woman’s passive acquiescence to malesexual initiative” (1406). Negotiation, in contrast,“suggests not the granting of permission for the actions ofanother … but an active consultation with someone else to cometo a mutual agreement” (1421). The negotiation model thusrequires “consultation, reciprocal communication, and theexchange of views before a person initiates sexual penetration”(1421). (This requirement of consultation before penetrationdistinguishes Anderson’s approach from Pineau’s, despitetheir shared emphasis on communication; in addition, Pineau’smodel retains an overall consent standard whereas Anderson abandonsthat standard.) Unless and until a relational context has beenestablished that enables partners to interpret reliably eachother’s nonverbal behavior, the negotiation must be verbal. Thenegotiation model is gender-neutral, requiring that any person whoinitiates sexual penetration consult verbally with his or her partner(of either gender) to come to a mutual understanding of whether bothparties want penetration to occur. Such communication, Andersonobserves, “expresses an interest in the other person’sperspective … [and] a willingness to consider the otherperson’s inclinations and humanity. It expresses that the otherperson matters” (1423). The negotiation model thus differs atleast in spirit from even a version of the Yes Model that requiresverbal consent, in that it emphasizes mutuality rather than aone-sided permission-seeking.

Martín Alcoff, having emphasized that the legal system is notalways the best, and certainly not the only, arena for reaching truthand understanding regarding rape, also suggests that we “moveaway from simplistic binary categories” (for instance, rapeversus not-rape) and embrace the broader, more flexible and capaciousnotion of sexual violation. “To violate,” sheobserves,“ is to infringe on someone, to transgress, and it canalso mean to rupture or break. Violations can happen with stealth,with manipulation, with soft words and a gentle touch to a child, toan employee, or anyone who is significantly vulnerable to the officesof others” (2018, 12). Among the benefits of this approach, inAlcoff’s view, is to make room for the complex experiences ofsurvivors, who often struggle and/or evolve over time in developingand articulating their interpretations of what was done to them.

Legal theorist Jane Kim has argued that “rape tolerance”in the United States—evidenced by low rates of arrest,prosecution, and conviction of rapists at the statelevel—indicates a need for new legal approaches (2012, 273). Inher view, “rape should be considered a form of slaveryprohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution, allowingfor the creation of a federal criminal regime to prosecute andprioritize rape in conjunction with state regimes” (266). Sheargues that the Thirteenth Amendment was intended to prohibit slaveryand involuntary servitude in all of its forms, and that neither thebrief duration of many rapes nor concerns about a “slipperyslope” warrant excluding rape from its purview. “In orderto construct and prosecute rape in a manner consistent with itspurported gravity,” Kim contends, “rape must beeffectively prosecuted, prohibited, protected against, and abolishedunder the Thirteenth Amendment” (267).

It bears noting that successful rape prosecutions depend not only onhow rape is legally defined but, at least equally importantly, on thegeneral public’s willingness to believe women’s testimony(rather than seeing them as lying or confused) and to recognizeparticular encounters as instances of the applicable legal definition(that is, to seethis behavior as force, orthisutterance as expressing nonconsent). Also posing a challenge tosuccessful prosecution is what Estrich calls the “assumption ofrisk approach to culpability”: the common belief that, as sheputs it, “women who put themselves in compromising positionsshouldn’t complain when they are compromised” (1992, 10).The continuing prevalence of such rape-supportive beliefs can rendereven well-intentioned prosecutors unwilling to pursue legitimatecases, given the likelihood that juries will refuse to convict.

3. The Wrongs and Harms of Rape

Any legal definition of ‘rape’ implies some correlativeidea of what is morally wrong with rape: its illegitimate use offorce, its disregard of the victim’s nonconsent, and so on.Feminist theorists have often sought to articulate a more richlytextured sense of rape’s wrongness, and of its distinctiveharms, than the law alone can provide. They have thus developed anumber of interpretive frames—ideas about what rape is mostclosely akin to, and/or a form of—for understanding rape’swrongs and harms. No doubt both the wrong and the harm of rape arecomplex and multifarious; these interpretive frames suggest emphasesthat may be illuminating in different contexts and for differentpurposes.

3.1 Harms to individual victims

The view most commonly identified with feminism in popular discourseis that rape is a crime of “violence, not sex”—thatis, a form of assault whose sexual nature is irrelevant, and which isanalogous to other violent crimes. While this view has rarely beendefended by feminist philosophers, it has been prominent in somefeminist anti-rape public education and activism. (One feministtheorist often claimed to have held this view is Susan Brownmiller(1975); see Cahill 2001, 16-28.) Such efforts often seek to challengeviews of rape as a “crime of passion,” motivated by theperpetrator’s overwhelming lust (presumably in response to thevictim’s sexual attractiveness and/or provocation). Thus, inaddition to challenging victim-blaming assumptions, feminists oftenemphasized rapists’ non-sexual motivations, such as anger andthe desire for dominance and control; on this view, the rapist is aviolent criminal like other violent criminals, not just a guy seekingsex a bit too vigorously. Similarly, this approach emphasizes thatrape victims are real crime victims, not vaguely titillating peoplewho had some overly rough sex and might just have liked it.

The limitations of the “violence, not sex” approach,however, are fairly glaring. Rape’s sexual nature is central tounderstanding both its perpetrators’ motivations and its effectson victims, not to mention the crime’s broader social andideological roots and consequences. While perpetrators differ in theirstrongest occurrent motivations, it is important to ask why so manymen who wish to harm or violate women do so in a sexual manner.Furthermore, some rapes do occur because a man wants to have sex, andperhaps would even prefer it if his partner consented, but is preparedto proceed without her consent. Rape’s sexual character iscentral from the perspective of both actual and potential victims; asCahill observes, “few women would agree that being raped isessentially equivalent to being hit in the face” (2001, 3).Furthermore, many rape survivors are damaged specifically in theirsexuality, facing difficulties in their sexual relationships in themonths and years following the rape. Finally, because many rapes donot involve overt extrinsic violence, the “violence, notsex” slogan may make it more difficult for people to recognizeless obviously violent experiences of sexual force as rape. In short,rape is forced, abusive, and/or violentsex; recognizingrape’s sexual nature is crucial to understanding not only itswrongs and harms, but also the cultural and political meaning of sexin patriarchal cultures. As MacKinnon observes, “so long as wesay that [rape, sexual harassment, and pornography] are abuses ofviolence, not sex, we fail to criticize what has been made of sex,what has been done to us through sex” (1987, 86–87).

The violation of bodily and sexual autonomy is no doubt amongrape’s most central harms. In their classic discussion, Frye andShafer (1977) employ the concept of “domain” to elaborateon such violation. A person’s domain—“the physical,emotional, psychological, and intellectual space it lives in”(338)—defines the range of matters over which the person hasrightful power of consent. Because a person’s body is at thevery center of her domain and is the locus of the properties andcapacities that make her a person, the intentional invasion of thebody is an especially egregious attack: “to presume to wield aneffective power of consent over the personal properties and/or thebody of [a] creature … is ipso facto to deny that there is aperson there at all” (340). Thus, rape treats the victim not asa person but as an object, and one with a purely sexual function. Fryeand Shafer emphasize that rape’s communication of this messageconstitutes one significant element of its harm: “[rape] gives[the victim] a picture of herself as a being within someone’sdomain and not as a being which has domain …. Whether it is therapist’s intention or not, being raped conveys for the woman themessage that she is a being without respect, that she is not aperson” (341–42). Hampton sounds a similar theme,contending that through its expressivecontent—“representing the rapist as master and the victimas inferior object”—rape does an objective “moralinjury” to its victim’s value (1999, 135). It is notsurprising, then, that many rape survivors describe feeling not onlyworthless, but also numb, absent, or deadened. The reaction isunderstandable since, as Cahill observes, “Rape, in its totaldenial of the victim’s agency, will, and personhood, can beunderstood as a denial of intersubjectivity itself …. The selfis at once denied and … stilled, silenced, overcome”(2001, 132).

Some recent discussions emphasize that a full account of rape’sharm must incorporate both its denial of victims’ personhood andits intimate, sexual and bodily nature. According to Cahill,“rape must be understood fundamentally … as an affront tothe embodied subject …. a sexually specific act that destroys(if only temporarily) the intersubjective, embodied agency andtherefore personhood of a woman” (2001, 13). Anderson, seekingto define rape’s harm based on the “livedexperience” of those who go through it, cites“dehumanization, objectification, and domination” asprominent in the accounts of both rapists and rape victims (2005,641). Rape, she concludes, is best understood not only as the denialof sexual autonomy, but as “sexually invasivedehumanization” (643).

Linda Martín Alcoff, too, emphasizes rape’s specificallysexual harm, arguing in particular that sexual violations can be bothidentified and criticized on the basis of their damage tovictims’ sexual subjectivity. Alcoff contends that “As aconcept, sexual subjectivity provides an alternative to the singularfocus on the violation of our consent, desire, the capacity forpleasure, or will . . . our central concern with sexual violationsshould be their inhibiting and transformative effects on sexualsubjectivity or our self-making capacities” (2018, 111). Sexualsubjectivity, in her view, includes the capacity for sexual agency,but more broadly amounts to “our concernful making relationshipto ourselves as sexual subjects” (121). Survivors of sexualviolations, Alcoff contends, suffer damage to their ability to developand live out, in a caring, reflective, and flexible way, their ownsexual selfhood. “What is violated,” she writes, “isnot a substantive set of normative or normal desires, but thepractical activity of caring for the self. Trauma atrophiespossibilities” (145).

The humiliation and shame often experienced by rape victims arepredictable results of experiencing total subjugation and the intimateloss of control of one’s body. These reactions—not tomention victims’ feelings of contamination, of having beendefiled or desecrated—are often exacerbated by culturaljudgments of raped women as dirty and impure, or as “damagedgoods.” In some cultures, these ideas are so powerful that awoman who is raped (or who has consensual illicit sex) is thought tobring shame on her entire family; such women sometimes become thevictims of so-called “honor killings” at the hands of malerelatives (Banerjee 2003, Baxi et al. 2006, Ruggi 1998).

A distinctive set of harms enters the picture when, as is increasinglycommon, women and girls are violated while unconscious, often withpictures or videos taken and circulated. As Kelly Oliver points out,“lack of consent is valorized within popular culture to thepoint that sexual assault has become a spectator sport and creepshotentertainment on social media … sex with unconscious girls,especially accompanied by photographs as trophies, has become a goalof some boys and men” (2016, 59–60). In such cases, Oliverobserves, “The trauma of victimization not only becomes publicbut also infinitely repeatable. It can go viral. It doesn’t goaway” (91). Cressida Heyes (2016) provides a phenomenologicalaccount of the devastating harms of raping an unconscious victim.Raping someone who is unconscious, Heyes contends,

exploits and reinforces a victim’s lack of agency and exposesher body in ways that make it especially difficult for her toreconstitute herself as a subject. It damages both her ability toengage with the world in four dimensions (through a temporallypersisting body schema) and her ability to retreat from it intoanonymity … Sexual assault while unconscious can make therestful anonymity of sleep impossible, leaving only the violentexposure of a two-dimensional life. (2016, 365)

The assumption that such rapes are less harmful than the rapes ofconscious victims--since the rape itself is not directlyexperienced--is therefore badly mistaken, Heyes argues. The victim ofunconscious rape, she points out, “struggles to feel safelapsing into the one form of anonymity that is biologically andexistentially necessary for human life, yet ultimately she will haveno choice but to revisit this place over and over … no one canavoid going to sleep for very long” (2016, 379).

Many rapes lead to additional harms beyond those intrinsic to the rapeitself. Some rapes cause pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases(including HIV infection), and some rapists physically injure theirvictims. Victims who do not reveal their rapes to others, whether dueto shame or to the expectation that they will not be believed,experience profound isolation and lack of support; and indeed, manywho do report their rapes are disbelieved or blamed by friends,family, and/or police. Even those survivors who are believed too oftenface, as Alcoff points out, a kind of “preemptivedisauthorization or assumption that [they] are incapable of measuredand thoughtful analysis” (2018, 50). Due to both low reportinglevels and low conviction rates, relatively few victims see theirrapists punished; many of those raped by relatives, co-workers,friends, or other ongoing acquaintances must then face continuinginteraction with the rapist, while those raped by strangers often fearthat the rapist will find and re-victimize them.

With or without these additional harms (but especially with them),rape constitutes severe trauma. Undergoing trauma shatters thevictim’s most basic assumptions about herself and her safety inthe world. According to Brison, who survived a violent rape andattempted murder, trauma

introduces a “surd”—a nonsensical entry—intothe series of events in one’s life, making it seem impossible tocarry on with the series … . Not only is it now impossible tocarry on with the series, but whatever sense had been made of it inthe past has been destroyed. The result is an uneasy paralysis.Ican’t go, I can’t stay. All that is left is thepresent, but one that has no meaning, or has, at most, only theshifting sense of a floating indexical, the dot of a “now”that would go for a walk, if only it knew where to go. (2002,103–104)

With its profound effects on social connection, cognition, memory, andemotion, trauma disrupts the continuity of the self. It is strikinglycommon for a trauma survivor to feel that she is not the same personshe was prior to the trauma, and even that at least a part of her hasdied; as Brison puts it, “I felt as if I was experiencing thingsposthumously … as though I’d somehow outlivedmyself” (8–9). To reconstitute the self in a new form, thesurvivor must construct a meaningful narrative that incorporates thetrauma, but many survivors face obstacles in this endeavor such asdisordered cognition, memory gaps, feelings of despair and futility,and the lack of an audience willing to hear, believe, and understandtheir story. Such isolation is exacerbated when the trauma was humanlyinflicted (as with rape), since such assaults, as Brison puts it,“[sever] the sustaining connection between the self and the restof humanity” (40). Brison’s own account emphasizes the“extent to which the self is created and sustained by othersand, thus, is able to be destroyed by them” (62); thisrelational element is central both to trauma itself and to anypossible recovery. Because “violent intrusions by others… severely impair our ability to be connected to humanity inways we value” (61), recovery requires slowly repairingconnections—both to others and to damaged parts ofoneself—and rebuilding a sense of trust (again, of both oneselfand others).

For many women, rape is not a one-time event; rather sexual violenceand exploitation are, for at least some period of time, routineconditions of their lives. Such women experience female sexualslavery, defined by Barry as any situation in which

women or girls cannot change the immediate conditions of theirexistence; where regardless of how they got into those conditions theycannot get out; and where they are subject to sexual violence andexploitation. (1984, 40)

As Barry observes, such situations include battering relationships,most prostitution, and the sexual abuse of girl children, all of whichare common around the world. It is thus important to consider thedistinctive effects of such repeated and routine sexual trauma. Hermanhas recommended the adoption of a new diagnosis, complexpost-traumatic stress disorder, to describe accurately thepsychological impact of “prolonged, repeated trauma”(1997, 119). (This diagnosis is intended to encompass various forms ofhumanly inflicted trauma, not only sexual trauma.) The damage of suchprolonged trauma to a victim’s personality may be so severe asto constitute what Frye has called mayhem: a psychic“maiming” in which the exploiter instills in his victimsuch a grossly distorted perspective on herself, her function, and herworth that she becomes (whether temporarily or permanently) unable toidentify or pursue her own interests, assert her rights, or defendherself against further aggression (1983, 70).

3.2 Harms to women as a group

Rape is unquestionably a gendered crime: 91% of rape victims arefemale, while almost 99% of perpetrators are male (Greenfield 1997).In light both of these numbers and of rape’s broader ideologicaldynamics and social consequences, feminists have long contended thatrape harms not only its individual victims, but also women as a class.Brison, for instance, calls rape “gender-motivated violenceagainst women, which is perpetrated against women collectively, albeitnot all at once and in the same place” (2002, 98). Understandinghow rape harms women as a group requires analyzing it not only as anindividual act but also as an institution—that is, a structuredsocial practice with distinct positions and roles, and with (explicitor implicit) rules that define who may (or must) do what under whatcircumstances (Card 1991). Feminists have highlighted the ways inwhich the institution of rape reinforces the group-based subordinationof women to men: for instance, by making women fearful, and byenforcing patriarchal dictates both about proper female behavior andabout the conditions of male sexual entitlement to women’sbodies. As Burgess-Jackson puts it, “Rape—the act and thepractice—subjugates an entire class of individuals (women) toanother (men) …. every woman, qua woman, is wronged byit” (2000, 289).

Feminists have long claimed that, in patriarchal cultures, rape is notanomalous but paradigmatic—that it enacts and reinforces, ratherthan contradicting, widely shared cultural views about gender andsexuality. As Dworkin puts it, “rape is not committed bypsychopaths or deviants from our social norms—rape is committedbyexemplars of our social norms …. Rape is no excess,no aberration, no accident, no mistake—it embodies sexuality asthe culture defines it” (1976, 45–46). A core dynamic ofpatriarchal sexuality, on this view, is the normalizing andsexualizing of male (or masculine) control and dominance over females(or the feminine). This dynamic finds expression in a number ofbeliefs about what is natural, acceptable, and even desirable inmale-female sexual interaction: that the male will be persistent andaggressive, the female often reluctant and passive; that the male isinvulnerable, powerful, hard, and commanding, and that women desiresuch behavior from men; that “real men” are able to getsexual access to women when, where, and how they want it; that sexualintercourse is an act of male conquest; that women are men’ssexual objects or possessions; and that men “need” and areentitled to sex.

One study of undetected, self-reported acquaintance rapists found thatthese individuals’ propensity to rape was significantly relatednot only to their acceptance of rape myths and of traditional ideasabout male and female sexuality, but also to their belief that malesexual aggression is normal (Hinck and Thomas 1999, 816). Such beliefshave repeatedly been shown to play a role not only in men’sself-reported likelihood of committing rape, but also inpeople’s tendency to define rape more restrictively, and toattribute responsibility and blame to rape victims (1999, 816). (Theinfluence of rape myths on people’s definitions of rape explainswhy most men who report engaging in “sexually assaultive,abusive, or coercive behavior in order to procure sexualintercourse” (1999, 816) do not define their own behavior asrape.) Feminists have coined the term ‘rape culture’ todescribe the pervasiveness and acceptability of rape-supportivemessages in media and popular discourse. Some have further contendedthat many rapes, being at least partially motivated by group-basedanimus as expressed in rape-supportive beliefs, should be categorizedas hate crimes (Wellman 2006).

On this view, rape is a political practice by which spurious beliefsabout gender and sexuality are expressed, inscribed, and enforced viathe violation and control of women’s bodies. Hampton thus claimsthat “rape as it occurs in our society … is a moralinjury to all women … insofar as it is part of a pattern ofresponse of many men toward many women that aims to establish theirmasteryqua male over a womanqua female ….Rape confirms that women are ‘for’ men: to be used,dominated, treated as objects” (1999, 135). This underlyinggender ideology helps to explain why, when men and boys are raped(almost always by other males), they are often seen as having beenfeminized, treated like women and thus rendered shamefullywoman-like.

Many feminists have emphasized the role of rape in controllingwomen’s behavior through fear. Dworkin contends that, due to thethreat of rape, “all women live in constant jeopardy, in avirtual state of siege” (1976, 37); and several feminists havedrawn analogies between rape and lynching as forms of terrorizing,group-based social control (Burgess-Jackson 2000, 286-88). Card arguesthat rape is a terrorist institution, one which—despite itsadmitted differences from acts more normally labeled terrorism, suchas bombing and hijacking—advances its political purpose, thecontinued subordination of women, by terrorizing a target population(1991). Like all terrorism, she contends, rape has two targets: thedirect victims, who are seen as expendable, and the broader populationto whom a message is sent, and who can then be manipulated by fearinto complying with demands they would otherwise reject. In responseto the threat of rape, women scrutinize and restrict their ownchoices—what they wear, where they go and with whom, whetherthey drink, what “messages” they may be inadvertentlysending men, and so on—to ensure that they are following theunwritten rules that govern female behavior and that (supposedly)distinguish the bad girls who get raped from the good girls who donot. Even women who, because of their conformity to these rules, donot feel afraid of being raped have nonetheless, Card points out, beenterrorized into compliance.

A central element of rape as a terrorist institution, Card claims, isa protection racket in which men, as the group both creating thedanger and proposing to deliver women from it, dole outprotection—sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent, oftenillusory—in exchange for women’s service, loyalty, andcompliance. In this system, “good” men protect virtuousand deserving women from “bad” men, and part of whatdefines a woman as deserving protection is her conformity to rules ofpatriarchal femininity. Women who are not offered protection, or whodecline it when offered, are then frequently blamed for being raped.Furthermore, as Card points out, the rules of the institution oftengrant “protectors”—whether husbands, boyfriends, orpimps—sexual access to the woman or women whom they protect, sothat nothing they do to those women is taken to count as rape. Theinstitution thus requires a woman to give up her sexual autonomy inrelation to one man, in order to gain his (conditional and unreliable)“protection” from other men.

The threat of rape, with its false promise that by being“good” we can avoid disaster, plays an important role intraining women in the requirements of femininity. Describing a“feminine bodily comportment that is marked by fear,”Cahill observes that the female body well-trained in femininity“is that of a pre-victim” (2001, 157). The feminine bodyis marked by hesitancy, relative weakness, delicacy, andrestraint—qualities that in fact render women more vulnerable toviolence—and yet the woman or girl is taught to view her sexualbody as dangerously provocative because inherently“rapable” (159). Hence her duty to control, conceal, andmonitor her body and its movements, so as not to bring disaster uponherself. “The socially produced feminine body,” Cahillclaims, “is the body of theguilty pre-victim ….she was somewhere she should not have been, moving her body in waysshe should not have, carrying on in a manner so free and easy as toconvey an utter abandonment of her responsibilities of self-protectionand self-surveillance” (160). By molding women both tofemininity and to self-blame, the threat of rape thus systematicallyundermines women’s capacity to resist not only rape itself, butvarious other elements of their oppression as well. The threat is sopervasive in the cultural environment that, according to Brison, girls“enter womanhood freighted with postmemories of sexualviolence” (2002, 87)^[1], and years of peremptory warnings and cautionary tales lead manyvictims to experience rape as “a threat fulfilled” (Cahill2001, 164).

Many feminists contend that even as the institution of rapesystematically disadvantages women, it benefits men as a class byunderwriting beliefs about the naturalness of male dominance, definingwomen of certain kinds or in certain circumstances as “fairgame,” rendering women dependent on and thus beholden to men forprotection, and giving men a competitive advantage by restrictingwomen’s freedom of action and movement. May and Strikwerdacontend that “just as the benefit to men distributes throughoutthe male population in a given society, so the responsibility (forrape) should distribute as well” (1994, 148); in their view, menas a group bear collective responsibility for rape. Rape’s rolein increasing the burden of fear in women’s and girls’lives leads Burgess-Jackson to highlight it as an issue ofdistributive justice (1996, 181-205). He contends that thestate’s obligation to advance justice requires that it takesteps to redistribute fear so that women no longer bear it as anunfair and disproportionate burden; furthermore, he claims, since menas a class are overwhelmingly the cause of women’s fear, most orall of the costs of such redistribution should be borne by men.

3.3 Rape and racism

Rape is a tool not only of patriarchy, but also of racism,colonialism, nationalism, and other pernicious hierarchies. These andother power relationships in turn make women and girls even morevulnerable to rape. In virtually any situation where women and girlsbelonging to especially desperate or powerless populations are at themercy of men in authority—from female inmates and girls infoster care, to undocumented immigrants, to refugees dependent on U.N.peacekeepers and/or humanitarian aid workers for survival—someof those men use their authority to force or extort sexual access.

In the United States, the racial dynamics of rape are shaped by a longhistory of white men raping their African-American female slaves.Because the women were chattel property, the owners (and oftenoverseers) could and did use them sexually at will, with completelegal and social impunity. Because children born of slave mothers wereslaves, regardless of their paternity, many slave owners benefitedfrom rape by producing more slaves for themselves. Roberts emphasizes,however, that

the rape of slave women by their masters was primarily a weapon ofterror that reinforced whites’ domination over their humanproperty. Rape was an act of physical violence designed to stifleBlack women’s will to resist and to remind them of their servilestatus … . Whites’ sexual exploitation of their slaves,therefore, should not be viewed simply as either a method ofslave-breeding or the fulfillment of slaveholders’ sexual urges.(1997, 29-30)

Slaves were frequently forced into undesired sexual liaisons with eachother as well, based on the whims or the breeding plans of theirowners. Ultimately, as Collins observes, “Black women as a classemerged from slavery as collective rape victims” (2005, 223),and the rape of black women, like the lynching of black men, was acenterpiece of Klan activity post-Emancipation. Collins points out,however, that unlike lynching, black women’s sexual abuse bywhite men during and after slavery did not become a central oruniversally understood icon of American racism. The legacy of slaveryand its attendant ideologies has meant that, both legally andsocially, “for most of American history the crime of rape of aBlack woman did not exist” (Roberts 1997, 31).

Black women’s unrapeability was not only written into law, butreinforced by a racial ideology that defined them as lascivious andpromiscuous by nature. This same racial ideology stereotyped black menas savagely oversexed and thus sexually dangerous, especially to whitewomen. The post-Civil War terror campaign of lynching, which continuedthrough the 1930’s, was frequently claimed to be punishment forblack men who had raped white women, although in fact only a minorityof lynching victims were even accused of having done any such thing(Hall 1983, 334; Davis 1981, 189), and of those, many had in fact hadconsensual relationships with white women (Hall 1983, 340). The racistassociation of rape with black men rendered rape by white mencomparatively invisible, thus making white men as a groupunaccountable for rape (Davis 1981, 199), a dynamic that continuedwell into the 20^th century (Dorr 2008).

These destructive racial stereotypes remain powerful today, exertinginfluence on people’s judgments of whether a rape has occurred,how serious an offense it is, and who is to blame (Foley et al. 1995;Donovan and Williams 2002; George and Martinez 2002). Popular cultureplays an important role in conveying and legitimizing thesestereotypes. For instance, the image of sexually savage andanimalistic black masculinity is a central trope of the popular“interracial” genre of pornography, marketed to white men,in which black men are often depicted as damaging white women’sbodies with their unusually large penises (Dines 1998, 2006). AsCollins observes, “movies, films, music videos, and other massmedia spectacles that depict Black men as violent and that punish themfor it have replaced the historical spectacles provided by live,public lynchings” (2005, 242).

The stereotype of black women as sexually deviant and aggressive“Jezebels” finds one contemporary reflection in the“hoochie” image, which is increasingly prominent in blackas well as white cultural and media venues (Collins 2000,81–84). One study, designed in part to measure the influence ofthe Jezebel stereotype on young black women’s perceptions oftheir own rapes, found that the “stereotype of Black women assexually loose appeared to be internalized by Black participants andidentified as an important reason why they were raped” (Nevilleet al. 2004, 91). Another researcher, having found that theAfrican-American women in her study were less likely than white womento have disclosed their rapes (Wyatt 1992, 86), attributes thisdifference in part to the fact that “African American women…. do not anticipate that they will be protected by traditionalauthorities and institutions” (88). Meanwhile, both thestereotypes of black women and their structural vulnerabilitiescontribute to a situation in which, for too many, sexual abuse is aroutine condition of life: “being routinely disbelieved by thosewho control the definitions of violence, encountering mass mediarepresentations that depict Black women as ‘bitches,’‘hoes,’ and other controlling images, and/or experiencingdaily assaults such as having their breasts and buttocks fondled byfriends and perfect strangers … may become so routine thatAfrican American women cannot perceive their own pain” (Collins2005, 229).

Black women who have been raped by black men are sometimes silenced,either in order to maintain their own hard-won image as“respectable” or to avoid further tarnishing the publicimage of black manhood. They may be penalized or shunned by theirfamilies and communities for speaking out, and thus cut off fromimportant sources of support (Collins 2005, 226-27).

Racist ideologies about rape are also prominent in the history ofcolonialism and genocide against Native Americans. Ideas about Nativemen as savage rapists, Native women as downtrodden and raped squaws,and white men as heroic saviors of both white and Native women wereessential to the “colonial imagination” that explained andjustified the taking of Native lands (Smith 2005, 7–33). Theseideas were conveyed in widely read captivity narratives,stories—usually apocryphal, and often written by whitemen—of the abduction and brutal treatment of a white woman bythe “savages” (Smith 2005, 21–22; Faludi 2007,200–279). The message was that white women desperately neededwhite men’s protection, not only in the usual form ofrestrictions on the women’s behavior and mobility, but also bythe men’s efforts to control and kill off dangerous natives. Asfor supposedly downtrodden Native women, white men proposed to deliverthem from their oppression by civilizing them, assimilating them tomore enlightened European values and culture. In short, the ideologyheld that “Native women can only be free while under thedominion of white men, and both Native and white women have to beprotected from Indian men, rather than from white men” (Smith,23). In fact, the reality was quite the contrary. Smith argues thatrape was a key method of forcibly instituting patriarchal values inwhat had been relatively egalitarian Native cultures:

In order to colonize a people whose society was not hierarchical,colonizers must first naturalize hierarchy through institutingpatriarchy. Patriarchal gender violence is the process by whichcolonizers inscribe hierarchy and domination on the bodies of thecolonized. (23)

History bears out Smith’s claim, as white men routinely rapedand brutalized Native people—first as prisoners and in massacres(Smith 2005, 7–23), and later in epidemic levels of sexual abuseof Native children in white-run boarding schools (Smith 2006).

3.4 War rape and genocidal rape

Rape is a common, indeed arguably universal, form of abuse in war. Ittakes many forms, including the mass rape of female civilians asrecreation and/or as a prize for military victory, the mass rape offemale civilians as a strategy or weapon of war, and the enslavementof women and girls to provide sexual service for soldiers andofficers. The latter is frequently practiced both by official armies(as in the enslavement of mostly Korean and Chinese women and girls byJapanese forces during World War II) and by rebel militias (as in theabduction of women and girls as “bush wives” for rebels inSierra Leone). Additionally, as more women enter military forces, therape of military women by their own male colleagues is an increasinglyreported abuse (Jeffreys 2007).

Seifert criticizes the common view of rape as simply a regrettablebyproduct of wartime social breakdown and lack of military discipline(as well as of naturally aggressive male sexuality), contending that,in fact, rape is a routine element of military strategy, aimed atundermining the will, morale, cohesion, and self-conception of theenemy population. She observes that, during wartime,

the women are those who hold the families and communities together.Their physical and emotional destruction aims at destroying social andcultural stability …. in many cultures [the female body]embodies the nation as a whole …. The rape of women of acommunity, culture, or nation can be regarded … as a symbolicrape of the body of that community. (1996, 39)

It is thus not surprising that rape in war often involves heightenedsadism, as well as additional abuses such as forcing men to watch therape of their wives or daughters and forcing women to engage in sexwith their own sons, brothers, or other family members. In these andother cases, according to MacKinnon, the rape of female civilians isoften “a humiliation rite for the men on the other side whocannot (in masculinity’s terms) ‘protect’ theirwomen. Many of these acts make women’s bodies into a medium ofmen’s expression, the means through which one group of men sayswhat it wants to say to another” (2006, 223).

Because rape in war frequently seeks to undermine and destroy bonds offamily, community, and culture, there are important points ofconnection between rape in war and genocidal rape (Nenadic 2011).Genocide is the attempt to destroy a racial, ethnic, religious, ornational group as such, in whole or in part, by committing any of anumber of acts against the group’s members; the acts include notonly killing, but also causing serious bodily or mental harm, creatingconditions of life intended to destroy the group physically, andimposing restrictions intended to prevent births within the group.When such acts are committed with genocidal intent, the victim is notonly the individual targeted, but the group itself. As Sarah ClarkMiller observes, rape is an extraordinarily effective genocidalstrategy, since it “corrupts women’s roles as caretakersof relationships, conveyors of cultural practices, and sustainers ofmeaning … . In these ways, genocidal rapists twist the way inwhich women are pivotal to the life of a community, rendering thempivotal to its destruction” (Miller 2009, 513–514).

Genocidal rape has been recognized and condemned by both theInternational Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and theInternational Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)(Askin 2003, Nenadic 2011). In both cases, rape was employedsystematically against the women of a certain group, as part of anorganized campaign to destroy that group. In Rwanda, theinterahamwe raped hundreds of thousands of women and girlsbelonging to the Tutsi ethnic group, as part of an effort toexterminate the Tutsi people entirely. MacKinnon describes thegenocidal rape of Muslim and Croatian women in Bosnia-Herzegovinaas

ethnic rape as an official policy of war in a genocidal campaign forpolitical control …. It is specifically rape under orders…. It is also rape unto death, rape as massacre, rape to killand to make the victims wish they were dead. It is rape as aninstrument of forced exile, rape to make you leave your home and neverwant to go back …. It is rape to drive a wedge through acommunity, to shatter a society, to destroy a people. (2006, 187)

The Serbian mass rape campaign was distinguished not only by itsextraordinary brutality and notorious “rape camps,” butalso by the systematic forced impregnation of Muslim and Croatianwomen and girls. The aim was to claim and colonize the women’sbodies reproductively as well as sexually, while increasing thepopulation of children identified as Serb: “Croatian and Muslimwomen [were] being raped, and then denied abortions, to help make aSerbian state by making what the perpetrators imagine[d] as Serbbabies” (MacKinnon 2006, 188). Goodhart points out that in suchforced impregnation, the soldiers’ (and their commanders’)hope is to “create a baby (a son) who will infiltrate,undermine, or destroy the mother’s group” (2007, 309). Theresulting children are in fact seen by the maternal community as“children of the enemy … a sort of nascent fifth columnwithin an already victimized community” (310) and are thus oftenstigmatized, mistreated, or abandoned. Goodhart argues that therapist-fathers have violated the rights not only of the women theyrape, but also of the children thereby produced. The rapists areguilty of wrongful procreation, a “deliberate, malicious, andsadistic” use of procreative power with the intent of creating achild who is unlikely to be able to enjoy his or her human rights(317-18).

Some have puzzled over how war rape aimed at enforced pregnancy andbirth can be genocidal, since it aims to produce rather than preventbirths within the targeted population. In the case of mass rapes inBosnia, some Serb perpetrators may have believed they were producing“little Chetniks [Serbs].” But Claudia Card points outthat such a belief, even if sincerely held, does not provide goodgrounds for regarding these rapes as genocidal, since “in termsof biological parentage, the child will be as much non-Serb as Serb,and the child’s culture will almost certainly not beSerbian” (2008, 184). Thus, she seeks to explain the genocidalnature of rape aimed at enforced pregnancy without appealing toperpetrators’ beliefs about the ethnic identity of any resultingchildren. A better explanation, in her view, emphasizes that theSerbian campaign of forced impregnation “imposed a social deathon its victims … it turned them into living (and gestating)corpses. … Whether the perpetrators thought they were producinglittle Serbs is irrelevant. What counts is the attack on the socialmeanings of the lives of the women they tortured” (185). Cardalso develops and expands Beverly Allen’s proposal (1996) thatmilitary rape aimed at enforced pregnancy employs sperm as a weapon ofbiological warfare. Such attacks meet the criteria for biologicalwarfare found in international documents, she points out, since

a product of a living organism (the rapist) is used to attack abiological system (the reproductive system) in members of the enemypopulation. Although this attack need not produce illness, it isdesigned to produce social chaos … . Sperm so used becomes asocial and psychological toxin, poisoning the futures of victims andtheir communities by producing children who, if they survive, willremind whoever raised them of their traumatic origins in torture.… Unlike bacteria and viruses, sperm is easily containable,storable, preservable, and deliverable by means of men’s bodies.(187)

Schott takes a different approach to explaining the genocidal natureof military rape aimed at enforced pregnancy, drawing centrally onHannah Arendt’s concept of natality. War rape aimed at forcedimpregnation, Schott observes, “[transforms] birth into a weaponof death. This is so for women who are raped, who lose a sense ofbeing at home in their own bodies and of having a future, and it is sofor the children born of forced maternity, who may suffer expulsionfrom the mother’s community” (2011, 14). Thus such rapeundermines natality, or the capacity for new beginnings, which Arendtregarded as fundamental to human political life. Thus, Schottcontends, “war rape can be understood not only as a tool for theunmaking of the social and cultural world, but also a tool for theunmaking of the political world” (2009, 86).

Rape is used as an instrument of genocide because it is extremelyeffective in doing what genocides do: destroying not only individualgroup members, but “that aspect of the group whole that is morethan the sum of its individual parts … the substance and glueof community that lives on when individual members die”(MacKinnon 2006, 225). This is especially true when the rapes leavechildren motherless, the victims with AIDS, other diseases,infertility, fistulas, and/or other internal injuries, and familiesbroken as victims are abandoned and shunned by their husbands or otherrelatives. Even absent these additional harms, however, sexual assaultmay be especially well suited to creating a kind of self-annihilatingshame in its victims, a shame that can focus on one’s groupidentity. MacKinnon points out that

sexual atrocities can reasonably produce revulsion to the identitythat marked the person for the intimate violation, making the rapedwant to abandon who they are forever. When the shared identity forwhich one is raped is ruined, shattered in oneself and relationallybetween oneself and others, the group quality of the group so definedis destroyed. (229)

Smith underlines this point, and its special applicability togenocidal contexts, observing that “in my experience as a rapecrisis counselor, every Native survivor I ever counseled said to me atone point, ‘I wish I was no longer Indian’” (2005,8).

In February 2001, the ICTY found three Serbian soldiers guilty of rapeas a crime against humanity. Crimes against humanity are certainextraordinarily inhumane acts (including murder, torture, enslavement,and deportation) when those acts are systematically committed againstcivilian populations in the course of armed conflict. The ICTYjudgment marked international humanitarian law’s first officialrecognition of rape as a crime against humanity. According toCampbell,

the axiological foundation of the crime against humanity … liesin a conception of a fundamental trauma to a social body, whichconsists of the denial of the humanity of others. This model of rapeas a crime against humanity therefore involves not only a physical andpsychic trauma to the subject but also a symbolic trauma to“humanity.” (2003, 510)

The ICTY verdict thus conveyed a judgment that the Serbianperpetrators of mass rape, in addition to violating their individualvictims and damaging the cultural and religious groups to which thosevictims belonged, also insulted and injured humanity as such. DebraBergoffen (2012) points out that, in addition, the ICTY verdictcreated a new human right to sexual self-determination--a rightgrounded neither in the agency of an autonomous and inviolable subject(implicitly gendered male) nor in an assumed feminine weakness needingmale protection, but rather in the dignity of a humanly sharedvulnerability.

4. Conclusion

Feminist theorizing about rape draws on a rich tradition of feministscholarship in many disciplines, as well as on women’s insightsinto their own rape experiences and on the knowledge gained throughdecades of feminist anti-violence activism. As such theorizingcontinues to develop—growing both more radical in its challengesto patriarchal social and sexual assumptions, and more global and intersectional^[2] in its analysis—it constitutes an essential support forfeminist movements against sexual violence.

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• Adams, D., 2000, “Can Pornography Cause Rape?”,Journal of Social Philosophy, 31(1): 1–43.
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• Davis, Angela, 2000, ‘The Color of Violence Against Women.’
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• National Online Resource Center on Violence Against Women.
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• ‘Rape Is ….’ (Website for a documentary produced by Cambridge Documentary Films)

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