THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ROLE OF RAPE

    It makes you wonder what can go through the mind of a person to rape another human being.  The word rape is derived from Latin (rapere), meaning to steal, seize, or carry out.  When the word rape comes to mind, we think why do you rape someone.  Is it fun, funny, just having fun, or what?  When rape is an issue, we think of nothing but sex because basically that is what it is, someone touching and holding you down while you are screaming for help.  Rape can be and is a serious matter that makes us think why someone would do that.

LITERATURE REVIEW

    There has been intense research on the subject of rape. It has been evaluated many ways. The evaluations vary from the aspect of "date rape" by Dr. Andrea Parrot (1988), to the analysis and research of rape by Sylvana Tomaselli and Ray Porter. Randy Thornhill aand Craig T. Palmer approached the study of rape from research on evolutionary biology (2000). Timothy Beneke approaches rape by analyzing and exploring what constitutes men's consciousness of rape (1982). Les Sussman and Sally Bordwell conducted interviews with convicted rapists to try and analyze the "mind set" of the attackers (1981).

    All of these studies did provide one common conclusion -Rape is a horrific sexual assault on an individual. Parrot's research revealed that victims do not confront the reality of date/acquaintance rape. One of the obstacles that they face is emotion. They aren't aware of what exactly happened to them and they don't know where to place the blame. Tomaselli and Porter concluded that contrary to popular belief, man is not a human version of a preparatory jungle beast. Man has a powerful sex drive but the sex drive does not direct behavior in the absence of social encoding. Thornhill and Palmer have concluded that the social science theory of rape is based on the empirically erroneous, mythological ideas about human development, behavior, and psychology.

    Beneke exposes that there are two conflicting statements that are contributed to rape. First, that rape is a crime of violence and terror and has little to do with sex. Secondly, rape is merely an extension of the sex roles and sexual behavior regularly played out between men and women. In there interviews, Sussman and Bordwell, discovered that most rapists do not believe that they have done anything extreme or "terribly immoral".

RESEARCH METHODS

  Statistics, provided by police agencies nationwide, reveal (16) rapes are attempted and ten (10) rape occur every hour.   It has to be noted that rape is the one major crime that is often not reported.  Susan Estrich (1990) reported that only 10 percent of sexual assaults are reported.  Approximately, 100,000 rapes are reported to law enforcement each year.  If 10 percent of the sexual attacks are not reported, the data reveals that a woman is raped a staggering rate of once every 36 seconds.  Attempted rapes occur at the alarming rate on women at the rate of about 3 per minute.  It has been estimated that 15 to 40 percent of women are victims of attempted rapes or rape in their lifetimes. (U. S. House of Representatives, 1990) The F.B.I. has estimated that if the present trend on rapes progresses at this rate, one woman in four will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime.  Numerous surveys and statistics have been compiled on various factors concerning rape.  The results of a survey conducted by Cosmopolitan magazine (1980) in which 106,000 women participated concluded that: 51 percent had been raped by friends; 37 percent by strangers; 18 percent by relatives; and 3 percent by husbands.
 

      Rape does not always occur in dangerous surroundings and the rapist may not always have a weapon.  Many rapes, 50 to 70 percent, occurred when there was some degree of trust.  College women surveyed replied in the following manner:

Number of women surveyed:  3,187

                                                   478 reported that they were raped

                                                    10.6% were raped y strangers

                                                    24.9% were raped by nonromantic acquaintances

                                                     21 % were raped by casual dates

                                                     30% were raped by steady dates

                                                     8.9% were raped by family members

 Change in public attitudes toward rape                                          73.8

 Effects of the women’s liberation movement                                  45.2

 Increased sensitivity of the criminal justice system                       41.7

 General increase in violence                                                            34.5

 Sexual permissiveness                                                                     16.1

 Increased convictions                                                                        8.9

                     AGE                                                    SEX                             RACE

 ==============================================================

   Crime       15-17   18-30   21-29  30+          male    female           wh       blk       other

     Often when statistics are compiled on rape, the effect(s) of that sexual violence is excluded:

                         1.  The threat of rape makes women more dependent on men(or other            

                             (women). 

2.      The threat of rape makes solitude less possible for women.

3.      The threat of rape inhibits a woman’s expressiveness.

4.      The threat of rape inhibits the freedom of the eye.

          In presenting an explanation of the sociological aspects of group rape Gilbert Geis states:  a pair or a company of men behaving in accord with well-established principles of collective behavior.  There is generally a leader, who usually plans the act ,and who is the first of the offenders to have intercourse with the victim.  His associates , consigned to later “shares’ suffer the definitional insult of dealing with already used and abused merchandise.

       Rapists differ in their degree of articulateness, understanding, and remorse. However , society has determined that individuals who rape, sodomize, ram fists and Coke bottles up the vagina of a woman is a violent, immoral, or extreme member of the human race.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

     Rape is a violent crime that has often been portrayed as a crime of violence.  Rape is misunderstood as a crime of passion because sexual contact is involved. Violence and control are the major elements of this crime.  This is not a crime that is an unusual event.  It happens everywhere, everyday, and to almost any age group. It happens at home, on a date, on a college campus, and at a social gathering.  The National Black Women’s Health Project based in Washington D. C.  compiled the following statistics:

                                           A woman is raped every 2 minutes

                                           An attempted raped occurs every 3 minutes

                                           Approximately 40 percent of Black women reported                                                           

                                           coercive contact by a sexual nature by age of 18.(1)

     Rape does not have economic barriers but the poor are raped at a higher and alarming rate.  Women who reside in households that have an income of $15,000 or less have a higher tendency to be raped.(2)  

     The rapist, unlike every other criminal, forces, requires or mandates that his victim to experience him through every one of her senses – sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste.  In a study conducted by the Law enforce Assistance Association (LEAA), it was revealed that 70 percent of the rapists either threatened or actually employed force.(3)  

     A substantial number of rapists were abused when they were children.  Some of the abuses were physical and some were of the sexual nature.  The majority of rapists have been reported to be under the age of twenty-five.   Of this group, there are a sizable number in the 17 – 20 age bracket.  Fifty per-cent of the rapists were found to have a previous arrest record.  Only a fifth of these were found to have a previous record for a crime against a person.(4)   Most males who are arrested for rape are males of low socioeconomic status.  A rapist is not a passionate individual. 

A rapist feels superior, viewing his victim as a faceless object.  Rape is a turmoil brought on by the rapist’s need to inflict personal violence and feel the power it creates.  It is by no means an act that is the result of pressures of seduction fantasies. Most rapists are or evaluated as otherwise normal men who succumb to committing criminal violence against women.  As weird as it may appear, a rapist is punishing his victim for what he believes he/she or someone else has done to him.  The common factor in rape situations is premeditated violence.  A rapist is a calculating, deliberate, and dangerous individual.

     If a substantial amount of violence towards women is to end, we must recognize that there has to be a revolution in the consciousness among  males to focus their anger elsewhere and in a non-criminal manner.  Rape is a crime of opportunity and when a potential victim and potential offender are thrown together by the forces of fate, a complete process is thrown into motion.  Each word, act, or gesture by the potential victim serves to either strengthen or lessen the resolve of the potential rapist, and hinder or help him to commit his crime.  Rape is not just “human nature”; rape is not “natural”; rape is a crime – a violent and deviant crime.

ENDNOTES

   1Lynn Norment: Rape and Recovery: Survivors Speak out, Ebony, (April 2002), p. 153.   

   2 Linda A. Fairstein: Sexual Violence, Our War Against Rape (William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, 1993 p. 205 

   3 Les Sussman and Sally Bordwell:  The Rapist File, (Chelsea House, New York, 1981) p. 20.

   4 Donald E. J. MacNamara and Edward Sagarin: Sex Crime and the Law (Macmillian Publishing  Co., Inc., New York, 1987), p. 20

REFERENCES

Astin, Patty, Surviving Sexual Assault Chicago, Congdon & Weed, Inc., 1983.

Barr, Jennifer, Within A Dark Wood, The Personal Story of a Rape Victim.
New York, Doubleday& Company, Inc., 1979.

Benedict, Jeff, Public Heroes, Private Felons, Boston, NortheasternUniversity Press1997.

Beneke, Timothy Men on Rape. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966.

Bode, Janet, Rape, New York, Franklin Watts, 1979.

Brewer, James D. The Danger fro Strangers Confronting the Threat of Assault,
New York, Plenum Press 1994.

Brownmiller, Susan Against Our Will, New York, Batam Book, 1979.

Fairstein, Linda A. Sexual Violence Our War Against Rape, New York
William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1993.

Lefkowitz, Bernard, Our Guys, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1997.

Lindquist, Scott, The Date Rape Prevention book, New York, Source books, Inc. 2000

MacNamara, Donal & Sagarin, Edward, Sex Crime and the Law. New York Macmillan
Macmillan Publishing co., Inc,1977.

Madigan, Lee & Gamble, Nancy The Second Rape, Society 's Continued Betrayal of the
Victim New York, Macmillan, 1989.

Marsh, Jeanne, Geist, Alison & Coplan, Rape and the Limits of Law Reform.
Boston Massachusetts, Auburn House Publishing Company, 1982

Michaud, Stephen & Hazelwood, Roy The Evil That Men Do, New York, St. Martin's
Press, 1998.

Parrot, Andrea coping with Date Rape& Acquaintance New York: The Rosen
Publishing Group, Inc. 1988.

Russell, Diana E. Rape in Marriage, New York MacMillan Publishing co, Inc., 1982.

Storaska, Frederic How to Say no to a Rapist - and Survive, New York,
Random House, 1975.

Sussman, Les & Bordwell, Sally The Rapist File. New York: Chelsea House, 1981.

Thonhill, Randy & Palmer, Craig T. A Natural History of Rape. London,
England, The Mitt Press, 2000.

Tomaselli, Sylvana & Porter, Roy, Rape. New York: Prentice- Hall 1986.

Wiseman, Rosalind, Defending Ourselves, A Guide: to Prevention Self - Defense and
Recovery From Rape, New York, The Noonday Press 1994.

Other comments: I did some minor grammatical editing, but I'm a little unclear on why you've chosen phrases like "when rape is an issue" or "we think of...." or "makes us think".  I guess it's your way of engaging the audience for your paper, but in general, use of the "we" or "I" or "us"  word isn't really appropriate for the Intro section of a research paper.  The sentence that reads "we think why do you rape someone" comes across almost as implying the reader is a rapist, certainly not something you want to impart to your audience.  I would suggest rewriting the Intro with impartial pronouns like "it" or "there".  Short, declarative sentences would help.  Some creative license is allowed.  I'm intrigued by the title.  It seems like a well-focused paper into the minds of rapists, and criminologists don't ordinarily consider roles to be psychological, but sociological.  You may have struck upon a new concept here - the concept of a psychological role. I cover a lot of social psychology in this course, so you should get plenty of ideas from lecture notes.

You need to start working on your paper, and turning in your work. I got your Lit Review on 04/02/02, and you might want to send me the references.

On 04/14/02, I added the references you sent me. On 04/22/02, I added the Research Methods section you sent me
On 05/02/02, I added the summary and conclusions you sent me.