The primary fact about sexual violence is that men do it to women and not the reverse. This non-reciprocal fact is the bottom line of women's status and discrimination, and neither our theologies nor politics can encompass it.
Our theology claims an equality before God between the sexes. Politically we distribute rights and protections in a vacuum and assume that men require protection from women on an equal basis as in the reverse category. Only recently have legal refinements, in rape and wife abuse for example, recognized the unilinear direction of male violence.
Violence itself is not a male to female category; sexual violence, however, is. Men can act violently toward each other and women can engage in violence toward men and women and even children at times. However, when it comes to those matters we label sexual, women do not rape men. Women rarely beat their husbands.
Biological distinction would appear, at first glance, to be the foundation of the reality. Men, in general, are physically stronger than women. This fact underlies and undergirds women's sense of self. To many of us, it is primary. What it means about our power and our sexuality is central. To realize the potential to be physically overpowered at most any time, most any place, with most any man, is to know the truth about where we stand biologically.
Here the ironies begin. In areas as disperse as military defense and chivalrous manners, women expect protection from men. Not violence. Women expect protection from males against other males. We are the currency, more often than not, in male power brokerage. As long as men are our agents of protection, it would seem, we are the victims of their intergender violence. Mae West put it well: "Every man I know wants to protect me--I wonder from what."
A second irony is that doubt about strength, and not strength itself, causes males to do violence to women. Study after study defines the rapist as a man whose personal power is in question. Not sex but power is his goal. To obtain power he looks to the vulnerable. Women are to him an easy mark and therefore he "proves" himself in an act of sexual violence.
Furthermore, the ironic and tragic history of sexual violence is that women are actually blamed for the violence done to them. We seek protection and get violence, men test the obvious when they test their power, and when women get hurt in the process, women are blamed. And finally, we women still have a tendency to accept the blame. The cycle of sexual violence goes from protection, to violence, to blame, to acceptance of blame.
These four progressive ironies are the best evidence I know for the existence of a bedrock sexism in our Western culture and life. By sexism I mean the unequal distribution of power on the basis of sex, regardless of individual merit or difference. Women, in general, have less power than men. Women, in general, are not valued as much as men. Women, in general, are weaker than men. All this could be true, and still we could be free from one-directional male violence. The outrageous truth is that we are not free. We are victimized again at the physical level. Cause or effect, action or reaction, which is this unnecessary physical intimidation? In Freud's words turned around, "What is it that men want anyway?"
To read anything other than anger and frustration in these words is to misread. One has only to see the 85-year-old rape victim in a hospital bed to summarize it all: She was not so ravishing that he could not control himself; or to hurt for the wife whose husband's weekend beatings frighten her enough to be scared but not enough to leave; she needs him for economic protection. From the point of view of a woman's insides, bottled-up rage exists. We can't fight back--and win.
The cycle of sexual violence today is threatened. Moving away from the acceptance of blame, women are questioning the whole process. Why are we the ones who feel guilty when raped? Case after case shows the rape victim's embarrassment and guilt, her overwhelming sense that this couldn't have happened to her. She goes on: "I'm not that kind of a woman."
Statistics show that rape victims are average, ordinary women, neither especially attractive nor especially available. Seventy-one per cent of rapes are planned. Seventy-five per cent occur within a woman's home. The theory so long validated by the culture that women want to be raped, that they put themselves purposefully in a dangerous situation, is being exposed. It is a lie, serving only to alleviate male responsibility for male violence.
The first step in moving beyond anger to action is to expose the myths. Most of us, women included, assume that rape happens to a certain kind of woman: sexy, available, vulnerable, unsure as to what she really wants. The myth of the rapist is that he is carried away by impulse; her vulnerable loveliness shatters his self-control. With 71 per cent of rapes planned, such argument is sheer rationalization.
The myth that nice women don't get raped is absolutely unfounded in fact. No statistical correlation exists whatever between a woman's sexual attractiveness and her chances of being a victim. Eighty-two per cent, in a Washington, D.C. study, had a "good reputation." The plain truth is that nice women do get raped. That fact alone changes society's attitude; much power is released by its recognition. It's one thing to make an object of the rape victim; it's another to know her as your friend, lover, wife, daughter, teacher, mother.
One of the more difficult myths is that of the rapist as an extraordinarily sick person. Again we objectify this reality and dress it in what we'd like to think rather than what is true. Professor Menachem Amir, in a study of 646 Philadelphia rape cases writes, "Studies indicate that sex offenders do not constitute a unique or psycho-pathological type; nor are they as a group invariably more disturbed than the control groups to which they are compared." Alan Taylor, a parole officer who has worked with rapists in the prison facilities at San Luis Obispo, California, stated the conclusion in plainer language: "Those men were the most normal men there. They had a lot of hang-ups, but they were the same hang-ups as men walking out on the street."
The lies continue: the rapist is insane, the victim oversexed, and finally, she really loved it. The myth is that all women secretly want to be raped. When we say no, what we really mean is yes. And in the great gamble which sex is in our culture we are encouraged to say no. Supposedly it's titillating.
Whether or not a woman has been a victim of an actual rape, she is nonetheless affected by it. Whether or not a man has ever raped a woman, he is nonetheless affected by it. For most of us, our defense mechanisms work well enough that we are not constantly oppressed by fears of physical consequence. But little rape as opposed to big rape is a part of all of our experience. Courtship is predicated on a rape psychology, with me saying no so you can force me to say yes. Men who cannot play this game successfully lose out in courtship; women who say yes too soon are considered aggressive and domineering. The power relationships in courtship are clear; for either partner to violate them by expressing too much power or too little is to court rejection rather than acceptance.
It would be naive to advocate the removal of power from the arena of sexuality. Still a consensual sexuality would take us a long way down the road away from our rape psychosis. As in any human relationship and any offering of gifts, balance is crucial to the healthy use of power. With power so unbalanced as it now is in sexual relationships, the warfare is predictable.
A balance of sexual power would mean the sharing of initiation and response, a goal very far away at the moment. What we have now is the requirement for men that they prove their power constantly, while women must achieve perpetual passivity. We are trained to keep our agenda secret, to say no when we mean yes. We are offered only "under the table power," and our seductive, manipulative skills show how well we have been taught.
Actor and acted upon, being forced, each of us, to say what we really don't mean, denied our freedom to be weak, denied our freedom to be strong, what is it that we're getting out of all this? Whose self-interest is being served?
Once we have internalized, as women, as potential victims, our own sense that we are not responsible as a class for the violence that is done to us, we are then free to move on rape as a social rather than personal issue. The first steps in breaking the cycle are indeed personal. They require a kind of personal metanoia on the part of women, in which we begin to see the truth of rape and how threatening it is to all of our well-being.
Beyond that personal level, rape is a social issue, and we must respond to it socially rather than personally. Blame will not cease from being projected onto us until we demonstrate that we are no longer accepting of the blame and we learn how to protect ourselves. In the majority of rape crisis centers around the country, women are being helped to refuse the blame. After a woman is victimized, at almost any place in the country today, she can be assisted in a healing process that will challenge the psychological scars which five years ago or less were the second level of her victimization.
Real progress has been made to avoid that double level of victimization, "raped once physically and then psychologically in the courts." But this progress has occurred for the victim and therefore has its own band-aid kind of mentality. The very existence of women who, even though they have been raped, have claimed their right to sanity, will go a long way in providing the political foundation necessary to dealing with the real root cause. That root is the assumption of the requirement for protection.
The cause of rape is impotence. When men rape women, they rape their own vulnerability and their own requirement for protection. In a world where a combination of reasons have produced a higher and higher frustration and powerlessness, it is no accident that rape is on the increase. This truth is that women are speaking to power. When we recognize the fact that men are being affected by the absence of mastery in their own lives and that they are externalizing that powerlessness in the form of rape, we have come a long way toward dealing with the problem.
Psychology never provides much more than insight, however. If women are to go beyond understanding their anger and understand themselves as human beings and not victims, methods of action must be developed. Women suffer equally with men a sense of powerlessness and lack of mastery over their lives.
The problem of protection must be addressed within the context of this shared powerlessness. Action against rape is the task of the woman who wants more than personal freedom from a victim psychology.
Just as there is a continuum of violence, from courtship patterns and sexual harassment to violent consummated rape and at times even murder, likewise there is a continuum of response. We began with the level of personal internal insight, with a movement from passivity to fear to an acceptance of rape's reality and our vulnerability to it. Once that vulnerability is recognized and we have no longer chosen to internalize it, we must seek methods of externalizing it. Action against rape at the corporate level is, simply put, action that is externalized, focusing the blame at its true source.
Rape is a problem whose home is in our gender socialization. We teach our children that dominance is sexy, that men are dominant and women passive. He asks her for a date, she says yes or no. He pays for the movies, she nestles at his shoulders. For a woman to be taller than a man is "odd," definitely not sexy. For a man to wait until she initiates sexual behavior is unmasculine. I could go on but everyone knows the data: There is a way for men to be and a way for women to be. And rape is simply a continuum of our courtship patterns and sex roles. Any action that does not recognize these foundational patterns and does not seek to adjust these segregated roles is shooting at the wrong target.
Only when women share initiating "rights" with men, as adolescents as well as adults, and only when men share the "right" with women to be sought after, will the ground be removed from the game of rape. Rape is a ritual stemming from the liturgy of courtship; it is the logical conclusion of the way we are taught to fall in love.
A glance at any motion picture or TV program will reinforce these sexual attitudes. We find in every major film that deals with male-female attraction that scene when he wins her over. From Gone with the Wind to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, dominance is what is sexy, not mutuality.
Therefore, when we look to take action on the issue of rape, we need look no further than our own homes and our own child-rearing practices. We need look no further than the local cinema. When parents meet together around the issue of Parent Effectiveness Training and share with each other their hopes that their sons and daughters will grow up differently than they did, there is action against rape that can be taken. When small groups of citizens gather in a living room in a local community to analyze the content of the movie playing down the street and the ads that appear on a given television station on a given evening and when they make their response and analysis known to the responsible persons, then action is being taken against rape. Media watch at a simple local level is an excellent way to connect the violence of rape to everyday behavior. One evening of TV viewing is enough to launch a year-long campaign.
A second level of action is that of refusing the violence in our streets and neighborhoods and subways and public places. In most of the large cities in this country, crime, sexual and nonsexual, is a fact of life. Again, small groups of people can make large impacts just by choosing to act together to reclaim their neighborhoods. On my block in Philadelphia, meetings were held once a month, crime was monitored, and residents made a special concerted effort to be on the streets at different times of day or night. Because of this consciousness and other simple methods of block awareness, we were not afraid to come home late at night.
At a more sophisticated level, there is the process of making official authorities accountable for security. In the public transportation system in Philadelphia, major efforts have been made to achieve political power on the part of women in order to 1) move from powerlessness to some evidence of power; 2) make the public transportation system safe by demanding lighting, adequate signs and directions, and police protection where necessary; and 3) demonstrate an unwillingness to be captives of our own homes because we are afraid to use public transportation. These three goals intertwine and reveal a model of holistic response to the reality of rape. Women need to show themselves and the world that they are capable of protecting themselves. By strategically gaining power and the visibility on the issue of rape in public transportation, these women are protecting themselves and others in a way that a thousand Judo courses could not.
Moving beyond the necessity for organized direct political action, we must face the matter of protection in general. The society maintains a police system because it assumes the need for protection on the part of all people; it then goes on to assume that only men can protect. Women must accept responsibility for their own protection and have the option of sharing the social burden for it. Otherwise we are a colonized protectorate, symbolizing daily our need to be protected by them. It is not enough for us to expect that men will learn to do the dishes.
In the areas of sex roles and the socialization of our children, of making our neighborhoods safe, of holding our public authorities accountable to the provision of the service they contracted to do, lies the action agenda for rape. We move into these areas once we realize the fact that rape is a subjective reality, something that happens to people like us and is done by people like us. This is the flesh of the bones of action against rape.
Churches have a specific responsibility in both of these major areas. We are a primary socializer; we teach people the "ethical" way to live. We legitimate social action on the basis of the gospel's demand to seek the kingdom. If God is not present in redemptive action such as this, then I don't know where God is. The denial of a person's will, which rape is, is a denial of that person's creatureliness.
Rape is neither a personal nor a social act: It is preeminently both. Because the church exists for the person, the family, and the neighborhood, it is ideally suited both for the transformation of social values and the caring for persons in that change process. And because the church is an institution with a long history of civilizing people against the temptations of violence, we have a responsibility to reaffirm that commandment in the public framework. Violence has become too easy an option. No one has a right to do violence to another; in the search for a bottom line for their activity, perhaps people need to hear that commandment again.
Finally, there is the whole matter of teaching people about power. Nowhere is power more horrifyingly articulated than in the act of rape. And nowhere is a legitimate level of power needed to be experienced--by both the victim and the rapist. A theology of power must be articulated and experienced, in which the church demands from the society some level of self-determination for all people.
In the genuine integration of male and female roles in both sexes, a chief ingredient will be the coming to terms with power. How much do we need? How much corrupts? If we feel that we don't have it, how do we get it? If we feel that we have too much, what are the formulas for release that permit violence its dissipation? These are not questions that can be answered on paper; rather, in the witnessing, living, breathing community which the church is, we must live our way to an understanding of power which comes out of the biblical reflection and is adequate to the kind of world we live in. Rape is a teacher about power; we can learn much from it. It deserves our serious and prayerful attention.
Donna Schaper was pastor of the First Congregational Church in Amherst, Massachusetts when this article appeared.
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