An Epidemic Of Violence

At a women's meeting in Sojourners Community a few years ago, we were discussing the vulnerability that we feel as women in an inner-city Washington, D.C. neighborhood.

"It's easiest to be friendly to children, and also easy to be warm to women and older people. But when I see a young man coming toward me, I feel myself closing in. I'm never sure whether to smile or speak or look right past him. I usually just look at the ground."

This comment got us sharing with one another the encounters that had brought us face to face with our own fears and powerlessness, and which had left us with a lamentable posture of vigilance in a neighborhood that we call home.

Each of us had experienced verbal assaults on the street. Some of these were violent, others couched as invitations—and all were aimed at our integrity.

Some women spoke of places that still held fearful memories: a bus stop where an exhibitionist once approached, a bank of shrubbery from which a man shouting obscenities emerged, a corner on which an attempted rape was fought off. We shared experiences from other times and settings: an inappropriate examination by a male doctor in the D.C. jail after a peace witness arrest, sexual advances from a college professor, a rape in an apartment and another behind a house. And we added to our own experiences those of other women we knew.

In the pain and healing that emerged in the sharing, we recognized one fact: each of us lives with the knowledge that most any man could physically overpower any one of us at any time. Our experiences of sexual violence vary, but each of us is affected by the very threat of such violence.

For most women this threat is epitomized by the reality of rape, an act of unilateral violence done by men to women. Rape is considered by many criminal statistics experts to be the fastest-growing violent crime.

Timothy Beneke's Men on Rape reports that, in a random sample of 930 women, sociologist Diana Russell found that 44 percent had survived either rape or attempted rape. In a September 1980, Cosmopolitan survey, to which more than 106,000 women responded, 24 percent had been raped at least once. According to Nancy Gager and Cathleen Schurr in Sexual Assault, between 300,000 and half a million women are raped each year. The FBI estimates that a rape is committed every eight minutes, and that if current trends continue, one in four women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime.

Such figures are only estimates, as it is widely believed that rape is one of the most underreported crimes. Gager and Schurr estimate that somewhere between one-tenth and one-half of all rapes are reported to the police.

The reasons why women do not report rape are many. Some assailants threaten to further harm or even kill their victims if they tell anyone. Many women expect to face insensitive treatment at the hands of examining doctors, police, and the courts. Susan Brownmiller offers the following testimony of one rape victim in her landmark book on rape, Against Our Will: "I went to the police station and said, 'I want to report a rape.' They said, 'Whose?' and I said, 'Mine.' The cop looked at me and said, 'Aw, who'd want to rape you?'"

While such insensitive treatment seems to be on the decrease as the public and involved officials are becoming sensitized to rape, the problem has not been eradicated. And for many women, having to repeat the details of her rape over and over for police and in the visible arena of the courts can be as traumatic as the rape itself.

All rape victims deal with feelings of guilt and shame. Many blame themselves, feeling they should have resisted more or talked their way out of the rape. They know that the burden of proof rests with them, and that judges often don't convict a rapist unless the woman shows evidence that she tried to resist: bruises, lacerations, or other wounds. Such an approach to conviction does not take into account the threat of further violence and the weapons often wielded at women, and it betrays a double standard: no one expects victims of armed robbery to be believed only if they show evidence that they tried to resist the assault.

Gager and Schurr estimate that only two to three percent of men who rape are sent to prison. In a study of 300 sex offenders, Nicholas Groth, director of the Sex Offenders Program in Somers, Connecticut, found that 10 percent reported they had raped more than 25 times before being caught. The others got away with an average of five rapes for every one for which they were arrested.

Some women are reluctant to report a rape in which their assailant is an acquaintance. In the Cosmopolitan report, 51 percent of the victims had been raped by friends, 18 percent by relatives, and 3 percent by their husbands. The D.C. Rape Crisis Center reports that 60 percent of all reported rapes are committed by an assailant known to the victim.

A 200-page report on federal government employees titled Sexual Harassment in the Federal Workplace, Is It a Problem? projects that in the next year, 21,000 American working women will face rape or attempted rape on the job. Twenty percent of these women will have repeat occurrences. The report also estimates that 164,000 women will be pressured into sexual favors.

Domestic violence of all types, in which wives are most often the victims, is also on the increase. Elsewhere in this issue, Judy Webb chronicles her work at a shelter for victims, shares their stories, and documents the growing shelter movement for battered women (see "Binding Up the Wounds," page 25).

Rape has always been surrounded by many myths, chief among them that it is primarily a sexual act rather than a violent one. One deputy district attorney who has tried a number of rape cases expresses this attitude in Men on Rape: "I don't care if it's Adam and Eve, or Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, [rape] is always going to happen. That's just human nature." A society that holds to such a myth finds it easier to blame the victim for "provoking" a rape.

But the facts surrounding rape contradict this myth. Women in their 90s have been victims of rape, and rapes of infants as young as six months have been documented by Children's Hospital in Washington, D.C. Seventy-one percent of rapes are planned, and 75 percent occur within the woman's home. And 75 percent of men who rape are either married or have regular sexual partners, according to the D.C. Rape Crisis Center.

Rape is not, therefore, the act of a man out of control of his sexuality against a woman who "asks for it" by placing herself in a dangerous place or by dressing provocatively. Rape is a violent assault expressed sexually. The victim is a target of rage, not sexual frustration, a rage that grows out of a distorted need to subjugate women.

The primary goal of rape is power. Ironically, it is a doubt about strength, not strength itself, that drives a man to rape.

In this light, it is not difficult to understand why children are increasingly becoming victims of sexual assault. Children are the most vulnerable targets for a man who wants to prove his power over someone who is weaker.

This may not be hard to understand intellectually, but it is emotionally difficult to comprehend when the terrible tragedy and long-term scars of child sexual abuse are seen up close. Can we even begin to comprehend the shattered young lives behind reports such as one found in the May/June 1977 issue of the UCLA Monthly, which reports "a recent sharp increase in oral venereal disease among children under five years of age"?

In a study by Dr. Charles Hayman at the D.C. General Hospital, 12 percent of the rape victims seen at the hospital were children 12 years of age and under. Parents United, a support group for people who have been involved in child molestation, estimates that one out of four girls and one out of seven boys is sexually abused.

Perhaps most frightening and tragic is the number of children who are sexually abused by members of their own family. Seventy-five percent of abusers are family members, according to Parents United. Ten percent of the women in the Cosmopolitan survey responded that they were victims of incest.

As with rape, these figures are only estimates. It is difficult to know how many children, out of fear, shame, or confusion, are sexually abused but never tell anyone. A perspective on incest is offered in this issue by Louise M. Garrison (see "Where Was God?" page 23), who shares both the anguish of her sexual abuse as a child and the healing she is discovering.

As rape is the ultimate violation of women, pornography is the ultimate objectification. Pornography exists for the purpose of robbing women of their humanity.

According to Not a Love Story, a documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada, pornography exploded from a $5 million business a dozen years ago to a $5 billion business today. Of the 10 most profitable magazines on the market, six are "men's entertainment" magazines, with Playboy and Penthouse outselling Time and Newsweek.

Pornography's message is that women deserve to be kept in bondage by men—and furthermore that they enjoy it. Images of gagging, chaining, whipping, raping, burning, and mutilating women are common fare in pornographic films and literature. All are done in the name of male sexual pleasure or sheer entertainment.

Psychiatrist Ed Donnerstein explains in Not a Love Story that "desensitization" takes place when humiliation and brutality toward women are portrayed as acceptable behavior. The aggression appetite seeks satiation, and soon violence done to women on the street rivals what is portrayed on the screen. Ginny Soley writes more about the roots of sexual violence found in pornography and the media (see "Our Lives at Stake," page 13).

It is no coincidence that the pornography business exploded after the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1965. Ellen Willis is quoted in Laura Lederer's Take Back the Night: "The aggressive proliferation of pornography is ... a particularly obnoxious form of sexual backlash. The ubiquitous public display of dehumanized images of the female body is ... society's answer to women's demand to be respected as people rather than exploited as objects."

Like rape, pornography is about power, with sex as the weapon. And just as sexual abuse of children is on the increase, so is child pornography. Time magazine reported in 1977 that child pornography is a $1 billion industry. The Los Angeles Times estimates that 1.5 million children under the age of 16 are used annually in commercial sex, either prostitution or pornography.

Florence Rush, a former social worker and author of a book on child abuse, reports in Take Back the Night that Robin Lloyd, author of For Money or Love, a book about boy prostitution, discovered 264 different child-pornography magazines, costing an average of seven dollars each. Where the Young Ones Are, "a sex guide for pedophiliacs"—people who view or use children as objects for sexual pleasure—contains a list of 378 places in 59 cities where children can be found for use. The guide has sold more than 70,000 copies.

Increasingly, children of the Third World—particularly from countries torn apart by war and other crises—are being used in child pornography. Britta Stovling, a Swedish feminist writer, explains why in Take Back the Night. Third World children are easier to exploit. Some people consider it "more exotic" for white men to have sex with children who are not white. And the final reason, says Stovling, is "so that one does not identify that girl in the picture with one's own daughter."

This coupling of racism and sexism is quite prominent in adult pornography as well. Liane Rozzell looks at this in depth and at other manifestations of violence against women of color (see "Double Jeopardy," page 20).

As Rozzell points out, one of the most widespread abuses is an effort to control minority populations through the forced sterilization of women. The U.S. government, with the active support of many of the biggest U.S. corporations, is the largest contributor to sterilization programs both domestically and around the world. Sterilization is part of a larger plan to assure U.S. control of the economic development of the Third World. The president of the Rockefeller Foundation is quoted in a National Lawyers' Guild report saying that, if all other efforts fail, "the developed world must be prepared to think the unthinkable: life-boat ethics and triage for example."

Sexual violence is an epidemic. It has many manifestations, and at its root is misogyny—the hatred of women. Rape is its threat, and pornography its propaganda.

This hatred is not limited to any particular culture or period of history. The subjugation of women has been the cornerstone of many societies as well as many religions, as Joan Chittister makes clear (see "Divinely Ordained?" page 16). The Indian Hindu rite of suttee was created to spare widows from the temptations to impurity by forcing them to burn themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres.

Footbinding of young girls was carried on for a thousand years in China. This ritual left women grotesquely crippled from early childhood. Also concerned with purity and control, the Chinese patriarchs used footbinding as a way of forcing women into total dependence, seeing to it that their women had limited mobility.

Widespread throughout parts of Africa is the ritual of clitoridectomy, or female genital mutilation. Clitoridectomy "purifies" a female by removing her center of sexual sensitivity. In some countries the medical profession, rather than condemning these mutilations, has made a specialization of them, to its own economic advantage.

Clitoridectomy is often accompanied by infibulation, the sewing together of the vaginal opening. Infibulated women must be cut open for intercourse or child-birth and then resewn, a process repeated many times throughout a woman's life. Thus women's "purity" and control by men are complete.

Lest we Westerners feel distant from such practices, it should be remembered that genital mutilation is common during gang rape in this country. Also, infibulation was practiced on women in Europe. The chastity belt, which was supposedly less painful, kept women locked up for months or even years when their husbands were away; discomfort was implicit, and infection was common.

From the 15th to the 17th centuries, witch hunts spread throughout Europe. The primary accusation leveled against the "witches" was sexual impurity. The victims were women considered outside the control of men, both unmarried women and widows. Large numbers of these women were put on trial, then publicly stripped, raped, tortured, and burned or hanged. This practice was carried out to a much lesser extent in the United States.

The violence done to women is limited only by the imaginations of men. But such violence is not simply isolated in the minds and actions of a few sick men; sexual violence has become a societal pathology. Not one woman is unaffected by the atmosphere of sexual violence that pervades our culture.

The agony is a tremendous weight to bear. But facing the pain is the first step toward healing.

Too often the church has been silent in the face of such violence, or has been among those forces that have blamed women for their victimization. It is time for the church to speak. And it is time for the church to listen—to the stories of women, to their fears and their pain.

Women are coming together to say no to this violence; and many men are joining them. Hope is emerging as growing bonds are transforming tragedy into a foundation for unity. We are moving forward toward that day when each person is respected; when each of us is valued as a son or daughter of God, in whose image we have been created with love.