Handbook on Sexual Violence (45 page)

(Stern 2010: 44–5, emphasis added)

This is largely a repetition of what has been known for many years, certainly since the report
A Question of Evidence?
(Home Office 1999) but paradoxically endorses analysis on attrition (Lovett and Kelly 2009; and see the website of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit,
http://www.cwasu.org/) while negatively claiming that the attrition figure dominates the public discourse ‘without explanation, analysis and context, [and] is extremely unhelpful’ (
ibid
.:

45). It is unclear to whom it is unhelpful. The concept of the attrition rate has allowed researchers to unpick the reality of why so few cases of rape are reported, recorded, investigated and prosecuted. Over the past 30 years, the attrition rate had fallen from 33 per cent in 1977 to 5.29 per cent in 2004 (Office for Criminal Justice Reform 2006: 8). Instead of using attrition as a measure, the Stern Review seems to prefer to use the conviction rate of 58 per cent (Stern 2010: 10). Yet it does not make comparable conviction rates available to help the reader make sense of the statistic. If the 58 per cent is compared with that for violence against the person, which is 71 per cent (Kershaw
et al
. 2008), it would seem that the statistical likelihood of securing a conviction in rape is more difficult than in other violent crimes and many offenders walk free. Let me rephrase that: many rapists walk free. There is an intellectual reluctance to confront what else this means in real terms, even though there is a well- known sociological phenomenon that some criminals are serial offenders. Let me rephrase that: each time a man walks free from raping or sexually violating someone, the risk increases that he will offend again. In a society where only around six per cent of rapes reported to the police result in a conviction (Stern 2010), rape still constitutes a low-risk activity for many men.

Within just the Metropolitan Police Authority area, rape has the highest percentage change of all violent crime (Table
8.1) with an increase of 470 cases in a 12-month period. The large increase was an effect of a correction in data after it came to light that the Metropolitan Police failed to record large numbers of rape allegations as criminal offences. Speaking in
The Guardian
, former Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Brian Paddick said, ‘It is shocking this has happened for such a serious offence. It could be a reflection of the pressure the police are under from the Home Office to improve the clear-up rate and reduce reported crime. There is not the political will in government and the Home Office to put resources into place, which the offence requires, to bring people to justice’ (Dodd 2009). It also marks an almost institutionalised distrust of rape victims whereby the initial report is deemed unworthy of officially recording.

Table 8.1
Crime in London 2008

Violence

Down Up Change Percentage

in number of change offences

Most serious violence and
:
+147 +0.2 assault with injury

Gun crime
:
+283 +14.3

Knife crime
;
-1319 –9.9

Youth violence
;
-1098 –5.2

Rape offences
:
+470 +22.0 All other serious sexual offences
:
+534 +8.2 Homicide
;
–24 –15.6

Source
: Metropolitan Police Authority 2010

Invisible or unrecorded

Sexual violence might also be a feature of other recorded crimes and/or might go completely untold, unreported and unrecorded. Following a Freedom of Information Act request, the BBC reported that many rape claims do not even make it to official crime records (BBC News 2009). Previous criticism of police data on sexual violence includes a report by Fawcett which highlights the differences across England and Wales, with attrition rates from 1.6 per cent in Dorset to 18.1 per cent in Cleveland (Fawcett 2009). At another point on the continuum, sexual violence can culminate in death. Domestic homicide is strongly associated with gender (Stark and Flitcraft 1996) and victims are overwhelmingly women. Women are more likely to be killed by a partner or ex-partner than by any other category of assailant (Lees 1997; Coleman
et al
. 2007) and men form the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of all forms of homicide and in particular for all forms of domestic homicide including child homicide. When women kill it is frequently in order to defend themselves or their children from a male partner who has been abusing them and more than half of all male victims of domestic homicide are killed by a partner they had been abusing (Stark and Flitcraft 1996). Lees (1997) suggested that the discourses used by judges in considering the lethal actions of men legitimise many rape myths and Mason and Monckton-Smith (2008) argue that murders of women are regularly sexualised by journalists. They use discourse analysis of six case studies of rape and/or murder of women by men to show how a conflation of the offences of rape and murder contributes to the acceptance of rape myths by criminal justice professionals, victims and the wider public. One such myth is that rape is always accompanied by physical violence. They argue that Jack the Ripper was defined by the media as the archetypal rapist despite the fact that ‘there is no evidence to suggest that any attempts to rape the victims were made, or that the killer ejaculated over the bodies’ (2008: 692). It is argued that this type of mythmaking had real consequences in hampering the investigation into the murders committed by Peter Sutcliffe (dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper). The construction of offender profiles reinforces an ‘extremely limited and distorted image of what serial murder is, who commits it, who is victimized, how they are victimized and why they are victimized’ (Schmid 2005: 79).

Assumptions about roles and entitlements frequently underlie the justifications presented in court for serious sexual violence. Lees (1997) researched how women (and girls) who give evidence in criminal trials as victims were subjected to inquisitions concerning their sexual reputation. Such a reputation was examined by questioning their past sexual experiences. The cross-examination aimed to undermine their credibility and a key question in a rape trial frequently examines the separation between consensual and non- consensual activity. A rape case against five men in 2010 illustrated this issue of credibility when it collapsed after a court heard that the female victim had used an online forum to talk about taking part in group sex (BBC News 2010). The judge ordered the jury to return not guilty verdicts after learning that the woman had shared fantasies with a man over the Internet and then went to visit him. She said her intention was to have sex only with him but when she

arrived at his house she was confronted by several men. The judge stated, ‘This case depended on the complainant’s credibility . . . Not to put too fine a point on it, her credibility was shot to pieces.’ By doing this, the judge suggested that the complainant had, by sharing her fantasies, invited the rape and only had herself to blame. This suggests again an institutionalised distrust of rape victims and how women who have been raped continue to be questioned on their behaviour, underpinned by the assumption that she has somehow provoked the attack (Stanko 1990; Temkin 2000; Horvath and Brown 2009). It has long been recognised that victims of rape are ‘put on trial’ (Abbott and Wallace 1990: 174) despite changes in the law (see Section 41, Youth Justice and Criminal Justice Act 1999) and that it is women’s behaviour (rather than men’s) that is scrutinised by the courts and held to be responsible for provoking the violence of men. In the case from 2010, no question was raised of the credibility of men regarding whether they fabricated their belief in her consent. Even if a person initially consents to sex, they have a legal right to change their mind. Regardless of any sexual fantasies, withdrawal of consent is legally permissible and to continue without consent constitutes rape. The issue should have been about consent rather than assumptions about the credibility of someone who has fantasised about a particular form of sex. It is an illusion that sociological understandings of sexual violence have filtered into the hearts and minds of the judiciary or the wider public. A survey was published in 2010 of the views of more than 1,000 people in London to mark the tenth anniversary of the Haven service for rape victims. More than half of those of both sexes questioned said there were some circumstances when a rape victim should accept responsibility (The Havens 2010). Gender-based assumptions may not make certain outcomes inevitable but while they go unchallenged, or even supported, many abusive men will continue to treat such assumptions as adequate justification for their own sexually violent behaviour.

Falling outside of local statistics: war and oppressive regimes

The horror of sexual violence in wartime can often be obscured by limits of terminology. Although the expression ‘rape in war’ will be used as a shorthand term throughout this section we need to be alive to the fact that sexual violence in war takes a variety of forms, including ‘individual rapes, sexual abuse, gang rapes, genital mutilation, and rape-shooting or rape- stabbing combinations, at times undertaken after family members have been tied up and forced to watch’ (Pratt and Werchick 2004: 6). Forced prostitution, sexual slavery and sterilisation are also common forms of wartime sexual violence. This
section explores the same issues identified earlier but within the context of war:

Violence against women is an element of war and part of the continuum of sexual violence;

Violence against women in war is complex but functions as a symbolic expression of defeat;

Statistical data matters because it helps to document the extent of violence against humanity;

Rape in war has been known about for a long time but has only recently been focused on as a ritualised expression of masculinity;

Violence against women has a profound impact on the cultural heritage of a people;

Women’s role within the structure of the community means that violence

against them has significance for all within that community;

Violence against women continues after formal conflict has ended;

Rape can be a ‘spoil of peace’ as well as a ‘spoil of war’.

Caution has to be raised about the statistics of sexual violations committed in war because, as with local-level reporting cited earlier, violations against women are rarely fully recorded or documented systematically (Wood 2006; Gray and Marek 2008). Do statistics even matter? What is the difference between one million rapes and two million in the context of war? Why count rapes in war (or in peace for that matter)? It matters to the sociological imagination, however, because each victim is a human being and by acknowledging their experiences and connecting them to others who have suffered, by making even just the best estimate possible, we can acknowledge their value as human beings, connected to the wider humanity of us all and take the first step towards trying to support the survivors (Enloe 2000).

From early feminist demands that sociological analysis take women’s lives seriously, ‘experts’ from a range of different fields have been challenged to construct knowledge based on credible evidence and this includes assessing gender impacts. Pilch (2009) suggests that the concept of rape as genocide began to emerge in the 1990s when the systematic rape of women was used as a strategy of war in the former Yugoslavia. However, Seifert (1996) claims the understanding of rape in war was not new and cites Brownmiller’s reporting of mass rapes in Bangladesh: ‘The rapes were so systematic and pervasive that they had to be conscious Army policy’ (Brownmiller 1975: 85). Seifert documents some of the known cases of rape in war:

In the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937, an estimated 20,000 women were raped, sexually tortured, and murdered during the first month of the Japanese occupation [...] According to evidence presented at the Nuremberg war-crimes tribunal, the German command had opened a brothel in a hotel in the city of Smolensk into which women were forcibly driven. It also became known that it was the usual practice to tattoo the legend ‘Whore for Hitler’s troops’ on the bodies of captured partisan women and to use them accordingly [...] In Korea during World War II between 100,000 and 200,000 women (the ‘comfort women’ who are now speaking out) were abducted to camps and raped or sexually tortured by the Japanese [ ...] 200,000 women were raped in Bangladesh in 1971 [...] in Kuwait, according to official statistics at least 5,000 women are assumed to have become victims of rape during the [1990] Iraqi occupation.

(Seifert 1996: 37)

Geraldine Brooks (1996: 183) discusses how during the 1991 Gulf War, Kurdish women were raped by Iraqi soldiers ‘as part of the regime of torture [ . . . ] Others had been raped as a means of torturing their imprisoned fathers, brothers or husbands.’ Other conflicts in which rape was widespread include civil wars in Bosnia–Herzegovina, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Sudan and Somalia (Canning and Tobin 2010). Although it is less common than female sexual assault during conflict, men are also raped or forced to rape or perform other sexual acts and have suffered sexual mutilations (Wood 2006).

Wielding a sociological imagination means that real-life micro-level consequences can be connected to macro-level events. In the case of war, this sociological analysis of taking the lives of women seriously can illuminate how modern-day warfare is conducted and how an examination of socio- economic forces highlights how, for many young men, the only available source of ‘employment’ is the military or some militarised group which is underpinned by cultures of masculinity toxic to women and children (Enloe 2000). Such cultures of masculinity encourage obedience to authority, dilute individual responsibility and progressively lead to moral disengagement (Wood 2006; Canning and Tobin 2010). Seifert suggests that feminist understandings of rape in war finally made an impact in mainstream understandings due to the escalation of rape in Yugoslavia with the establishment of ‘camps explicitly intended for sexual torture’ (1996: 35) together with the rise in the number of women in ‘politics, academia, science, and the media enabling them to make these incidents a political issue and to question the established, marginalising explanations that have been offered’ (
ibid
.).

Using our earlier sociological framework, we can ask certain questions of

the issue of rape in war:

1. What is the strategic function of sexual violence within war?
   

2. Who benefits from sexual violence within war?
   

3. Do men and women have different understandings of sexual violence within war?
   

Of course these are just some of the questions that can be raised but in considering the
function
,
benefits
and
understandings
of sexual violence against women in war we can begin to see that an attack on the social cement of families and communities is an effective strategy in conflict and that the ‘dehumanisation of the woman through this process is used to persecute the community to which they belong’ (Jones 2005: 590). The destruction of social and cultural stability through rape in present-day Sudan has a physical and symbolic impact on the self-image of the whole people (Gray and Marek 2008). Destruction of women has a more profound impact on the cultural heritage of a people than the destruction of buildings, art or other cultural artefacts.