Handbook on Sexual Violence (93 page)

Sexual assault referral centres (or SARCS) have been the government’s preferred model for support for victims of rape and sexual assault. They operate alongside the police, providing a range of support (which varies in different locations: Payne 2009: 13) alongside forensic examination facilities. In police force areas where there is a SARC (29, at the time of writing: www.homeoffice.gov.uk/crime-victims/reducing-crime/sexual-offences/sexual-
assault-referral-centres) victims who report sexual offences are referred to the centre by the police themselves.

ISVAs are a relatively new idea, and are workers who are funded by the Home Office, but placed within SARCs, in police stations or in rape crisis centres, to work with women on a one-to-one basis. This role begins to blur the boundaries between rape crisis and public responses to rape. The women’s voluntary sector views the creation of this role as a useful step in terms of public responses. The sector is also concerned that the ‘independence’ of these workers is not properly guaranteed, and this hampers their work in the field. The Stern Review provides some description of the ISVA role and concludes that this is an important and welcome specialism, which should receive ongoing public funding (Stern 2010: ch. 4). Altogether, these are currently the core public responses for women who experience rape.

The key problem with public responses, which Sara Payne has recently identified, is inconsistency (2009: 17, previously highlighted by EVAW in their ‘Map of Gaps’ http://www.endviolenceagainstwomen.org.uk/pages/resources.
html, accessed 18 June 2010). Around the country, and even within particular areas, cases are treated differently, according to the local police, SARC, ISVA or Victim Support policies or priorities. As the ‘Map of Gaps’ illustrates, the same charge of inconsistency can be laid at the door of the women’s voluntary sector. The problem here tends to be one of funding and resources, rather than policy.

The voluntary sector responses which provide a different model are focused

within the rape crisis and women’s refuge movement, as discussed above. These groups grew from entirely different roots from the public organisations and have no primary allegiance to criminal justice as a response to sexual violence. In addition, there is a range of other independent groups which operate within the voluntary sector, providing important services to survivors of violence. A notable exclusion from the general description just given is the magnificent Southall Black Sisters (SBS). This is a long-established women’s group in London, which provides a range of local services to black women. The group also has a national and international lobbying profile and has been instrumental in some key changes and campaigns (www.southallblacksisters.
org.uk). Another leader in its field is Survivors’ UK, which works with male survivors of child sexual abuse and rape (
www.survivorsuk.org). This discussion returns to the topic of male rape later on, in reviewing some current challenges faced by the voluntary women’s sector.

The Rape Crisis movement grew from the Women’s Liberation movement in America, which grew across the United States in the 1960s. Consciousness- raising has been described as the ‘method’ of this movement (MacKinnon 1989: ch. 6), the same method employed within the continuum itself.

Which rapes?

This
section of the discussion considers the role of consciousness-raising in defining ‘rape’ and contrasts this with public definitions. As the opening quotation illustrated, this feminist consciousness-raising model defines rape as it is described by women. The definition is constantly changing and expanding to encompass the range of women’s experiences.

Both the rape crisis support model and the concept of the continuum use a consciousness-raising approach and are capable of allowing rape definitions to adapt. In contrast, the public sector definition of rape is relatively fixed and is largely derived from the legal context. It is true to say that public responses now understand using ‘rape’ as a basket term, which includes a range of differing violent acts. Nevertheless, the public conception of ‘rape’ is narrower than the women’s sector definition, in a number of ways. The following discussion will highlight these problems of scope and demonstrate that these lead to a false sense of a common terminology. When a feminist within rape crisis says ‘rape’ she means something far wider than a colleague in the police or the medical or legal professions is likely to appreciate. To illustrate, I recall talking with a friend, some years ago now, who was distressed at the police response to her report of rape. She had been told that this was not ‘rape’ and felt that her experience was being dismissed or diminished for some unaccountable reason. In fact the police had not meant to be disbelieving or unsupportive. The officer in question was commenting that the offence committed was sexual assault, not rape, in the eyes of the law. My friend and this officer were not using the terminology in the same way.

A modern feminist definition of ‘rape’ might be: sexualised violence which constitutes a range of possible acts and is perpetrated by men and boys upon women and girls. Rape is a mechanism for the exploitation of power difference

and the sum of the acts of rape maintain and reinforce the patriarchy which can also be characterised as being racist, ageist, able-ist, heterosexist, and beauty-ist. Rape is very commonly perpetrated by men and boys acting within patriarchal stereotypes. Women and girls are also sometimes able to access forms of patriarchal power and thus they can be capable of performing these acts of rape, though they do so far less often.

This definition tries to do justice to the knowledge which feminism has gained from women’s experiences. It acknowledges a patriarchal cause and reason for rape’s dominance, whilst acknowledging the range of other forms of difference which are reinforced and used within rape. The definition is unpicked further below, with some comparison with the public view of rape. The feminist definition here begins with a ‘range of possible acts’, deliberately failing to name or detail these, since women’s experience teaches that the list is never closed. It is clear that when Kelly developed the continuum model in 1988, she already knew that rape was made up of a range of linked acts. Some women experienced one or more of these on one occasion. Others were subjected to repeated and diverse attacks, over periods of years. To this extent, public responses have done some catching up, in the intermediate years. These acts of ‘rape’ are now defined within sections 1–4 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Section 1 covers the legal offence of rape and the act here is penile penetration of the vagina, anus, or mouth. Section 2 covers other acts of penetration with body parts or objects, where the penetration is of the vagina or anus. Section 3 relates to what the law terms ‘sexual assault’ and covers a wide range of other forms of sexual touching, which presumably covers other sexual penetration of the mouth, since this is excluded from section 2. Finally, section 4 covers being forced to do sexual acts to another, against one’s will. This might include being forced to masturbate an attacker or

their accomplice.

The law now covers a range of acts which can be recognised as a fair attempt to detail the acts that a continuum of rape would describe. At least to this extent the law has been influenced by survivor-led calls for change. Public services (linked to law) should now be capable of understanding the range of acts which survivors perceive to be rape as some form of sexual offence though survivors can still find that the terms they use differ from those of the police and others.

Early British feminist work on rape revealed that inflexibility in language resulted in complaints about non-supportive responses from public agencies (Ginsburg and Lerner 1989). Certainly SARCs, ISVAs and police officers now have the capacity to change to this degree. That said, one key problem for the law remains the drive to identify individual acts to charge as specific offences (under sections 1–4, for example). A woman might tell of being raped on a number of occasions; sometimes with objects, sometimes while being hit or bound, other times being made to perform acts on others. The law responds with a list of charges, under the Sexual Offences Act, but perhaps also under other legal provisions. In total, this list may not sound very much like the experience which the survivor has detailed. She may continue to view this as a mismatch. This is far more marked when the course of abuse went on over a number of weeks, or years. These ‘specimen’ charges rarely do justice to

women’s experience. This drive from the criminal law, to reduce an ongoing campaign of sexual violence to a list of specific offences, can create a sense of not being understood, which makes it harder for public responses to appear supportive. The continuum model would suggest that it might be more productive to conceptualise violence against women as a blanket offence and to think in terms of periods of abuse, rather than single moments within that time frame.
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Kelly’s concept of the continuum also allows for further investigation into the nature of rape, examining the contexts in which these acts of rape occur and the range of possible rapists. These aspects may remain harder for public agencies to respond adequately to. Much of what is now known about rapists was already there, in
Surviving Sexual Violence
. Kelly’s original research discussed women’s differing experiences of rape and made the links that established the idea of a continuum in the first place. Perpetrators can be strangers, acquaintances, dates, friends, friends of friends, family members, husbands and partners, ex-husbands and ex-partners, boyfriends who are gang members, carers, religious leaders, care workers, teachers, coaches, bosses, colleagues, taxi drivers, bus drivers and indeed, the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus. This last chap, in case you haven’t come across him before, is much beloved of the law. He has been used as a model for the ‘reasonable man’ for many years now and is supposed to represent a standard, objective, sensible man.
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Herein lies a problem then: in translating the continuum into services, the public sector struggles with the notion of the ‘reasonable man’ as rapist. To put it another way, the myth of the loner rapist may have been diluted, but rapists are still not perceived to be normal men. Research from Kelly (1988), Lees (1996), Brownmiller (1975), Russell (1982) and many others has now made it clear that women’s experience teaches that the men who rape are just men, nothing more. However, acknowledging this breadth of perpetrators remains a tough challenge for public responses. The police and other agencies are naturally keen to be able to identify the men who rape, with a view to isolating them in prison and creating a safer society. This is a central function of a criminal justice response. If all men truly are potential rapists (as Brownmiller originally asserted) then this task becomes

more fraught.

This tension can be examined with reference to the public sector preference for dealing with domestic abuse over rape. The men who commit domestic abuse are less of a challenge to public understandings. They can be seen to be acting outside of the norm when they have hit a woman partner, and so can be separated from the ‘normal man’ simply by becoming a violent partner. Other men and heterosexual women, who have vested interests in keeping a safe distance from involvement in this label, can know that they (or their men) are not violent partners. Inclusion within the group of violent partners becomes a self-fulfilling abnormality. Footballer Paul Gascoigne was seen to become an abnormal man when he was accused of wife-beating. His hero status was revoked. Men who abuse can be identified and their actions distinguished from the norm; this makes a public response manageable.

By contrast, the label of ‘rapist’ is far more complex. When a man is accused of rape, he is perceived as having committed an act which all heterosexual

men (want to) perpetrate. His act of penetrative sex is understood as simply sex (as illustrated by the comment from the Stern Review, used at the beginning of this
chapter). If he is shown to have acted outside of the normal range of sexual behaviour, then his status may change. For example, he can be appreciated as an abnormal man if he has sex with children, or with too many partners, or perhaps in too odd or violent a manner. In such a case, his oddness singles him out from the norm, and the application of the label ‘rapist’ does not threaten the heterosexual majority. However, if he has simply had intercourse with a woman who says it was rape, how does the majority keep its distance from the label? When Craig Charles,
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Mick Hucknall,
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and Kobe Bryant
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were accused of rape they did not become abnormal men in the public consciousness. The rapist label does not attach easily and when these complaints went away, so too did any need to re-evaluate the status of these men. Feminism can accept that the man on the Clapham omnibus is a rapist, if women say so. The rest of society struggles with this knowledge and still wants to find that men who rape are ‘strange’, even if they are not ‘strangers’. Meanwhile, more has been learnt in the past 20 years about the contexts in which rape occurs. Feminist anti-rape theory encompasses rape in marriage and relationships, the rape of children, rape in children’s homes, in schools, churches, dentists’ offices, and in swimming clubs. Rape in the sex industry is on the public agenda, as it was in Kelly’s first outline of the continuum. Activists now focus on rape in the lives of trafficked women, asylum seekers, and other migrant women, including domestic servants, and ‘mail-order’ brides. Cults, groups and other organisations which exist to perpetrate the sadistic and ritualistic rape of women and girls are also taken seriously within feminist practice. Situations where women are co-opted into abusing roles by men, and where women abuse in isolation, can also be included in this model.