What We Talk About When We Talk about Rape

by Sohaila Abdulali

In the US, more than ninety percent of people with developmental disabilities are sexually assaulted.

Blue Seat Studios created a charming little video, Consent: It’s Simple as Tea.27 It uses stick figures to illustrate why having sex is like a cup of tea. If you wouldn’t force someone to drink tea, why would you force them to fuck? If someone said they wanted tea, and then changed their mind when you made it, would you pour it down their throat? And so on. It’s a nice tool for children. But sex isn’t a cup of tea. If you don’t really want a cup of tea, but you drink it because you’re afraid you’ll offend your host, that’s good manners. If you don’t really want sex, but you do it because you’re afraid you’ll offend your date (this happens all too often), that’s not quite the same thing.

In Canada, raping your wife is a crime (except if you come before Superior Court Justice Robert Smith, who ruled that a man who didn’t know it was illegal to force intercourse on his wife was not guilty28).

In India, Ghana, Jordan and numerous other places, once a woman is married to a man, she signs over the rights to her vagina (and the rest of her body) to her husband.29 No consent? No problem. The law says marriage means full access, no questions asked.

In Kuwait, if you rape someone you’re not married to, you can get out of trouble ...

In Italy, Article 544 of the Penal Code also allowed rape to be canceled by marriage. This goes to the heart of the true meaning of consent, and what you are actually consenting to. According to Article 544 (made famous in the 1960s by Franca Viola, a girl who refused to marry the man who kidnapped and raped her), sexual violence is a crime against morality, not against a human. This meant it could be fixed by marriage. Just think—you could erase all the bad juju caused by rape by simply going to church and having a matrimonio riparatore with your rapist. The law was finally abolished in 1981.

Kim Fromme, a blackout expert, appears regularly in court as an expert witness to say it’s possible to consent while blackout-drunk.32 According to this point of view, you aren’t competent to drive a car or operate machinery, but you’re fully able to consent to sex.

in the US legal system, if you are invested, informed and interested in your subject, you’re not fit to judge your peers. If you’ve been raped, then you can’t have an opinion about it because you’re too biased, too emotional, too close to it.

If only people who have had no experience with sexual assault get to sit on juries, it’s no wonder the conviction rate in American rape trials is abysmal. Consider this: out of every 1,000 rapes, • 310 are reported to the police; • 57 lead to an arrest; • 11 get referred to the court system; • 6 rapists go to jail.55

Sharia law requires the eyewitness evidence of four grown men to prove rape.

“Rape is not sex. If you hit someone on the head with a rolling pin, it’s not cooking.”

We raise our children with such unclear standards that they don’t even have the tools to recognize rape when they see it. We really have a problem if we think it’s easy to confuse sex with rape. Jaclyn has a stark example of this:60 I think often of the two men who intervened when they came upon Brock Turner assaulting an unconscious woman at Stanford—they knew instantly that something was wrong, because she was clearly not participating. Contrast that with Evan Westlake, who in high school witnessed his two friends raping a semiconscious girl at a party in Steubenville, Ohio. When asked why he didn’t intervene, he told the court, “Well, it wasn’t violent. I didn’t know exactly what rape was. I always pictured it as forcing yourself on someone.” I’m sure there are many differences between Westlake and the two men in the Turner case—and these cases are different from the Ansari situation—but the one that stands out to me is that Westlake was raised here in the US. The two men on bicycles in Palo Alto were Swedes, raised in a country that teaches healthy attitudes toward sexuality and gender in school, starting in kindergarten, including lessons on not just biology but healthy relationships, destigmatizing taboos around sex, and, yes, affirmative consent. They knew that a woman who is lying still and not participating in sex is a woman who isn’t consenting. And it prompted them to take action.

Sharonne sees a massive gap in dentistry, as well as a reluctance among trauma survivors to seek dental care. “As dentists we are not educated about this. And patients tend not to relate the phobia to sexual abuse.”

abusers frequently respond to accusations with “DARVO”—Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender: I hypothesize that if an accusation is true, and the accused person is abusive, the denial is more indignant, self-righteous and manipulative, as compared with denial in other cases. Similarly, I have observed that actual abusers threaten, bully and make a nightmare for anyone who holds them accountable or asks them to change their abusive behavior. This attack, intended to chill and terrify, typically includes threats of lawsuits, overt and covert attacks on the whistleblower’s credibility, and so on … the offender rapidly creates the impression that the abuser is the wronged one, while the victim or concerned observer is the offender.

Rape as a political tool is one of the many baffling aspects of rape. Consider this oddity, for instance: many cultures tend to value boys more than girls. Yet, if you want to humiliate the men of a culture, your best bet is to rape the women. Boys are worth more, but girls are more worthy of rape. This gets to the core irony of being raped: you’re simultaneously not good enough, and too good. You have no value, but you represent everything that we value.

Marital rape is not considered a crime in thirty-eight countries, including India, where the Research Institute of Compassionate Economics reports that the vast majority of rapists are the victims’ own husbands.76 In September 2017, the government of India actually spoke out against outlawing marital rape. Government lawyers stated that making it a crime would destabilize the institution of marriage, and that we shouldn’t blindly follow the West in these matters: husband harassment might become a real problem. We should concentrate instead on things like poverty.

If a child has been molested, she or he is much less likely to report it if she doesn’t know what words to use.

The Vera Institute of Justice conducted a study of women prisoners and found that eighty-six percent had a history of sexual abuse.87 Imagine coming to prison with that in your background, and then coming face-to-face with a new brutal statistic: while women make up thirteen percent of the jailed population, they represent sixty-seven percent of the victims of sexual violence by prison staff.