|
Today in History (1862) - The U.S. government forbids all Union army officers from returning fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation. On the same day in 1865, the Confederate Congress voted to enlist 300,000 black troops, granting them freedom with the consent of their owners. Lee surrendered a few weeks later. |
Eugene Volokh challenges the idea that rape is not "both a crime of violence and a crime of sex -- the rapist is motivation by sexual desire as well as by the desire for domination (and the two may well be intertwined)." For evidence, he notes that "The best evidence that I've seen for this is the breakdown of rape by age of victim [...] Rapists seem to select victims in age ranges that are pretty highly correlated to the generally understood peaks of sexual attractiveness."
Volokh fails to note two problems with his analysis, one relatively minor and one more significant. The first is that rape is more likely to be underreported by older women, who may feel a greater social stigma from having been a victim of this crime. Younger women, who have grown up on the message that one should not feel ashamed, and whose adulthoods post-date the changes in rape prosecution (which now prevent the "she's a slut!" defenses formerly popular), still do not report all rapes but are increasingly likely to do so.
The larger difficulty I see in Volokh's analysis is that it ignores the entire phenomenon of male-on-male rape, particularly the epidemic of prison rape. Men who did not commit same-sex rape while on "the outside" will nonetheless sexually victimize other men while in prison.
Sociologists consider this to be a dominating behavior intended to establish a hierarchy. Men who commit the rape are superior; those who are raped are the "bitches," "wives" and otherwise considered inferior. When questioned about their behavior, prison rapists declare that they themselves are not homosexual, but that their victims are.
This is not to say that Volokh's conclusion is wrong, only that his evidence has some gaps. Prison rape certainly shows that in the pursuit of both sexual gratification and domination, some men will engage in behaviors that they would not choose when women are available to them. I would modify the hypothesis from the motivation of sexual desire, with the connotation that the rape victim is the object of desire, to the motive of sexual gratification, in which the victim's attractiveness is not relevant.
Probably the most effective analysis would have to be more qualitative than quantitative, examining which crimes people prefer. For example, non-sexual assault allows one to commit violence and thus dominate another person, but without the motive of sexual gratification.
Solicitation of prostitutes allows one to be sexually gratified without committing violence (though one would then have to subdivide encounters with prostitutes into those in which the prostitute is paid to act in a subservient manner and be dominated by the client, and those in which s/he is not paid for that particular scenario).
Rape appears to combine the two. But rapists who commit non-sexual as well as sexual assault appear to be more motivated by the desire to dominate, whereas rapists who solicit prostitutes as well as force sex without paying for it appear to be more motivated by the desire for sex.
July 15, 2004 7:21 PM | TrackBack