Date rape is the lay term that captures the phenomenon of rape perpetrated by an assailant who knows his victim. While legislators had never excluded such perpetrators, except for husbands, who were excluded in marital rape exemptions, from the legal definition of rape, appellate courts had demonstrated great difficulty in letting stand the rape convictions of men who had known their victims. Susan Estrich, a feminist jurisprudential scholar, assumed the task of analyzing case law to make transparent the legal reasoning appellate judges used to overturn the rape convictions of these men. In the 1970s, Estrich herself was raped when a stranger put an ice pick to her throat. She ultimately learned that she had been ‘‘really’’ raped because her assailant was a violent stranger. The experience of discussing the crime with police and prosecutors who would distinguish her ‘‘real rape’’ from the rapes of women who were ‘‘asking for it’’ led Estrich to begin researching the cases of ‘‘not real’’ rape.
Rape unmodified is a legal offense typically perpetrated by men against women. It is nonconsensual sexual intercourse with force or threat of force. As jurisdictions began modernizing their rape statutes, they began broadening the categories of sexual assault prosecutable under their newer ‘‘sexual deviant assault’’ legislation. Under the new statutes it became possible for sexual crimes perpetrated against men (most commonly by other men) to be prosecuted. Legislative reforms attempted to capture people’s experience of sexual crimes. But the criminal justice processing of these cases lagged behind the intent of reformers in cases where the assailant knew the victim. Did a woman’s speech or conduct indicating ‘‘no’’ mean the sex was nonconsensual if the woman was not physically injured? Did a man’s taking of a woman’s car keys when she was in an unfamiliar and dangerous neighborhood constitute sufficient force? Legal processing reflected a lingering social problem: Between a man and a woman who know each other, the cultural gaze remained on the woman and what she did to bring sexual attention to herself rather than on the man’s conduct that culminated in a crime.
Over the course of time, ‘‘date rape’’ has come to be more commonly called ‘‘acquaintance rape.’’ Whereas the concept of date rape seems to limit the phenomenon to people who have some sort of relationship, conceptualizing the event as acquaintance rape broadens the field to the cases of parties who know each other, lack a relationship appropriate to sexual intimacy, yet have unwanted sex forced upon the victim.
Women who know their assailants often assume some blame or complicity in the attack. In the 1980s, psychologist Mary Koss and her associates framed questions to college students to capture the actual behavior they had engaged in or had had forced upon them, without labeling the events as rape. In that way, one in every twelve men admitted to having forced intercourse or attempting to force intercourse, with virtually none of the men identifying themselves as rapists. Women identified attacks on them without conceptualizing the attacks as rape. The Koss analysis revealed that one in four college women had been the victim of rape or attempted rape and that 84 percent of these women knew their assailants. Ultimately the study was criticized as both exaggerating the date rape problem yet underreporting its extent. Research of date rape has continued to focus on college students and young people. The subject would benefit from research done on a representative sample of Americans to capture the depth and frequency of the phenomenon.
In light of the pace of legal reforms and of the dearth of large-scale empirical research on acquaintance rape, perhaps the most pressing and accessible project for students, scholars, and practitioners is the undermining of rape myths that continue to fester in Western culture. The first set of right-of-access myths rely on a male perspective that interprets nonsexual behavior as an opening to sexual behavior. For instance, the belief that if a woman agrees to go to her date’s home or apartment, or, in a famous case, his hotel room on their first date, that she is willing to have sex. Or the belief that how a woman dresses or presents herself is meant to lure sexual handling rather than simply reflect her taste in fashion. Right-of-access myths also depend on pushing agreed upon activity to non-agreed upon extremes. Agreeing to a ride, drinks, or even some sexual activity needs to be accepted at face value rather than converted into traps that bar women from rejecting any other attention. Cultural rape myths also revolve around creating specious distinctions among women. The non-raped are women who can successfully resist rape because they want to, whereas the raped are women of less stellar reputations (and apparently physical abilities), women who subconsciously want to be attacked, or women who are vindictively lying about men. Finally, people are more comfortable thinking of the rapist as some brutish Other when the very phenomenon of date and acquaintance rape arises from the men who commonly surround a woman’s life.
Men intent on extracting sex from their dates have traditionally used alcohol to facilitate the crime. In the Koss study, 73 percent of the assailants and 55 percent of the victims had used alcohol or other drugs prior to the attack. However, three drugs have become more common in facilitating date rape. Rohypnol (flunitrazepam), GHB (gamma hydroxybutyric acid), and Ketamine (ketamine hydrochloride) are colorless, odorless, and tasteless. Rohypnol (‘‘roofies’’) comes in pill form and dissolves in liquid. GHB comes in forms as varied as pills, white powder, and liquid. Ketamine is a white powdery substance. Besides rendering victims vulnerable, each of these drugs distorts memory, further protecting the rapist from prosecution. In the current state of law and culture, women are still their own best first defense.
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Bibliography:
- Bergen, Raquel Kennedy. Issues in Intimate Violence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998.
- Estrich, Susan. ‘‘Rape.’’ Yale Law Journal 95, no. 6 (1986): 1087–1184.
- ———. Real Rape. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
- Francis, Leslie, ed. Date Rape: Feminism, Philosophy, and the Law. University Park, PA: University Press, 1996.
- Koss, Mary. ‘‘Hidden Rape: Sexual Aggression and Victimization in the National Sample of Students in Higher Education.’’ In Violence and Dating Relationships: Emerging Social Issues, edited by Maureen Pirog-Good and Jan Stets. New York: Praeger, 1988, pp. 145–168.
- Malamuth, Neil M. ‘‘Rape Proclivity among Males.’’ Journal of Social Issues 37, no. 4 (1981): 138–157.
- Warshaw, Robin. I Never Called it Rape. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.