Rape Is Not Ambiguous

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

NPR News has an excellent article up this week on the persistence of rape and sexual violence on college campuses. In honor of Women's Week and "Feminist Coming Out Day" here at Harvard, I thought I'd make a few comments:

There's a common assumption about men who commit sexual assault on a college campus: That they made a one-time, bad decision. But psychologist David Lisak says this assumption is wrong —-and dangerously so...

He found them by, over a 20-year period, asking some 2,000 men in college questions like this: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated [on alcohol or drugs] to resist your sexual advances?"

Or: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn't want to because you used physical force [twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.] if they didn't cooperate?"

About 1 in 16 men answered "yes" to these or similar questions....

It might seem like it would be hard for a researcher to get these men to admit to something that fits the definition of rape. But Lisak says it's not. "They are very forthcoming," he says. "In fact, they are eager to talk about their experiences. They're quite narcissistic as a group — the offenders — and they view this as an opportunity, essentially, to brag."

What Lisak found was that students who commit rape on a college campus are pretty much like those rapists in prison. In both groups, many are serial rapists. On college campuses, repeat predators account for 9 out of every 10 rapes.

And these offenders on campuses — just like men in prison for rape — look for the most vulnerable women. Lisak says that on a college campus, the women most likely to be sexually assaulted are freshmen.

Some people seem to believe that campus rape is an "unclear" or "difficult" issue. They say that alcohol sufficiently complicates our judgments, and that, for this reason, the term "rape" is often not appropriate. This article utterly destroys that case.

Stated most strongly, the "rape is a tough issue" argument says that anti-rape campaigns do not emphasize enough the sovereign choice of the female. Women need to be clear about their sexual choices. Sex -- like all matters of the human heart -- is naturally mixed-up and full of indecision, and part of what it means to believe in the equality of the sexes is to believe that both women and men are strong enough to make their desires decisively clear. They argue that "yes, maybe, I don't know" cases, infused with alcohol, are not rape. They say we shouldn't be labeling rapists retrospectively.

But the fact is, we're not! As this article explains, the vast majority of rape cases are, in fact, pellucidly clear. They involve repeat offenders who know the sexual choices of their victims, and they in turn know that they're violating those choices. The face of campus rape is not the drunk girl and guy who do something that they kinda sorta regret. The face of campus rape is the man who subdues and violates his victim.

To my mind, the arguments about the "confounding" effects of alcohol are more than just canards -- they're close cousins to the blame-the-victim arguments that have been trotted out to exonerate rapists all around world and all throughout history. For the vast majority of cases-- alcohol or no alcohol, peers or strangers -- rape is not ambiguous.