RAPE VICTIMS: GETTING BEYOND THE GUILT
(From my book The Changing Face of Sex out in January 2012)
With
the entry of rape victims into my client load in the mid ’60s, my education as
a sex therapist continued. I don’t
remember the first victim, but I do remember that the receptionist, who was
very intuitive about which counselor should work with which client, began
assigning me women who had traumatic sex histories. Although we didn’t call it post-traumatic
stress disorder at that time, they had the symptoms we later recognized as
such.
We
probably had a greater number of victims coming in at this time because
previously victims had not felt they could talk about what had happened to
them, but with the change in attitudes toward sex there was a backlog of
clients who needed to work on their trauma symptoms.
Certain
symptoms were common with some being severe enough to prevent the victim from
living a normal life. There was an over
response to cues connected to the event, nightmares in which the incident was
relived vivid enough to wake the victim in a panic, guilt for having caused the
incident by some action or inaction on their part, and in some cases a fear of
men in general.
Victims
could respond to cues that were visual, auditory or even related to time of
day. One client, who had been captured
by the rapist coming out from behind a wall at Stephens College as she walked
past it at night, became nervous when walking past any wall at night. The time cue was from several women who had
been raped in their rooms by someone coming in a window. They would wake in a nervous state at that
time of the night.
Nightmares
were frequent and often lasted for years. One client had been having the same
nightmare for six years. This was one
symptom that I was most successful treating with a minimum of work by helping
them rewrite the script of the dream and practicing it while under hypnosis in
my office.
The
guilt was very difficult to work with and was reported in a number of
clusters. It appeared that if the
victims could find things they had done that provoked the rapists, they could
feel some control over the events and prevent future attacks. If the rape was completely out of their
control, they had the feeling they were living in a dangerous environment where
bad things could happen at any time regardless of what they did to protect
themselves.
Guilt
was exacerbated by the mental set of the time of some police, hospital staff
and jury members who felt that if a woman got raped it was her own fault. One victim had dropped out of school and took
a lower level job and took to alcohol.
She saw me two years after the rape and still felt guilty about her part
in the rape. She had been working at the
hospital, came out of the hospital and walked to her car, which had a van
parked next to it. When she unlocked her
door, the van door slid open and a man reached out and took her into the van. Two men took her into the country, raped her,
and discussed different things they could do with her as if she were an
object. They took her back into town and
dropped her off.
The
guilt? “I shouldn’t have parked my car
so far from the door; and when I saw the van parked next to it, I should have
been more cautious.” Statements from
other victims concerned what kind of clothes they were wearing, drinking too
much, and trusting the offender.
Another source
of guilt was not taking more action, such as trying to fight the man off or
screaming. Most of the women described
how they went weak and lost the ability to fight as soon as the man got close
enough to grab them or make a threat to hurt or kill them if they didn’t
cooperate. This often did serious damage
to the victim’s self image. Having once
believed she could successfully fight off an attacker or persuade him not to
carry through, she now had lost that image of potency and was left with only
feelings of vulnerability.
Later
I got some insight into this when I interviewed a sentenced rapist at Maximum
Security Prison in Jefferson City. He had started as a voyeur, who actually
climbed into women’s rooms and watched them sleep. One of them awoke, screamed and said, “Please
don’t hurt me; I’ll do anything you want.”
He fled, but thought about it and the next time raping the victim, not
only watching, was his goal. One victim
indicated to him that it had been very exciting. This was what he had really wanted in a
victim, and when she asked why didn’t he come back the next night, he did. “And you know, the bitch had the cops waiting
for me.” He sounded truly amazed at her
strategy.
Occasionally
I would have a client who had successfully fought the offender off. A classic in my mind was the slightly built
woman who was seeing me for vocational counseling who had had a rape
incident. She and her roommate had
worked late, taken a swim in a nearby pool and came back to their basement
apartment.
She went to take a shower and heard a noise,
cracked the door to look out and saw her roommate being held by a man with a
knife in his hand. Her thought process
was, “The cops will be here soon, I need a cover.” She threw a towel over her shoulder. “I’ll need a weapon.” She ripped the towel rack off, and went out
swinging it. She moved fast, knocked the
knife out his hand. He grabbed the rack
from her hand; she picked up the TV set and threw it at him. He yelled something about, “You bitches are
crazy,” and ran out the door.
Later
in the week as she was walking down the street, she saw him standing on a
ladder painting a house. She called the
police; several victims identified him in a lineup and he was convicted.
At that time it
was estimated that only a small percentage of rapes were reported to the
police, and even a fewer number successfully prosecuted. Besides the
embarrassment and guilt there were other reasons in those days to avoid
reporting. First was the behavior of
some police officers. Some asked such
questions as, “Were you a virgin?’ The
implication being that if you weren’t, it couldn’t be rape. “What were you doing in the area?” “Had you been drinking?” The questions did reinforce the victim’s
feeling that she had done something wrong or was in some way responsible for
the rape.
Some hospital
personnel had similar attitudes, and some victims had been treated rudely when
they reported to the hospital. Since
many of them had been injured by the rough handling of the rapists, they needed
some care and a checkup. This was before
DNA samples were taken.
Defense
attorneys were tough on victims; after finding out the kind of questions they
would have to answer in front of the jury, some victims backed out. They did not want their sexual histories made
public. It was some years before we
could get the laws changed so that victims had the same right to protect their
personal history as the accused did.
One of the
female defense attorneys who appeared on a panel with me was careful in her
choice of jurors. She wanted at least two
women over the age of fifty. She was
sure that they would be convinced that no woman could be raped against her
will; and if she really had had sex with the accused, she was responsible for
it happening. At this late date it is
difficult to get back into the mindset of the period and see the victim as
perpetrator. The defense attorney also
recognized that some men feared false accusations and could be an asset on the
jury.
It also saddened
me to counsel several women who had men in their life react negatively toward
them. One woman, whose boss had raped
her, had a husband who divorced her on the grounds of adultery. Several had boyfriends break up with them
because they considered it the woman’s fault if she had been raped, and they
couldn’t deal with the fact of her bad behavior. (Many years later in Pakistan when I was touring a prison in Lahore, I was informed
that some of the women in prison were rape victims who had been imprisoned
because they were considered to have committed adultery.)
These experiences
led me to the conclusion that we needed a rape crisis center, partly as a basis
for educating both the professionals and the public about the nature of rape
and how to change attitudes to make them less damning on the victims.
When I went in
search for some help, I was told that a woman who called herself “Nexus” would
be the person to contact, because as a rape victim she wanted to correct some
of the same problems that I saw with the system. I was also warned that she might not want
to work with me because of my reputation among liberated women as being a
“male, chauvinist pig.”
When she found
out what I wanted, we became a team with our first goal of educating the
professionals involved on the nature of rape, the victim’s reactions, and some
things they needed in the way of treatment.
We got excellent cooperation in meetings with the police department,
hospital staff, the prosecuting attorney and some lawyers who defended accused
rapists. In addition a local TV station
filmed a half-hour program with Nexus and me discussing the problem.
The prosecuting
attorney at the time would not prosecute a case unless he was sure he could get
a conviction. His judgment was partly
based on how well the victim handled questions.
My understanding was his conviction rate was close to 100% despite the
defense attorney’s choice of jury members.
Later when I was talking in a prison to a rapist who had received a
13-year sentence, he said, “I made the mistake of getting caught in Columbia. Your prosecutor has a reputation for getting
convictions.”
Therapy
First
the client needed to tell her story.
That established the fact that it was real; it was important that
someone had heard it. I would return to the story later as part of the
desensitization process. Next I needed
to normalize the client’s responses.
That gave her the feeling that her reactions were not crazy or out of
line, but part of what happens to people who have been traumatized. The message I wanted to give was, “Your
reactions are normal for a person who has gone through a traumatic
experience.”
Some
responses were unusual, but still normal from my point of view. For example, one victim had an out-of-body
experience and found herself looking down from ceiling watching the rapist use
her body.
Because
of the tensions and anxiety connected with the rape and its aftermath, I
routinely gave my clients a session on relaxation. The method depended upon their reactions, but
most frequently I used a combination of progressive muscle relaxation and the
visualization of a safe place. Most
clients could learn this in a short time and with practice outside of the
session get proficient at it. Some of my
therapists in training preferred to make an audio tape for the client to use
when they needed to relax; and some like my wife, a therapist in private
practice, used commercial relaxation tapes that the client used in their
home. Regardless of how relaxation was
presented, learning to control physical tensions made a significant difference
to most clients.
I found the easiest problem to work with to be
the nightmares. The treatment was very
straightforward. The client told me in
detail the dream that was disturbing her.
The detail was almost always a replay of the rape scene. The next step was to construct a new script
that in some way empowered the victim,
i.e., the new script put her in control.
All
my therapy files have been shredded, but examples I used in my training program
are still clear in my memory.
Story 1. The rapist came into the kitchen through the
open garage door. He demanded money, and
hoping to escape uninjured the victim went into the bedroom and brought back
the funds. It was then he grabbed her, took her into the bedroom and raped her.
The new script
involved her going to the bedroom; but instead of getting the money she took
out her husband’s pistol and came back
into the room. As he moved toward her,
she shot him in the head which exploded like a melon. We practiced the new dream several times with
her in a light trance, and I asked her to practice the dream before she fell
asleep. The nightmare did not
return. Lest this sound too simple,
this was the usual response. Write a new
script, practice it and it replaces the old script. I found it hard to believe it would be so
simple, but no clients reported a failure.
I wish the other aspects of the trauma could have been so easily dealt
with.
Story 2. The second husband of a woman, who had been
raped six years previously, insisted she see a therapist because the nightmares
were interfering with his sleep. Her
first husband had been a criminal and had been in prison. The rapist had been in a deal with her
husband who owed him money on a drug deal, and he decided to take it out on the
wife. He not only raped her but stabbed
her with a barbeque fork. The
nightmares had returned when she learned the rapist was out of prison.
The new dream
involved the rapist being in a cell with a heavy door like one on a giant safe
that she could push closed, double barricading him. The dream didn’t work. She reworked it so that she first looked in
the cell and saw that he was looking out the rear window and had no interest in
her. Then she pushed the heavy door
shut. The dream did not return; when I
saw her a year later for another problem, the dreams still had not returned.
Story 3. This
woman was a student in ROTC who had been running on the campus when the rapist
came from behind the greenhouses on campus and physically overpowered her. She used a solution no one else had used
before. She was an observer to the rape
and also the victim. As she watched the
scene unfold, she shot the rapist in the leg.
As a ROTC student she was quite familiar with firearms. She did not want to do permanent damage, but
to teach him enough of a lesson so that he would never attack another
woman.
Story 4. This
was an acquaintance rape situation. We
wrote a new script which she went home to try.
A week later she reported there had been no more nightmares, but added
that “as soon as you said you could teach me a way to stop the nightmares, you
wouldn’t have had to do anything more.
Just knowing they could be stopped would have been sufficient.”
Guilt was the
hard symptom to work with. Believing
they were in some way responsible for the rape gave victims a sense of control;
without this sense of control the situation became even more dangerous because
things were so unpredictable and capricious.
Things they felt guilt about varied:
not being defensive enough by yelling or screaming or trying to run
away; having trusted the person because they were a friend or relative; not
responding to cues that told them the situation was dangerous; having too much
to drink making themselves vulnerable.
What I found I
couldn’t do was argue all of these comments away and convince the victim there
was nothing she could have done, because it was out of her control and only the
rapist was responsible for what happened.
That leads victims to feeling they live in an even more dangerous world.
Instead we worked on planning, “What can you do to make yourself safer?” Take a self defense course, have a companion
if you must go out at night, carry a whistle, and don’t drink with strangers.
In 1992 an honors student, Kimberly
Cummings, approached me to do a study of women’s acceptance of rape myths and
their sexual experiences. She felt that
with sexual liberation and loosening of sexual standards that more pressure was
being put on women to have sex and sometimes this slipped over into rape. Our sample was only 112 junior and senior
women, but the results are consistent with what had been found in other studies
with slightly fewer of our students saying they had been raped. The results of the latter part of the
questionnaire we developed are interesting enough that I will discuss them
here. The answers were given anonymously
(see Table 1).
The
first part of the questionnaire dealt with their acceptance of rape myths and
how closely they identified with feminine stereotypes. Questions 1 through 40 are the Sexist
Attitudes Toward Women Scale (SATW) developed by Benson and Vincent
(1980). A sample item is, “It bothers me
to see a man being told what to do by a woman.”
Questions 41-65
were rape-myth acceptance items from Burt (1980) and explored rape myths and
cultural reasons for this support. A
sample item is, “A woman who goes to the home or apartment of a man on their
first date implies that she is willing to have sex.” (Jumping ahead to more recent standards, that
statement may now be true given what my students tell me about the frequency of
“hooking up.”)
One
of our questions was, do women now recognize when they have been raped? Earlier we found that in date rape situations
the women often took the blame and did not recognize that the use of force
against the woman’s wishes is legally rape.
The correlation between items 76 and 78 was .88, a very high positive
correlation meaning that women now recognize that they have been raped even in
a dating situation by someone they know.
Cummings
and I, probably influenced by our own acceptance of the rape-myth mentality,
had expected that the more a woman accepted traditional feminine roles the more
likely she would find herself pressured into sexual intercourse. Although there
was a significant relationship between acceptance of a traditional feminine
role and being raped, that relationship was very weak (r = .19, p<.05). This indicates that a woman’s social
orientation is probably little protection against having sexual relations when
she does not wish them.
Table
1 gives some additional information about the factors that were and may still
be operating in sexual relations between male and female students. On item 67, 73% of the women reported they
had been in situations where the level of sexual intimacy they desired was
misinterpreted. It also appears that
some women (items 68 & 69) had sexual intercourse with a man when they did
not want to because of pressure in the immediate situation. A fair number of women also reported they had
had force used unsuccessfully against them (items 72, 73, 74).
The
data indicate that whether a woman is forced to have sexual intercourse by
threats or is raped is not greatly influenced by her ideas about women’s roles
or her acceptance of rape beliefs.
Although the women’s mental set or acceptance of certain beliefs has a
small relationship to her being pressured into sexual acts, there are other
factors that are of more importance in what happens. The major influence appears to be the
attitudes of a subgroup of males who commit sexual aggression and their beliefs
about women’s behavior. The problems in
communication about sexual issues evidently go beyond the dimensions we
explored in this study.
Since
women’s attitudes appear to play such a small role in their having sexual
intercourse under pressure, there is a need to place more emphasis on the
findings of such studies as those of Kanin (1985) and Lisak and Roth (1988,
1990), which point to a group of sexually aggressive males who see their
behavior as macho and who do not label the force they use as sufficient to be
called rape. I will explore these
attitudes and behavior in the chapter on date rape.
Sensitizing
women to sexual harassment is probably still a worthwhile endeavor, and they
should be encouraged to resist male pressure for unwanted sex. The 25% of the women in this study who had
sexual intercourse when they really did not want to because of various
pressures from the man may have been contributing to his becoming more
aggressive with other women. Ellis
(1991) said, “in the process of courtship, for example, many women may
inadvertently reinforce successive approximations of forced copulatory tactics
by sexually yielding to the use of mild forms of force” (p. 638).
Some interesting arguments
Until
the early 1970s researchers acknowledged that while many motivations could be
involved in rape, it was assumed that sex was the predominant motive. In the
early ’70s women’s liberation advocates began to play a large role in how rape
was viewed. Millet, Griffin, and Greer put forth the view that
rape was not a sexually motivated act, and this became widely accepted when
Brownmiller published Against Our Will
in 1975. By the early ’80s a researcher
could say, “It is now generally accepted by criminologists, psychologists, and
other professionals working with rapists and rape victims that rape is not
primarily a sexual crime, it is a crime of violence.”
One
effect of this orientation was positive in that it helped us reject the claim
that rape is a sexually arousing or sought-after experience on the part of the
victim. But I was concerned about the
danger of taking a non-sex orientation.
I thought the outpouring of papers that attributed all rape to hostility
toward women and treated rape as a purely aggressive act did more to cloud the
issue than to give a handle from which we could think productively about what
was happening.
During the ’70s
I found myself arguing against the feminist movement’s insistence that rape was
mainly a crime of violence and anger against women. I believed that many factors were involved
and that men raped for different reasons.
Let me repeat some of the arguments on both sides. I will give the feminist side (a) and counter
with what I saw as a valid rebuttal (b).
(a) Sex or sexuality is a
drive associated with honest courtship and pair bonding. In such situations, males report feelings of
tenderness and affection.
(b)
A large percentage of males have no difficulty in divorcing sex from love. Consider the number of them who visit
prostitutes or who have casual sex with willing partners.
(a) Rape can not
be sexually motivated because of the fact that most rapists have stable sexual
partners.
(b) Having studied rapists, I question that
most of them have stable sexual partners; most patrons of prostitutes, adult
bookstores and adult movie theatres are married men, but this is not considered
evidence for lack of sexual motivation.
(a) Unlike sexuality, aggression does
diminish with age and, therefore, a male’s likelihood of committing a rape
diminishes with the onset of middle age.
(b) Not only does the age of most
rapists fail to disprove that rape is sexually motivated, the general
correlation between the age distribution of rapists and the general level of
sexual activity of males is very consistent with the view that rape is sexually
motivated.
(a) According to Groth and Birnbaum
(1979) “careful examination of his behavior typically reveals that efforts to
negotiate the sexual encounter or to determine the woman’s receptiveness to a
sexual approach are noticeably absent, as are any attempts at lovemaking or
foreplay.”
(b)
That is true of stranger rapes, which are about half of the total. Date rapists on the other hand, often involve
extensive negotiation and foreplay.
These rapists explain their behavior by references to sex needs. “She stood there in her nightgown, and you
could see right through it—you could see her nipples and breasts and, you know
they were just waiting for me, and it was just too much of a temptation to pass
up.”
(a) “It is not a
crime of lust but of violence and power because rape victims are not only the
lovely young blonds of newspaper headlines—rapists strike children, the aged,
and the homely—all women” (Brownmiller, 1975).
(b)
This conclusion ignores the fact that rape victims are not a
representative cross-section of all women.
It also ignores the possibility that victim selection is based on both
attractiveness and vulnerability. Less
than 5% of rape victims are over the age of fifty. As we will see in the chapter on rapists
they are, however, the ones most likely to be killed.
(a) In many
cases of rape in humans, assault seems to be the important factor, not sex. . . (Harding,
1985).
(b) In my own study of rapists I found a
subgroup for whom violence was an important part of the act, but this was not
all or even a majority of rapists. Amir
found, “In a large number of cases (87%), only temptation and verbal coercion
were used to subdue the victim.” Other
evidence also indicates that it is only in a minority of cases that violence
and injury are even one of the goals of a rapist. Gebhard et al., (1965) also found that the
vast majority of sex offenders used force only when required. If violence is what the rapist is after, he’s
not very good at it. Certainly he has
the victim in a position from which he could do all kinds of physical damage.
Sexual motivation always appears to
be a necessary ingredient for a rape to occur instead of a nonsexual assault.
“If aggression were the sole motive it might be more simply satisfied by a
physical beating” (Rada, 1978).
When I studied
murderers years later, I was disturbed by the fact that punishment for rape and
for murder could be at the class A felony level. I found rape victims could be murdered, not
because of hostile motivation on the part of the rapist, but because the
killing of the victim greatly increases the rapist’s chances of escaping
punishment by removing the only witness to the crime.
