Handbook on Sexual Violence (8 page)

Blaming the victim

The idea of blaming the victim can be found in Victorian ideals which suggested that to have unsanctioned sex outside marriage was such a blow to respectability that it was a fate worth fighting literally to the death to preserve. The belief that chastity should be protected at all costs meant that failure to do so implied consent. The victim is blamed both for precipitating her own victimisation through her sexual attractiveness and also through her failure to resist when attacked. As Horvath and Brown (2010) point out, this places the victim between a rock and a hard place: greater believability is attached to notions of ‘real’ rape – the stereotype stranger attacks in the dark alley with a knife, which is actually relatively rare – whereas the more frequent, contested consent cases involving allegations against someone the woman knows tend to be more often disbelieved. In that latter instance, successful prosecution relies on scrutiny of the consent rather than the behaviour of the attacker (Stanko and Williams 2009). Blaming the victim and exonerating the perpetrator is a prevailing rape myth which experimental social psychological studies by, for example, Bieneck and Krah´e (in press) show to be attributable to schematic information processing, i.e. when people judge social information on the basis of their generalised beliefs and knowledge that are stored in their memories. They found that this tendency was more pronounced in cases of rape rather than other crimes such as robbery, when the issue of prior relationship and being drunk seemed significantly less related to the attribution of blame. Rape, they concluded, represents a special case. Brown and Horvath (2009) then

argue that the operation of such culturally embedded myths acts to attenuate the perceived harm experienced by women and actually creates a reversal whereby men become the victims of sick, vindictive or vengeful women by virtue of belief in the number of false allegations that are thought to be made. There is a commonly held belief that many women offer only token resistance to sex and that when they say no they actually mean yes (Muehlenhard and Hollabaugh 1988). Young college women (N=610) completed a questionnaire designed to measure their explicit verbal behaviour and behavioural intentions whether to engage in sex. Muehlenhard and Hollabaugh report that 40 per cent of women indicated saying no to sex when actually they meant yes. The reasons for this were: fear of appearing promiscuous; feeling inhibited about sex; or more game playing. The conclusion drawn from this study was that although there was a substantial minority who did say no when they meant yes, this could be attributable to perceptions of the attitudes embedded in cultural expectations about sex. Most women did not engage in token resistance, thus ‘when a woman says no, chances are that she means it regardless of the incidence of token resistance; if the woman means no and the man persists, it is rape’ (Muehlenhard and Hollabaugh 1988: 878). Brown and Horvath (2009: 333) argue that culturally embedded sexual scripts, which dominate the negotiation of sexual encounters, make it difficult for women to change their minds. Such scripts tend to cast men as the sexual pursuer and initiator of sex while women are the gatekeepers whose role is to grant permission for sex to take place. Reliance on such scripts can lead to some confusion because if women fail to signal no clearly, or men fail to understand, there is a perception by men that the confusion is the result of miscommunication. This represents blame shifting, whereby the woman becomes responsible for the apparent

communication problem.

Communicating is at the heart of Liam Bell, Amanda Finelli and Marion Wynne-Davies’s Chapter
2. Their starting point is the notion of the commonality of sexual violence, a point which resonates with Kelly’s continuum of violence concept. Their point of departure is Brownmiller’s notion of women ‘fighting back’ and the idea that rather than violence being an act of self-defence, women may actually initiate it, a point the Kelly continuum does not concede. Their gripping analysis deconstructs the victim–perpetrator relationship through the medium of the novel. Using Angela Carter’s
The Passion of New Eve
they challenge the concept of the self-defending woman by examining the violating woman. They also discuss the idea of responsibility for violence and the excuse given by a male character in the novel, Zero, that the notion of repressed sexual dissatisfaction gives rise to sexual violation. Interestingly David Canter, in his exposition of the rapes and murders committed by John Francis Duffy, notes that Duffy blamed his wife for his escalating levels of violence perpetrated on his victims. Canter writes: ‘John Duffy had found out that he was infertile and some of his most violent assaults took place after he discovered that his ex-wife had become pregnant by another man after she had left Duffy’ (Canter 1994: 51). In court, Duffy’s former wife explained that ‘he [Duffy] said he raped a girl and said it was my fault.’

Are things getting better?

All this sounds pessimistic and rather bleak. So has there been any progress? In Chapter
4 Sylvia Walby and her colleagues map the occurrence of sexual violence over time through a self-report victimisation survey (the British Crime Survey), police-recorded crime and academic research results. They discuss the problems of accurate measurement of the extent of sexual violence and the continued problem of attrition, in other words the pinch points at which cases drop out of the justice process. A major pinch point is the failure to report sexual violence to the police in the first instance and the high percentage of cases in which the police decide to take no further action.

Miranda Horvath and Mark Yexley’s Chapter
5 charts the development of police training in sexual offences investigations. They start with the ‘bad old days’. In the 1970s the attitude of police towards sexual offences was one of suspicion and disbelief of the victim. This was epitomised by a comment by Detective Sergeant Alan Firth of the West Midlands Police, who wrote in the
Police Review
of 28 November 1975 (page 1507):

Women and children complainants in sexual matters are notorious for embroidery or complete fabrication of complaints . . . It should be borne in mind that except in the case of a very young child, the offence of rape is extremely unlikely to have been committed against a woman who does not immediately show signs of extreme violence . . . If a woman walks into a police station and complains of rape with no such signs of violence, she must be closely interrogated. Allow her to make her statement to a policewoman and then drive a horse and cart through it . . . call her an outright liar. It is very difficult for a person to put on genuine indignation who has been called a liar to her face . . . Do not give her sympathy. If she is not lying, after the interrogator has upset her by accusing her of it, then at least the truth is verified.

Horvath and Yexley move on ten years to 1985 and the now notorious scenes from the Thames Valley Police fly-on-the-wall documentary by Roger Graef which showed the oppressive interviewing of a rape complainant. This sequence emphatically illustrates the points being made by both D’Cruze and McGregor as, in the documentary, it was the woman’s reputation as a prostitute which minimised both her credibility and the harm she was believed to have suffered. The ensuing outrage resulted in women’s groups, The Women’s National Commission and the Home Office working to create new principles of good practice when dealing with sexual crime. Specialist training had begun in the Metropolitan Police Service in 1984 with officers being made more aware of the criticality of forensic evidence and the need to support the complainant through the courts process. By 2008, the approach had become a co-ordinated response with officers being familiarised with the special measures that can be undertaken to support or protect vulnerable witnesses.

Sharon Stratton, herself a serving police officer specialising in sexual violence investigation, argues in Chapter
6 that training and guidance have

improved dramatically in police forces in England and Wales. She suggests that the establishment of specialist teams, known as Sapphire units, illustrates the importance attached to police investigations into rape allegations. Certainly in England and Wales there has been a steady increase in the numbers of reported rape cases. Notwithstanding these developments, the Metropolitan Police Service was severely criticised by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (2010) over two specific serial rape investigations involving John Worboys and Kirk Reed. The IPCC concluded that the investigative shortcomings were not just of individuals but were also systemic failures of supervision and cross-referencing of reports. The Commission stated (p. 16): ‘there is a widely held perception that women reporting rape and other sexual offences have not been taken seriously, either because of the nature of the offence or because priority has been given to other offences such as burglary.’

Reforms in police investigations may have had some limited successes but because of the adversarial nature of the prosecution system complainants are also witnesses and often face hostile cross-examination designed to destroy their moral character; a strategy which, as D’Cruze and McGregor show in their chapters, was at the heart of men’s and society’s upholding of the established social order.

Conclusions

The first five chapters in the Handbook offer some historical and cultural grounding to ideas about the perpetration, perpetuation and victimisation associated with sexual violence. Contemporary issues around complainants’ credibility as a victim, the need to have resisted and to have made an early report of the assault have resonances with historical precedent outlined by D’Cruze and with their embedded nature in popular culture as discussed by Bell
et al
.. Ideas such as that of the more deserving victim have their modern- day counterpart in victim vulnerabilities. Modern medical technologies have been something of a double-edged sword. The contraceptive pill liberated women from the risk of pregnancy following sex, but that very freedom signalled her sexual availability without the previously almost inevitable consequences of conception. DNA analysis has shifted the contested grounds of an allegation from whether or not sex took place, and with whom, to whether or not what took place was consensual. Sylvia Walby and her colleagues suggest that it is crucial that accurate measurement of the extent of sexual violence is undertaken if effective monitoring of policy changes is to be undertaken. They suggest a standard definition of conviction rates in order that there is both a clear and commonly used metric whereby agencies and the public understand what is being measured.

Joan McGregor’s suggestions of more radical reform, such as relabelling sexual assault to conform to the rules of physical rather than sexual assault, might at least see more defendants in the dock but risk obscuring the unique harm of rape. Differential penalties for unaggravated assaults could imply some rapes are worse than others. Liz Kelly’s pioneering work in the 1980s

argued against such comparisons. The essays presented in the chapters here find her continuum of sexual violence helpful in so far as it shows its emergence out of the routines of everyday life, and its ubiquitousness, but that level of generality limits its explanatory power.

References

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Brown, J. and Horvath, H. (2009) ‘Do you believe her and is it real rape?’, in M.

Horvath J. and Brown (eds)
Rape; challenging contemporary thinking
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Canter, D. (1994)
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Estrich, S. (1987)
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Finch, E. and Munro, V. (2008) ‘Breaking boundaries? Sexual consent in the jury room’,

Legal Studies
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Horvath, M. and Brown, J. (2010) ‘Between a rock and a hard place’,
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Independent Police Complaints Commission (2010) Independent investigation into the Metropolitan Police Service’s inquiry into allegations against John Worboys. London: IPCC.

Muehlenhard, C. and Hollabaugh, L.C. (1988) ‘Do women sometimes say no when

they mean yes? The prevalence and correlates of women’s token resistance to sex’,

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
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Page, A. Dellinger (2008) ‘Judging women and defining crime: police officer attitudes towards women and rape’,
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What are the vulnerabilities of the victims who report to the police?’, in M. Horvath and J. Brown (eds)
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Stern, V. (2010)
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