A call for better language and nuance to get at the root causes of rape culture
I care a lot about abolishing rape culture, and figuring out how we get to a consent culture that works for everyone. Much of this work involves focusing on what to do when rape is committed, but a huge part of it is thinking about the root causes of rape culture.
A study in the Lancet surveyed 10,178 men from six countries. It did not use the word rape, instead it asked have you ever “forced a woman who was not your wife or girlfriend at the time to have sex” or having “had sex with a woman who was too drunk or drugged to indicate whether she wanted it”. Reasons given were: expressed sexual entitlement (statements endorsed by 73% of men across the region), followed by entertainment seeking (59%), anger or punishment (38%), and alcohol or substance use (27%; table 2). Leaving aside how incredibly sexist the language and study was in it’s approach (it only asked men, and it only asked men about interactions with women), this tells us some interesting things:
1) there are many diverse reasons and factors behind rape and
2) the language we use around rape matters, so much so that it seems many people who have committed sexual violence, aren’t even aware that they have done so, potentially because of the language that we are using.
I spend a lot of time working with people accused of physical and sexual violence. Something that I find to be an almost daily problem is our language around rape and sexual assault. We only have a few terms for these things, and as such, we can’t think about them or classify them appropriately. As a result we classify a range of wildly different acts with distinct intentions and mistakes, as one and the same thing.
We don’t do this for other kinds of violence. In the case of murder, the legal system distinguishes between the intent, emotional states and plans of the perpetrator, both in terms of classifying the harm done and in determining the appropriate consequence: We have first degree murder (which includes intent to kill, premeditation, or deliberation), second degree murder (intentional killing that was not planned beforehand), voluntary manslaughter (no prior intent to kill, acted “in the moment” under circumstances that could cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally disturbed). Finally we have involuntary manslaughter (the homicide of a human being without intent of doing so).
Why on earth do we lack such nuance for rape and sexual assault? There are many cases of people who did not intend harm on someone else, but simply misconstrued the situation, or believed that the person they were with wanted to have sex, either through ignorance about how important consent is, or through poor social skills and so on. This is wildly different from someone who leaves their house with the intent to forcefully rape or coerce someone into sex. Wildly different again from someone who didn’t intend to hurt someone one but in the moment felt unable to stop themselves. These are not the same acts, and yet we linguistically classify all these things as one and the same. As a consequence we don’t have the tools to treat them differently. It seems clear that the help someone needs to change their behaviour should be determined according to the specific reasoning and circumstances that led to the harm being committed.
So yes, we need to address human social behaviors on the whole, it is appropriate to consider social boundaries in our conversations about sexual boundaries. But it is inappropriate to make everything in the latter category rape. If we were to take the legal terms for murder, we could bare minimum include descriptions that include whether there were:
- intent to rape, premeditation, or deliberation.
- intent to rape that was not planned beforehand.
- no prior intent to rape, or someone acted “in the moment” under circumstances that could cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally disturbed.
- no prior intent or plan
Bare minimum, this would allow us to determine better forms of support to help people change the thought patterns and behaviours that lead to these harmful behaviours. It would also help us to determine future risk in a more sensible and less panicked fashion.
To be utterly clear — I am not saying that any of these are more or less horrific, regardless of the intent, the effect on the one who experiences this might be the same regardless of intent, planning or emotional state. What I am saying, is that creating nuance around our terminology is a crucial stage in figuring out how to get to the root causes of these harms done.
