FREEING OUR LIVES
A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF RAPE PREVENTION
In an excellent 25-page booklet entitled Freeing Our Lives the staff of "Community Action Strategies to Stop Rape" (CASSR), Women Against Rape, Columbus, Ohio have
presented a feminist analysis of rape prevention. We are reprinting excerpts from it here with their permission. We highly recommend this booklet for groups organizing to
stop violence against women. It may be ordered from Women Against Rape, P.O. Box 02084, Columbus, Ohio 43202, USA. Price per copy US$.85 plus .40 postage. Bulk rates are available
Most rape victims are women. The threat of rape pervades our lives. Yet , until recently, the issue of rape has been considered inappropriate for action by women. Men have interpreted and responded to rape. Even though men have perpetrated rape and have had minimal reason to fear it themselves, they have developed the social machinery to deal with it. Men have passed the sexual assault laws under which we live, have publicized the known cases, and have led the social reaction to rape. As husbands, fathers and authority figures, men have told women how to avoid rape and have assumed a protective role over us
The women's anti-rape movement of the 1970's reverses this tradition . Women's groups in many countries are seeking to analyze rape and develop strategies to eliminate it. Women Against Rape in Columbus, Ohio, is part of this movement to stop women's victimization and to plan prevention based on our own experiences of rape. Freeing Our Lives probes the causes and consequences of rape, and suggests ways to stop it. We hope that we and other women will continue this analysis and develop more powerful methods to end rape. The time must come when no woman need fear for her safety and integrity.
THE THREAT OF RAPE
Women learn to fear rape at an early age. Mothers teach daughters not to talk to strangers and not to accept gifts or rides. Parents watch over girls more carefully than boys, who are allowed to roam and to stay out late. As children, we do not know the reasons for parents' protective actions. Only as we grow older is their fear, and ours, identified as the fear of rape.
The fear of rape follows women all of our lives. As a result, we learn to take precautions to avoid rape. We plan our time so we will be home before dark. We make sure the porch light is left on. We recheck locked doors. We even schedule routine chores carefully, knowing that a night time trip to a deserted laundry room or a jaunt through the backyard to dump the trash can be hazardous.
Often women do not acknowledge the ways in which rape restricts our lives. Safety considerations often affect a woman's choice of job , transportation , clothing styles and living arrangements. Activities that men take for granted, such as working a night shift, walking alone after dark, or hitch hiking , are riskier for women because of the danger of attack. Every time a woman says to herself, "Perhaps shouldn't do that ; it might not be safe", she is assessing the risk of rape.
The effect of rape is greater than just the effects on victims of actual assaults. Living with fear, being constantly watchful, and restricting our lives over a long period of time damage all women. In this way, we are all victims.
Women's fear is a natural, rational response to the pervasive threat of rape. We cannot just pretend the threat does not exist, or try not to be afraid. We must acknowledge both the threat and our fear of rape — then go on t o plan prevention strategies to change the social conditions that foster rape.
Traditionally , rape prevention programs have ignored the impact of constant threat on women and have focused only on actual cases of rape. Prevention has been based on controlling either the victim or the rapist. Both victim control and rapist control have severe limitation s as prevention strategies.
LIMITATIONS OF VICTIM CONTROL
Victim control , also called " victim avoidance", teaches women to avoid rape: women learn to take various safety precautions and to avoid situations where the probability of attack is presumed to be high. We must not consider this approach a basis for rape prevention. Although caution and security devices save some women from immediate danger, they do nothing to reduce the threat of rape. Even if a woman successfully avoids violence, her knowledge that other women are raped reinforces her own awareness of the threat. This awareness continues to control her activities.
Avoidance has several undesirable consequences as a prevention approach. First, avoidance reinforces women's helplessness. Locking doors and staying in at night give us a temporary sense of relief, but do not make us strong and capable of defending ourselves. Women's helplessness perpetuates our vulnerability to rape. A prevention approach should combat helplessness, not reinforce it.
A second consequence of the avoidance approach is victim blame. If a woman who does not follow avoidance advice is raped, people tend to assume that her lack of caution caused the rape. This assumption shifts the blame for rape from the rapist to the victim. Any approach which burdens the victim with the blame for the attack is unacceptable.
The worst consequence of the victim control strategy is that women must lead circumscribed lives to feel safe. Since every woman is a potential rape victim, victim control programs amount to mass control of women's lives through restriction of our liberty and mobility. This constraint is intolerable in a society that values freedom. We must find a prevention strategy that does not force women to trade freedom for security.
LIMITATIONS OF RAPIST CONTROL
Many people view rape as a crime which can only be effectively combated through the criminal justice system. They encourage stiff penalties to deter potential rapists, and incarceration to remove dangerous offenders from the community. They confuse prosecution with prevention, despite the fact that police and courts enter the scene after a rape has already occurred. Prosecution is intended to redress, not prevent, injustice. In the case of rape, it not only fails to prevent injustice, it cannot redress the full extent of the injury. The prosecution of a few rapists cannot correct the daily injustice to women who may never be raped, but whose lives are damaged by fear.
There is little evidence that punishment serves as a deterrent or that imprisonment includes re-education for rapists. Society has punished rapists for centuries, yet sexual assault against women remains a serious problem. Even if the criminal justice system could work optimally, it would only detain some rapists, not eliminate rape.
RAPE PREVENTION: ENDING WOMEN'S VULNERABILITY TO RAPE
Rape prevention must focus on eliminating the conditions in society which make women easy targets for rape. Our approach is to reduce the threat of rape by eliminating
omen's vulnerability to it. Our specific prevention strategies evolve from an analysis of the individual, community, and social factors which reinforce each other and maintain women's victimization.
We have identified three areas of vulnerability that maintain women's status as potential rape victims:
(1) a lack of information about and understanding of rape;
(2) women's subordinate relationship to men and the resulting characteristics women develop which contribute to our vulnerability;
(3) women's isolation from one another and in the community.
We will discuss each area as it relates to rape, and then explore strategies for reducing our vulnerability in each area.
Our approach to rape prevention draws on women's long-ignored experience of living with the constant threat of violence. As individuals, we can begin the process of gaining strength, developing skills, and changing our beliefs about ourselves. As a group, women can organize to change the power relationship between women and men, and to reduce our isolation from each other and within our communities.
As women, we must participate in prevention, not because we bear any responsibility for men's attacks, but because we have the most to gain by ending rape. We can only end our victimization through our own actions. We must act responsibly toward ourselves and toward other women to alter the conditions that keep us vulnerable. We can then become strong enough to stop rape.
ISIS: Following this introduction to the issue, Freeing Our Lives goes on to analyze the lack of understanding and information about rape and women's subordinate relationship to men, emphasizing women's status and men's power in society and rape as a means of control over women. It also analyzes women's dependence on men for political representation, economic support, social position, physical protection and psychological approval. Finally, it analyzes women's isolation from each other and in the community.
Not stopping at this analysis Freeing Our Lives goes on to discuss strategies to overcome these areas of women's vulnerability. Some of these strategies are:
1. redefining rape in terms of our own shared knowledge experience; making rape a public issue.
2. changing the power-dependence relationship between and women in a patriarchal culture;
3. developing physical strength and skills, and gaining confidence in our ability to assert our rights;
4. learning to recognize our power as a group;
5. organizing for our common defense in neighborhoods and making women's safety a community priority
The thorough but concise presentation of all these elements
makes this booklet a very good resource for all people trying to understand and organize against violence against women. It is also a good basis for further discussion and analysis.