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We Have Set Out Above The Sexual Offences We Are Going To Consider In This ...


We have set out above the sexual offences we are going to consider in this essay and looked at some of the statistics on the subject; therefore, in this section we will look at the criminological theories concerning these offences. There has been much written about the crimes of sexual violence and how they relate to women. Lynne Segal, writing in 1990, looks back at some of the arguments made by early feminists regarding women as victims of sexual violence. She states her belief that thinking on this subject was heavily influenced by a book published in 1975, by Susan Brownmiller, called Against Our Will (Segal, 2003, p211). This book was an analysis of male power, which placed rape and male violence at the front of feminist issues (Segal, 2003, p211). Segal claims, ‘it is startling to realise that rape and men's violence towards women became a serious social and political issue only through feminist attention to them' (Segal, 2003, p211). She credits Brownmiller for the questioning of what became known as the ‘myths of rape', which has revolutionised the study and treatment of this crime (Segal, 2003, p212). The myths she refers to are the myth that rape is a rare event and the myth that men have a desire to protect women from violence. Certainly statistics bear out this latter myth; statistically sexual offenders are almost entirely male, with only around 2% of offenders being women (Jones, 2001, p444); this is also seen in other countries, in Australia the figure is 7% (White, 2005, p61). We have already considered the statistics of this crime and know that the first myth is indeed a myth, below we will consider whether or not biology is a factor in this statistic; we will also consider the second myth, that of men's attitudes towards women being benevolent and consider the validity of the argument that it is not.
The arguments about male sexual violence being a result of their biology are vigorously disputed. It has been suggested that one reason men are more sexually violent is because they have an uncontrollable sex-drive (Jones, 2006, p445). Jones points out that although the male hormone testosterone is responsible for sexual arousal, it is not responsible for the ‘quality or nature of sexual arousal' (Jones, 2006, p445). Generally, aggression in any form is considered to be a result of social context rather than anything physiological (White, 2005, p63). Evolutionary biologists have suggested that men's propensity to sexual aggression could be explained as the need and desire to procreate, in order to ensure the continuance of his genes; however, there is a flaw in this argument, as many sexual offences are carried out on those too old or too young to procreate; this also would not account for rape with an inanimate object or the rape of men Croall, 1998, p209).

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