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Hazell Croall Points To Studies In The Usa That Suggest Men Rapists Do ...

Hazell Croall points to studies in the USA that suggest men rapists do consider rape to be their way of claiming dominance (Croall, 1998, p210). However, this is likely to be an oversimplification of a complex problem. The feminists of the 1970s and 80s saw rape and other sexual offences as the result of ‘patriarchy'; a belief in men's right to lead and control that can be traced throughout history. They argued that it is in men's interest to keep women in a state of fear and that rape is one way of achieving that end. As we have argued earlier, it is claimed that the primary force for sex is not desire for the act itself but a demonstration of the ability to dominate.
When looking at crime statistics we observed that the prevalence of crimes of sexual violence towards women has increased substantially over the last 150 years. As we have seen, Feminists have suggested that rape was used in a patriarchal society to subjugate women; yet this does not appear to be substantiated by history. Roy Porter undertook a study of women's writings, which includes diaries and letters from seventeenth-century England; in these texts he discovered very little mention of rape or sexual assault, despite the fact that they were clearly happy to write at length on other issues that affected them or made them anxious. Porter concluded that rape was not the ‘principle agent' used in men's subordination of women in a pre-industrial society (Segal, 2003, p214).
Barbara Lindemann, looking at records from eighteenth-century Massachusetts, comes to similar conclusions. She discovered that only one rape per decade was recorded before 1729 and remained low throughout the rest of the century, averaging two a year (Segal, 2003, p214). Lindemann took into consideration factors such as the possibility of underreported rape and problems of definition; she also suggested that rape between a man and his servant would not necessarily be considered rape at this time, even by the woman victim; they would be considered the expression of authority, over which married women and servants did not have legal redress they were a form of property (Segal, 2003, p214). However, even taking into account these factors, Lindemann still concludes that levels of rape were low. She states,
The conclusion is inescapable that the number of rape prosecutions was so much smaller in eighteenth-century Massachusetts than it is today because many fewer rapes were committed in proportion to the population (Segal, 2003, p215).
It is also important to consider whether statistics for rape are the same in other countries, in order to test this thesis that sexual offences are biological or learned. If they were purely biological then we would expect uniform rates for this crime across cultural boundaries, but this is not the case.


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