Damned Whores and God's Police by Anne Summers

Author:Anne Summers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New South
Published: 2016-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

The court experience merely highlights and crystallises the prevailing social attitude to rape and its victims, and a woman does not have to go to the police or endure a court hearing to be marked by these attitudes. All women have been taught to fear rape and to curb their activities and behaviour because of it. If a woman is raped, therefore, one of her first reactions will be guilt. She has internalised the myths of rape described earlier and it is impossible for her not to apply their import to herself. Even if her rational mind can reassure her that she did absolutely nothing to provoke the attack, her subconscious is likely to quibble and question, to turn over every word or action that could perhaps have sparked off the rape.

Few women have learnt to view rape as a political act – in the way that it has been portrayed in this chapter – and they can only interpret it in terms of the patriarchal myths that lessen or remove the culpability of the rapist and implicate his victim. But a political consciousness is not necessary to feel degradation and humiliation and this is what every rape victim feels. Her body has been violently invaded; she has usually been subjected to, or forced to perform, sexual acts which she might enjoy with her lover but which with a violent stranger are repugnant and perverse. Most rape victims report that they feel soiled and dirty after the attack. Many wash themselves compulsively, shower up to a dozen times a day for weeks or months afterwards, trying to wash away the memory and the taint. For many women their sexual behaviour is irreparably altered. Some become absolutely frigid and cannot endure a sexual advance; for them rape and sex are inseparably associated and sex takes on all the horrors of rape. Other women become self-destructively promiscuous, consciously or otherwise reckoning that the guilt imputed to them by the myths must be justified and they therefore embark on proving it a prophecy.

Women who have been raped are also made to feel tainted, to feel that they bear a stigma. Again a court experience will heighten this because the woman’s shame and guilt will become public knowledge, reported upon in the newspapers and listened to by prying crowds in the public gallery. But the stigma is still there even if the woman does not press charges. Her family and friends have internalised the myths too and however much sympathy they feel for her, they will find it almost impossible not to secretly believe that she did not somehow invite the attack. She will thence-forward be known as a ‘rape victim’, a status that invites prurient and speculative curiosity. The association of sex and violence – a best-selling combination as every Sunday newspaper proprietor knows – incites a curiosity of mingled horror and excitement. People want to know all the details and will often feign extreme sympathy for the woman to prise them from her and then use this knowledge to condemn her.

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