Framing the Rape Victim by Carine M. Mardorossian

Author:Carine M. Mardorossian [Mardorossian, Carine M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Women's Studies, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780813566047
Google: y-hpAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2014-05-13T04:24:51+00:00

4. Prison Rape, Masculinity, and the Missed Alliances of Hollywood Cinema

According to a report released in 2007 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 4.5 percent of state and federal prisoners surveyed reported sexual victimization in the previous twelve months (Beck and Harrison 2007). This would mean that in one year alone, between 70,000 and 100,000 prisoners were sexually abused. Put another way, nearly one in twenty inmates are raped or sexually abused in prison. For incarcerated women in particular, sexual assault, particularly guard-on-prisoner sexual assault, is simply a fact of life. It can vary from institution to institution, but in the worst prison facilities, one in four female inmates is sexually abused (Naughton 2009; Struckman-Johnson and Struckman-Johnson 2006; Summer 2008). Victims of sexual violence behind bars sometimes contract HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and they always suffer severe psychological harm.1In 2001, the first national study of male prisoner sexual assault published by Human Rights Watch and a number of mainstream media reports about male sexual abuse in prisons led to national outcry and a call for reform (see Mariner 2001). This was followed by a historic piece of legislation in 2003, the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which called for zero tolerance for sexual abuse in jail. Two years later, California enacted a similar law, the Sexual Abuse in Detention Elimination Act, which required the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to prevent and respond to sexual abuse in its prisons. Like the Human Rights Watch study, the nationwide call to end the “cruel and usual punishment” of prison rape was focused on the treatment of male prisoners in correctional institutions. This is so much the case that today the gender-neutral phrase “prison rape” automatically evokes male prison rape, to the exclusion of the rape of female inmates. The sociological context of the introduction of laws to combat (male) prisoner rape was driven by a public outrage that contrasts with the normalization of the victimization of female inmates. The public discourse of institutionalized male rape has overshadowed sexual violence against women, in part because men are seen as victims of homosexual rape and hence as “undeserving” victims of sexual violence. By contrast, views of rape of women prisoners subscribe to heteronormative understandings of women as somehow deserving of rape.

This chapter juxtaposes a discussion of prison rape with an analysis of Hollywood cinema’s representation of male victimization in the context of the legacies of the 1990s political correctness movement. This juxtaposition helps expose how the phenomenon (male rape) that should have led to an alliance with feminists and women led instead to the reinforcement of the gap between masculinity and femininity (and men and women) in the name of a damaged and threatened masculinity. After all, since feminism was the movement that brought rape to public attention in the 1970s, it would have been logical to expect the renewed public interest in male prison rape to be aligned with the goals of the group whose intervention removed rape from its association with the private, the domestic, and the personal.

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