Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (42 page)

,
f inally, a, case of rape stands a greater chance of being, interracial than a. case of assault, .but the interracial element is more frequent n1robbery.
i

It seems likely that this "man in the middle" profile of the forcible rapist reflects the nature of his act, which "borrows" char acteristics from the other two offenses. •t:.ike
·
assault, rape' is an act
"ef·physical
damage to another person, and like robbery it is also an
.
aet..'.Of acquiring,;property: the iritent is cto "have"·the female body
.

-in the acquisitory meaning of the term. A woman is perceived by the rapist both as hated person and desired property. Hostility against her and possession of her may be simultaneous motivations, and the hatred for her is expressed in the same act that is the attempt to "take" her against her will. In one violent crime, rape is an act against person and property.

Contrary to popular opinion, New York and Washington are not the rape capitals of the nation. That honor, bestowed yearly by the FBI as a sort of negative Oscar, usually goes to Los Angeles, but Denver, Little Rock, Memphis, San Francisco-Oakland, Las Vegas, Tallahassee and Albuquerque are right up there in the running, and a good student of rape must always keep in mind that police reporting procedures vary dramatically from city to city. The FBI does note emphatically that cities with populations in excess of a quarter of a million show higher rape rates per capita than suburban areas while rural areas lag far behind, so in this sense, rape can be said to be a big-city crime, although the rape rate in suburbia is noticeably rising. When rapes per capita are viewed geographically, the Southwestern states emerge as the champions. Southwestern states also lead the nation in rates for homicide and assault, so Southern and Western traditions of violence would appear to be an operative factor.

One statistical consideration that has received too much at tention to the detriment of other aspects is the actual site of the crime. Brenda Brown's 1973 Memphis police department study reported that 34 percent of all rapes occurred in the victim's resi dence, usually by forced, illegal entry;
22
percent took place in automobiles;
26
percent occurred in "open spaces" ( alleys, parks, roads, on the street, in the bushes, behind a building,
etc.
) ; 9 percent took place in the offender's residence; and the remaining 9

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percent occurred indoors in a variety of places ranging from a church to an abandoned building.

The 17-city survey conducted by the task force of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence reported that
52
percent of all rapes occurred in the home ( most frequently in the bedroom );
23
percent occurred outside;
14
percent occurred in commercial establishments and other inside locations; and
11
percent occurred in automobiles.

Menachem Amir's Philadelphia study reported that 56 per cent of all rapes occurred in the home; 18 percent occurred in open spaces;
11
percent occurred in other indoor locations; and
1
5 per cent occurred in automobiles. Taking into account that an offender often escorts a victim, either by duress or through a ploy, to a propitious rape loca tion, Amir was also concerned with what he called "the initial meeting place in a rape event." He found that in 48 percent of the cases, offenders first spotted their victims on the street.

According to these three sets of statistics, the street, the home and the automobile emerge as dangerous, high-risk places, so what is lef t? Good locks on doors and windows and admonitions against hitchhiking and walking alone at night in deserted places are the usual palliatives, but they do nothing to affect the rape ideology, or to increase our understanding of the crime.

Rape begins in the rapist's mind, and place may be irrelevant. A small comparison study of rape patterns in Boston and Los Angeles is interesting in this respect. Densely packed Boston has a relatively low reported rape rate while vast, sprawling Los Angeles, where people need cars to get about, is a leader. Two sociologists who scrutinized police reports in these two cities discovered that the Boston rapist was more likely to break into an apartment and confront his victim while the Los Angeles rapist was more likely to pick up his victim while cruising about in an automobile. They also found that gang rape was more common in Los Angeles than it was in Boston, which seems directly related to a transportation and mobility problem that encourages the practice of hitchhiking. Weapons were more frequently employed by the Boston rapist, a phenomenon that seems reasonable since solitary offenders have more need for a show of force than gang rapists whose very number provides the display of power.

PAIRS, GROUPS AND GANGS

THE POLICE-BLOTTER RAPIST
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Although it is not unusual to hear of one rapist who manages to keep a second victim at bay and immobilized while he methodi cally attends to the first, the numerical odds in rape situations are more typically in the rapist's favor. This in itself tells us much about the nature of the act.

Group rape may be defined as two or more men assaulting one woman. As I have mentioned, Amir found that in 43 percent of his Philadelphia cases the female victim had two or more assailants. A Toronto survey came up with a figure of
50
percent. A Washing ton, D.C., study reported
30
percent.
In
Toronto and Philadelphia, rapists who operated in groups accounted for
71
percent of the total number of offenders.

"Whatever may be the causal explanation, these results are amazing," wrote Amir, a man not given to hyperbole. The sociolo gist expressed this astonishment because psychiatric literature on rape had treated the phenomenon of group rape "with silence." Police departments, as a rule, do not tally group-rape statistics for public consumption and the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports do not analyze such information.

When men rape in pairs or in gangs, the sheer physical advan tage of their position is clear-cut and unquestionable. No simple conquest of man over woman, group rape is the conquest of men over Woman.
It
is within the phenomenon of group rape, stripped of the possibility of equal combat, that the male ideology of rape is most strikingly evident. Numerical odds are proof of brutal inten tion. They are proof, too, of male bonding, to borrow a phrase made popular by Lionel Tiger, and proof of a desire to humiliate the victim beyond the act of rape through the process of anony mous mass assault.

As we have seen in Bangladesh and Vietnam, men in war tend to rape in groups in which they are anonymous and secure, and against the backdrop of an all-male army to which they have a strong male allegiance. In domestic group rape, male bonding is similarly operative, whether the young men have loosely gotten together of an evening or whether their relationship had been previously formalized into a bona fide gang. The act of group rape

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forges an alliance among men against the female victim who be comes, for their purposes, Anonymous Woman.

Rape in war, because it is so routine and casual and twinned with the opportunity to loot and kill, has rarely been considered an indication of mental disorder. Domestic group rape, with its reli ance on the buddy system for planning, security and coordination, its overtones of competitive
machismo,
its sometime link with robbery or thef t, and its aspect of sport and rousing conviviality, has also provided meager grist for the psychiatric mill. Recall the remark of Dr. Guttmacher, "just . . . another act of plunder."

Out of the total number of police-blotter rapists that Menachem Amir looked into, 55 percent raped in gangs and an other 16 percent chose to rape in pairs. Pair rape has never been studied as an isolated phenomenon. Studies of gang rape have been sparse but interesting.

A California group psychologist, W. H. Blanchard, published a fascinating paper on two sets of youthful gang rapists he studied, one white and one black. He did not divulge their ages but he called them "boys" and mentioned their placement in a juvenile custodial institution. The psychologist put each set of youths through what he called a Group Process Rorschach. A series of Rorschach cards, that pack of random blobs and splashes that offer an infinite variety of personal interpretations, was shown to each boy af ter a personal interview. The test was then repeated with the entire group present and the boys were told to agree upon one response to each card. In Blanchard's words, "This affords an excellent opportunity to discover how the boys modify their origi nal responses . . . in order to conform to the dynamics of the group." Blanchard quickly discovered that the group response to the cards was richer and more elaborate because of "the pressure of competition for dominance in the group and under the stimulus of group activity."

The white group, Blanchard wrote, had "participated in a particularly vicious assault on a pair of lovers at a secluded spot in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles." ( Actually, as gang rapes go, the Hollywood Hills rape was not especially vicious.) Five boys had taken part in the assault but only their acknowledged leader, Keith, and Harry and Don were in custody. The rape had gone like this: Boozing it up among themselves the boys decided it might be fun to "scare" some lovers in a parked car. When they approached the

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car the situation escalated. Keith grabbed the ignition keys, the boy in the car got out and protested, and Keith took a sock at him. The others then jumped on the boy and Harry grabbed his wallet. According to Blanchard, "The girl agreed to do whatever Keith wanted if he would leave her boyfriend alone." Keith raped her first in the car while the other boys were grabbing at her breasts and helping to pull off her clothes. Don was next. By this time the girl was in pain and she pleaded to be allowed to "masturbate" him instead. Don agreed. "During this incident," Blanchard reported, "the other boys were running around the car yelling and knocking on windows." When Don was finished, a third boy made his try, but by this time Keith was getting anxious that they would be discovered. He pulled the third boy out of the car and gave the order to run.