Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (61 page)

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husband, femme wife, and assorted aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters and children. The female acculturation process, so different from the male's, leads to a preference for nest-building over the simpler tyranny of the strong over the weak.

Yet there is evidence enough that outright sexual assault among women does occur. In her autobiography, the actress Frances Farmer described in frightening detail the lesbian rape of an inmate by a trusty on the women's ward of a state mental hospital in the nineteen forties. Recently in New York City a newspaper expose of conditions at the temporary Children's Center reported that an adolescent girl, shortly after her admission, was taken by a group of girls into a room where she was raped by a gang of youths that included some young men who had come into the building from the street.

This was not an isolated incident. Workers at this shelter for truant and retarded teen-agers described a deteriorated situation in which gangs of girls, in cahoots with outside gangs of boys from whom they took orders, terrorized staff members and newer in mates. On one occasion a woman counselor was stripped by a gang of girls intent on abusing her sexually. Complaints of sexual assault at the Children's Center, including abuse of girls by girls, were common according to a deputy police inspector from the nearby precinct who remarked, "There is no way of knowing if this is lesbian or sadistic. All we do know is that we don't hear of most of the crimes because the victims-and this includes counselors-are afraid to complain."

Consider the case of James J. Farley, a New York City police detective assigned to the robbery squad and the holder of four special citations in six outstanding years of service. In October, 1972, officer Farley was quietly suspended from the force when he was arrested and charged with raping a fifteen-year-old girl in Suffolk County near his home the previous June. A small item about his arrest and suspension appeared in the newspapers and I filed it away as a curio in a manilla folder marked
POLICE.
In February, 1974, another small news item caught my eye. James

POWER: INSTITUTION AND AUTHORITY
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Farley had been sentenced to fifteen years in prison for the ad mitted rape at gunpoint of two women on the West Side of Manhattan. Not only that, Farley had received a twelve-year sen tence in another jurisdiction for three other rapes in the borough of Queens and his Suffolk County case was still pending. Farley's entire raping career, as it came to light, had occurred while he was a member in good standing of the New York police department.

In the course of monitoring New York newspapers over a four year period, I collected reports on one new police rapist per year that is, one new case per year in which the evidence against a policeman was sufficient to warrant his arrest and departmental suspension that subsequently came to public attention. Less sys tematic monitoring of some other big-city newspapers leads me to suspect that the pattern holds true for Washington, Cleveland, Houston and Detroit. Detroit might win a mention in the Guin ness
Book
of World Records. On Thanksgiving Day, i973, three Detroit policemen were suspended from the force and charged with rape and sodomy af ter a departmental investigation. One of the Detroit officers had done his work solo, while the other two, one white and one black, had utilized the buddy system. On routine patrol one evening they picked up a young woman on a drunk-and-disorderly charge in front of a bar and took her to the precinct house for booking. There the commander on duty deter mined that the young detainee, age i9, was not drunk and ordered the patrolmen to drive her home. Instead, according to the official charges, the officers drove her to a deserted street and proceeded to rape her.

The two policemen were dismissed from the force (as was the third and solo operator ) af ter a departmental trial affirmed the charges. Interestingly, in an outside criminal court procedure they were found not guilty on a technicalitjr, but this did not affect the departmental ruling.

I want to say that this Detroit case represents a distinctive modus operandi of police rape-on-the-job abuse of power within the protective cover of "duty" by men invested with the sanctioned authority of a badge and a gun and the power to make an arrest that has been far more prevalent than any of us realize. But to support such a serious indictment I would have to rely on unprov able folklore as it has been told and retold by ranks of bitter

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women, especially black women, who never won the satisfaction of having their police rapists charged with the crime, let alone con victed.

One item out of several from We
Charge Genocide:

Memphis, Tennessee, August 3, 1945: Two young Negro women were raped by uniformed police officers. They were waiting for a street car to take them home from work when the officers took them into custody. They were then driven to an isolated spot where the officers raped them. The officers warned them that they would be killed if they reported the incident. A complaint to the Chief of Police from the mother of one of the young women brought the advice that she keep her mouth shut. The two officers were ac quitted by an all-white jury.

Those who bear the awesome responsibility for maintaining law and order are demonstrably reluctant to face up to evidence of criminality within their own house, as periodic exposes of police brutality, graf t and corruption plainly show. That
this
m uch docu mentary evidence of police rape has surfaced is in itself remarkable in view of the solidarity of the police brotherhood and the reluc tance of policemen in general to believe a rape complainant. Equivocators might argue that the phenomenon of police rape, whatever its statistical incidence-it has never been formally studied-proves that officers of the law are no different from any one else and that occasional acts of miscreance are an all-too human failing. This will not do. The horror of police rape is special, for it is an abuse of power committed by those whose job is to control such abuses of power. A police department, like a prison or an army, is by nature and structure a traditionally male, authori tarian institution, but one empowered by law to employ force where necessary to protect us from crime. Operating through sanc tioned force, the local police precinct has always been a bastion of male attitudes and responses that are inimical to women. (See Chapter
i i.)
The policeman who rapes is at the extreme end of a value system that also tolerates the policeman who does not be lieve that the crime of rape exists.

Police rape, as I have said, represents the ultimate Kafkaesque nightmare, for when society's chosen figure of lawful authority commits a criminal act upon one of those persons he has been sanctioned to protect, to whom can a woman turn for justice?

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The women's folklore of rape-cases that seldom, if ever, reach a court of law-is an oral history of abuses by men in positions of authority. The therapist who applies his personal kind of sexual therapy, the doctor or dentist who suddenly turns a routine examination into a physical overture that the bewildered patient feels helpless to halt, the producer who preys on a starlet's ambition, the professor who twists to his advantage his student's interest in his field of scholarship-these are examples of what men would call seduction since the sexual goal may be accomplished without the use, or even the threat, of physical force, but the imposition of sex by an authority figure is hardly consensual or "equal."

ri€J(!)ercion, -0an .take rnany forms, economic and emotional coert eion;are among them, and not only is the victim afraid to resist, but

' af ter, the, fact,.she is seldom believed. Rape by an authority figure can befuddle a victim who has been trained to respect authority so that she believes herself complicitous. Authority figures emanate an aura of rightness; their actions. cannot easily be challenged.
What
else can the victim be but "wrong"?

No area of sexual abuse is characterized by unchallengeable authority to a greater degree than the sexual abuse of children, for to a child all adults are authority figures. When a child is sexually abused by an adult, the entire world of adult authority bears down to confuse and confound the hapless victim.

"Dear Abby," a mother who signed herself
"DAZED"
wrote to the syndicated columnist Abigail Van Buren,

I wrote to you several months ago about a male relative molest ing my 3-year-old girl. Your answer was to confront him with it and get him to a doctor, fast.
We
had already confronted him, and of course, he denied everything. "She makes up stories," he said. Abby, how can a 3-year-old make up stories of this kind? I talked with the police department and was told you cannot accuse someone of molesting without proof. . . . Will they take the word of a 3-year old against that of a grown man who is admired and respected by all? NO! I was made to look like an hysterical mother having hallu-

2
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cinations. Can you understand why each night
I
pray for God to take him?

Columnist Van Buren did understand. This was not the first such letter she, or her real-life sister Ann Landers, had printed.

The sexual abuse of children is an outrage to which people universally react in uncontained horror when that rare manifesta tion, a mutilation murder, occurs. Yet the
routine
occurrence of child molestation remains a subject from which people prefer to avert their eyes. "Never take candy from a stranger" is a lesson all mothers drum into their unsuspecting children, for in the popular imagination the child molester is the dirty old man who lurks outside the schoolyard or the sniveling Peter Lorre character in M. In the hierarchic world of the prison inmate, where assaultive criminals rank high, the child molester is considered the lowest of the low, on a par with the squealer as a figure of scorn and derision. In stunning contrast to the prison populaion's own view, in the all-forgiving liberal's attitude toward crime, the child molester has come to be personified by the nice, timid man with a fear of grown-up relationships ( I'm thinking of that curious movie of some years back,
The
Mark ) or as a confused, conflicted man with
·
a "morality" problem or bad judgment.

What is the national incidence of child molestation in these United States and who are the molesters? Is the sexual abuse of minors extreme and aberrant behavior committed by a small num ber of unfortunates who cannot help themselves-and whose crimes have been blown out of proportion by the tabloids to such an extent that they have ticked off hallucinating fantasies in "hys terical" mothers and their "lying" children? Or is it an all-too-real and rather common experience? The FBI's
Uniform
Crime Re ports are no help to us here, for incredible as it sounds, although they can tell us all about the thef t of automobiles, the govern ment's crime fighters have never produced a national analysis of sex crimes committed against the defenseless young.

Dr. Charles Hayman's Washington study disclosed that the ages of rape victims brought to D.C. General Hospital ranged from 15 months to 82 years. Twelve percent of his intake were children age
12
and younger. Brenda Brown's study of rapes reported to the Memphis police department showed that 6 percent of all victims were age
12
and under. Menachem Amir's study of reported rapes

POWER: INSTITUTION AND AUTHORITY
273

in Philadelphia showed that 8 percent of all victims were age 10 and under; a total of
28
percent were age 14 and below.

Recent literature by and about women has turned up a re markable number of accounts of childhood molestation and rape. Quentin Bell's intimate. biography of his·
·
famous aunt;::. Virginia

·
Woolf, in
.
fomed
,
th literary world of what had been a well-kept family secret, that young Virginia had been cornered and molested

ip the
.
.
1:1
,
':1
.
ery a! age six
.
by her .19-year-old half
.
brother George Duckworth,
·
who
.
contiµed his furtive, insistent grapplings until

the. young. writer Was into her teelf6. Lady
Sings the
Blues, the autobiography of Billie Holiday, told of her rape by a 45-year-old neighbor when she was ten. Underground film star Viva has de scribed being regularly molested by the trusted family doctor dur ing her childhood years. The most moving and painful account of childhood rape ever put to paper appears in
I Know Why the
Caged
Bird Sings,
a personal memoir by Maya Angelou, the ex traordinary and multitalented black woman.
It
begins, "Mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, lived with us, or we lived with him ( I never knew quite which ) ."

Eight-year-old Maya and her brother Bailey, she tells us, had gone to live with their mother and Mr. Freeman in St. Louis. One morning the child awoke to feel a strange sensation of pressure on her leg.
"It
was too sof t to be a hand, and it wasn't the touch of clothes. . . . I knew, as if I had always known, it was his 'thing' on my leg. He said, 'Just stay right there, Ritie, I ain't gonna hurt you.' ,; And so began an off-and-on-again fondling that the father less young girl desperately wanted to believe was a sign of love. "Get up," Mr. Freeman would say irritably af ter a flurry of motion. "You peed in the bed." The child knew she hadn't, but Mr. Freeman would pour a cup of water over a telling spot. The funny activity continued for some months, with Mr. Freeman pressing "his thing" against the confused young girl when they were alone and then refusing to speak to her for weeks at a time. One morning when Bailey and Mother weren't home, Mr. Freeman called out, "Ritie, come here."

I didn't think about the holding time until I got close to him. His pants were open and his "thing" was standing out of his britches by itself.

"No, sir, Mr. Freeman." I started to back away. I didn't want

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to touch that mush-hard thing again, and I didn't need him to hold me any more. He grabbed my arm and pulled me between his legs. His face was still and looked kind, but he didn't smile or blink his eyes. Nothing. He did nothing, except reach his lef t hand around to turn on the radio without even looking at it. Over the noise of the music and static he said, "Now, this ain't gonna hurt you much. You liked it before, didn't you?"

And then there was the pain. A breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart. The act of rape upon an eight-year old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can't. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot.

I thought I had died-I woke up in a white-walled world, and it had to be heaven. But Mr. Freeman was there and he was wash ing me. His hands shook, but he held me upright in the tub and washed my legs. "I didn't mean to hurt you, Ritie. I didn't mean it. But don't you tell . . . Remember, don't you tell a soul."

Young Maya was hospitallzed, and eventually she did tell.

There was a trial and the courtroom was filled.

"What was the defendant wearing?'' That was Mr. Freeman's lawyer.

"I don't know."

"You mean to say this man raped you and you don't know what he was wearing?" He snickered as if I had raped Mr. Freeman. "Do you know if you were raped?"

A sound pushed in the air of the court ( I was sure it was laughter ) . . . .

"Was that the first time the accused touched you?" The ques tion stopped me. Mr. Freeman had surely done something very wrong, but I was convinced that I had helped him to do it. I didn't want to lie, but the lawyer wouldn't let me think . . .

"Did the accused try to touch you before the time he-or rather you say he raped you?"

I couldn't say yes and tell them how he had loved me once for a few minutes and how' he had held me close before he thought I had peed in my bed. My uncles would kill me and Grandmother Baxter would stop speaking, as she of ten did when she was angry. And all those people in the court would stone me as they had stoned the harlot in the Bible. And Mother, who thought I was such a good

girl, would be so disappointed. But most important, there was Bailey. I had kept a big secret from him.

"Marguerite, answer the question. Did the accused touch you before the occasion on which you claim he raped you?"

Everyone in the court knew that the answer had to be No. Everyone except Mr. Freeman and me.
I
looked at his heavy face trying to look as if he would have liked me to say No.
I
said No.

Mr. Freeman was given one year and one day, but he never got a chance to do his time. His lawyer (or someone) got him re leased that very afternoon.

That night a tall white policeman came to the house to report, "Freeman's been found dead on the lot behind the slaughter house. . . . Seems like he was dropped there. Some say he was kicked to death." To the logic of an eight-year-old child, "a man was dead because I lied. . . . I could feel the evilness flowing through my body and waiting, pent up, to rush off my tongue if I tried to open my mouth. I clamped my teeth shut, I'd hold it in.
If
it escaped, wouldn't it flood the world and all the innocent people?"

Maya Angelou stopped talking. For a long time.

What would Sigmund Freud have made of Maya Angelou's story, or of Viva, Billie Holiday, Virginia Woolf and the woman who signed herself
"DAZED"
if, perchance, they had sought an audience with him in Vienna? The father of psychoanalysis had noticed that many of his hysterical female patients reported a childhood experience of rape or molestation, most often at the hands of their own father. At first the good doctor believed the women. Later he developed the theory in his famous essay on femininity that these disturbing reports of childhood assault were fantasies that the child contrived as a defense against her own genital pleasure and her guilty wish to sleep with her father.