Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (63 page)

Still, on the whole, police-blotter child molesters appeared significantly older than police-blotter rapists, and a full
10
percent were above the age of
50. (
Amies combined Philadelphia statistics on men and boys who raped women and children showed a median age of
23;
a negligible
1
percent were above the age of
50. )
Half of all offenders had had a previous brush with the law, an observation that closely matched the Philadelphia statistics.

*
Psychiatric case studies of prostitutes unearth accounts of childhood rape or molestation by relatives with stunning regularity, but although these cases have been reported individually, no serious study of the prostitute, as far as I know, has tried to put together any statistical evidence. A recent magazine interview with a New York pimp who prided himself on his stable of teen age runaways contained the quote, "The majority of girls I've gotten so far got raped by their fathers or uncles or somebody." Pimps, who are acknowl edged experts in the field of female psychology, intuitively, or perhaps empiri cally, understand that rape is the fastest way to "turn out" a likely teen-age candidate, and they have been known to set up intricate gang-rape situations when they have spotted a prospect, as a sort of good-business practice.

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AGAINST OUR WILL

The victimized child's natural father had committed the abuse in
13
percent of the cases, and the child's stepfather or the man with whom the child's mother was living was responsible for an other 14 percent of the crimes. Victims and offenders came mainly, though not entirely, from the lower end of the economic ladder. Reflecting the ethnic composition of lower-class neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn,
22
percent of the offenders were white, 42 percent were black and 37 percent were Puerto Rican. By and large, offenders molested children of their own class and kind, but as members of the newest immigrant group and with a language barrier to boot, Puerto Rican children were found to have been frequently victimized by neighbors and storekeepers of other ethnic backgrounds.

One serious and unanswerable criticism of the Humane Asso ciation study would be that middle-and upper-class families do not bare their internal disorders to the police or to child-protection agencies that essentially service the poor. And since so many of the sex crimes committed against children turn out to be what the sociologists call an interfamily event, the study was unavoidably skewed to the disadvantaged end of the social spectrum. Florence Rush believes that the sexual abuse of children crosses all class lines and economic distinctions quite without favoritism, and the report of Dr. Kinsey, despite himself, would tend to confirm this, since his subjects were all white and largely middle-class. Not much force is needed to molest a young child, and for this reason, I think, older men prove quite successful at it, whereas young men use rape as a test of male prowess and male solidarity. This last point is important. Amir found that 43 percent of all adult rape in Philadelphia was committed by pairs or gangs, but the Brooklyn Bronx study revealed that only
10
percent of the abuses against children involved more than one offender, and few of these were group assaults. They were, for the most part, "situations where more than one member of a household or more than one relative had each separately committed offenses against the same victim. When the child's victimization was discovered all of the offenders were reported."

Are men who rape their daughters a subspecies of brute monster? Gebhard's group from the Institute for Sex Research, for all its studying, found nothing at all special about father rapists when compared to ordinary rapists and the rest of the prison

POWER: INSTITUTION AND AUTHORITY
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population. In fact as a group they appeared "conservative, moral istic, restrained and religiously devout," to name a few of their sterling qualities as defined by Gebhard's researchers. Throwing up his hands in dismay, Gebhard concluded that "propinquity" and alcohol, and a possible "cultural tolerance" of incest within their backgrounds, had led these quite ordinary men to abuse their daughters.

The unholy silence that shrouds the interfamily sexual abuse of children and prevents a realistic appraisal of its true incidence and meaning is rooted in the same patriarchal philosophy of sexual private property that shaped and determined historic male atti tudes toward rape. For if woman was man's original corporal prop erty, then children were, and are, a wholly owned subsidiary. A careful reader might recall from my chapter "In the Beginning Was the Law" that in the Code of Hammurabi a man who "knew" his own daughter was merely banished from the city while a man who stole the virginity of another man's daughter might be law fully killed. Incest, a misnamed term that implies mutuality-I prefer the explicit description of father rape-has hardly been the universal or uncompromising taboo that psychologists and anthro pologists would have us believe; or rather, the taboo against father rape is superseded by a stronger, possibly older taboo-there shall be no outside interference in the absolute dictatorship of father rule. Am I expressing this point in an exaggerated fashion?
As
recently as the beginning of this century the Washington State Supreme Court dismissed a suit for damages brought by a girl named Lulu Roller, who had been raped by her father-on the grounds that "the rule of law prohibiting suits between parent and child is based on the interest that society has in preserving har mony in the domestic relations."*

*
It
has been suggested, I forgot by whom, that the origin of the incest taboo was an agreement wrung from the father by the mother when she consented to accept male authority in return for protection of herself and her children. I like this theory but I'll admit it is only speculation, but no wilder specula tion than the theory that the incest taboo sprung from the father's own recognition of his desire to sleep with his daughter, or was a compact a tribe wrung from each male member, either to increase their number through marrying out (exogamy) or to discourage inbreeding and hereditary flaws. At any rate, the incest taboo, when it works, does protect children, and that
is
important.

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AGAINST OUR WILL

All adults, and especially male adults, are authority figures to a child. Fathers, uncles, big brothers, next-door neighbors and store keepers are invested with an assumed benevolence that may not exist-that certainly did not exist for those unfortunates in the Brooklyn-Bronx study.

9

The Myth

of the Heroic Rapist

People often ask what the classic Greek myths reveal about rape. Actually, they reveal very little. For one thing, myths about any given god or goddess are often contradictory and impos sible to date; and for another, it is far too easy to retell a Greek myth to fit any interpretation one chooses.
It
does seem evident that up there on Olympus and down here on earth and in the sea and below, the male gods, Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Hades and Pan, raped with zest, trickery and frequency. Yet on the other hand, the goddesses and mortal women who were victim to these rapes, Hera,
Io,
Europa, Cassandra, Leda, rarely suffered serious consequences beyond get ting pregnant and bearing a child, which served to move the story line forward. Hera, Zeus's sister, wife or consort, had a foolproof method of recovery. She would bathe yearly in a river to restore her virginity and be none the worse for wear. Aphrodite was a champion seducer in her own right.

Philomela was raped by Tereus, King of Thrace, who took the precaution of cutting out her tongue so she could not tell her story. Philomela cleverly embroidered her woes into a piece of needle work that she sent to her sister, Prokne, who happened to be Tereus' wife. In sisterly revenge, Prokne killed Tereus' son. (Later all of them were turned into birds.) The young girl Kainis, raped by Poseidon, chose an unusual and highly personal solution to her problems. She asked Poseidon to change her into a man in order to