Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (79 page)

11

Victims: The Crime

TESTIMONY:
I am 73 years old and I was raped when I was 67. A young fellow followed me into the elevator of my apartment building. He was wearing a green uniform. He asked me if I knew the apartment number of a certain tenant but I told him that name was unfamiliar to me. I said, "Oh, are you the man from United Parcels? I'm expecting a package that hasn't arrived." He asked me my name and apartment number and told me he'd go down and check in the truck. A few minutes later my doorbell rang. I looked through the peephole and there was the young man with a pack age. Of course I opened the door right away. He had a wrench in one hand. He shoved me against the wall and started hitting my head. Later I had to have five stitches. He told me not to make a sound and he started walking through my apartment. I think he wanted to see if I was really alone, or he might have been looking for things to steal. When he came back to where I was he asked me where I hid the money. I told him I didn't have any money hidden, just what was in my pocketbook. He didn't seem to believe me. He told me to get on the bed. He pulled off my underthings and then he tore into me. When he was finished I watched him go through my dresser drawers. He took some jewelry and my portable TV. Finally he left, af ter warning me to keep quiet.

My neighbors and the police were very kind, but the police couldn't find him. The United Parcels Service said they didn't have any truck delivery route scheduled for my neighborhood that day and his description didn't match anyone they had working for them.
It
turned out my package had been delivered to the wrong apart-

347

ment a few days earlier.
It
was sitting in the package room all the time.

Any female may become a victim of rape. Factors such as extreme youth, advanced age, physical homeliness and virginal life style do not provide a foolproof deterrent or render a woman impervious to sexual assault.

A certain amount of risk is present whatever our attributes and demographic standing. Dr. Charles Hayman's five-year study con ducted at D.C. General Hospital in Washington reported that victims of rape who were processed through the emergency ward ranged from a child of 15 months to a woman of 82. Results like Hayman' s are confirmed by other studies.

TESTIMONY:
I was eleven and my sister was seven. Looking back now I'm amazed I was so naive. I was coming home from the den tist with my sister at four in the afternoon, and I was aware that a man was behind me. He followed us into the building. We were scared. I said to my sister, "Julie, he's behind us, don't get into the elevator with him, run, let's run up the stairs." He caught us on the third floor stairwell and put a knife at my sister's throat. He said to me, "Pull up your dress and pull down your pants and I won't hurt the little one."

Statistical probability does matter. Just as there is a calculable "typical" rapist, there is also, to a lesser degree of certainty, a "typical" victim. While any woman is a natural target for a would be rapist, the chances are that a rape victim will be of the same class and race as her attacker, at least between
70
and
90
percent of the time. More often than not, she also will be approximately the same age as her attacker, or slightly younger. Overall, the danger to women is greatest between the ages of
10
and 29. Teen-age girls, simply by being teen-age girls, run the greatest risk of any age group. In Menachem Amir's Philadelphia study, girls between the ages of 15 and i9 accounted for one-quarter of all reported victims of rape.
In
Brenda Brown's Memphis study, students comprised
27
percent of all rape victims and "made up the largest group having stated occupations."

Rape is usually an "ecologically bound" offense, to borrow a phrase from Amir. Not that rapists prefer their own class and kind (personal preference appears to be immaterial ); it is simply that

rape is a crime of opportunity and opportunity knocks most fre quently in a familiar milieu. Women who live in urban lower-class neighborhoods of high crime and juvenile delinquency are subject to the greatest risk of any class.
It
follows then, and statistics bear it out, that the group of women who run the greatest risk of being assaulted, because of their proximity to those who are most quick to resort to forcible rape, are black, teen-age, urban lower-class girls.

TESTIMONY:
Okay, I was
14
years old at the time. School had let out and
I
was walking home because
I
didn't have enough money for carfare. This guy saw me on the street or
I
saw him and he said, "Hey, are you looking for a job?" Wow,
I
thought to myself, how did he know
I
was looking for a job? So
I
said, "Yeah, why?" And he said, "Because
I
know someone, a friend of mine, who's looking for someone to work part-time in his office." So
I
said, "Where's your friend's office?" and he said, "I'm not doin' anything, I'll walk you over there right now."
I
told him my mother was expecting me home.
I
said, "Why don't you just tell me where it is?" He said it would be better if he went with me because he had the connections. He said, "Why don't you call your mother and tell her you'll be home later?" We walked to a phone booth and this guy gave me a dime. He actually gave me a dime to call my mother.
I
called and said, "Ma,
I
got a job. I'm going over there right now."

He walked me over to this building and then he told me to wait downstairs and he'd go up and see if his f riend was in.
I
thought that was a little odd,
I
didn't see why
I
had to wait downstairs, but
I
waited around and in a while he came back and said we could go upstairs. We went into this place and there was nothing in it but a dirty mattress. The guy locked the door real quick and then
I
kew what was happening.
I
started to cry.
I
was a virgin.
I
pleaded with him not to touch me, but he did.
It
hurt. He hurt me.
I
was crying

a
Jot.

Af terward he gave me
20
cents to get home. He had the nerve to ask for my phone number so he could call me again. He wanted me to ask my mother if he could date me. I gave him the wrong number and a phony name. All I could think of was that I had to go home and face my family, right? I had to go home, have dinner, smile and pretend nothing was wrong.

At dinner my ma kept asking, "What about your new job?" I said, "I don't want to talk about it, leave me alone.
It
didn't work out."

In recent years rape and other crimes of violence have been reported with increasing frequency at formerly protected citadels like the college campus. The publicized rape and sodomizing of two students at George Washington University in
i972
by an outsider who posed as a student and the son of a congressman is one such example. As it happens, the jury in this case refused to convict.

In
i971
the FBI added a new statistical chart to its Uniform Crime Reports, an index to the number of felonies committed at state universities (although not necessarily committed by stu dents) . Over the next three years, the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, the University of Illinois, Southern Illinois at Edwardsville, the University of Indiana, Michigan State at East Lansing, the University of Kansas, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Milwaukee led the list. Eleven rapes were reported at Berkeley in one year, the highest ever recorded
by
a state university system. Many, if not most, of the rapes of college students occurred while hitchhiking.

TESTIMONY:
I took a ride from a truck driver. I always thought truck drivers were good people to get rides from. My father used to drive trucks when he was young, and my cousin was a truck driver they must be good people to take rides from, you know?

I got in the truck and he said to me, "Aren't you kind of young to be hitchhiking?" Right away I got scared. Then he told me that he'd have to pull off the highway and go to, I think it was Green wich, or some other town. I thought, Oh God, he's going to pull off the highway and drive into the woods and rape me or stab me because there had been a case I had just read about. I thought, My God, I have to jump out. I think he realized that this was on my mind because at that moment-we were on the highway-he started to attack me while he was driving. He started to beat me down and he started to rip off my blouse. He unzipped his pants and started to beat my mouth and head down on his penis.

In the meantime the truck is swerving back and forth. I said, "Well, we're both going to die now." I remember at one point I was thinking, Why don't I just take the wheel and just swerve the fucking truck off the highway and end it? That was the only way I could end it, but I didn't want to die. I don't know if this is what I imagine now, but I think there was some type of understanding be tween us that if I gave him all he wanted he would let me go.

According to the task force of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, half of all rape victims ( 53 percent ) were total strangers to their attackers; another
30
percent were slightly acquainted. Seven percent had a family relationship to their rapists (daughter, sister, niece or cousin ) and 3 percent were not related but had a previous close association. (As with most percentage distributions concerning crime, there is always a category called "unknown" or "other.") The task force concluded,
"If
a woman is attacked, then, considerable justification does ap pear to exist for the fear that the offender will be a stranger."

As I mentioned in Chapter 6, "The Police-Blotter Rapist," the statistical profile of rape falls midway between the profiles for assault and robbery.
In
keeping with this pa ttern, when interper sonal relationships in these three crimes of violence are compared side by side, we find that strangers commit
21
percent of all assaults, 53 percent of all rapes and 79 percent of all robberies.

TESTIMONY:
About five years ago when I lived in Chicago I awoke one night gagged with my hands pinned down by someone who was wearing leather gloves and holding a razor to my throat. I wasn't quite sure I was awake. I thought I must be in the middle of a nightmare that seemed much more realistic than usual and I couldn't break it up. I was trying to establish if there really was a person there. And then I did get my wrist cut slightly, so I realized it was real and that I was risking my life and that I'd better hold still and let the man have intercourse with me. He was very fast. He wasn't wearing any clothes on the bottom half of his body and he ran out the window in that position, just like Romeo on the bal cony, onto the fire escape and down.