Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (81 page)

I warned him the police would be going by. I tried to get up the back steps to my own house, but he kept tight hold, all the time telling me to lay down. But I knew if I did that, he'd finish the rape. I figured I had to do something to scare him, so I decided to act crazy. I started yelling my baby was right inside that house and she's sick and what he was doing was making me crazier and he'd better watch out. And that did it. He just took my money, about ten dol lars, and then he beat it. So-I'd beaten off a would-be rapist.

TESTIMONY:
I fought back. I kicked a guy in the lower extremity and put him in the hospital. I kicked that bastard's balls and at the time I was only 7. So we didn't have a rape case but we almost had manslaughter. That's what the police told me, if the guy died I'd be up for manslaughter. Can you imagine? I told the police I wanted to prosecute for attempted rape and they said, "Didn't you do enough already to the poor guy?" Their sympathy was with him. They told me I was a crazy, hostile hippie.

TESTIMONY:
I awoke at 3
A.M.
Someone had his hand over my mouth and a knife at my throat. He said,
"If
you move, I'll kill you." My first thought was it's a dream, wake up, but I felt the steel and a throat isn't a good place to get cut. I went into a computer men tality, totally cold. The Wylie-Hoffert case flashed through my head and I thought to myself, I don't want to be a Daily News headline. I also thought, this is like a Grade B movie. I got him talking, that's what I did, I stalled for time. I sat on the bed and talked. "Are you going to rape me?" I asked.
"If
you are, okay, but please put away the knife." To my surprise, he did. "I've been watching you for three weeks," he told me, "I watch you from the roof through the window." Where I got the courage to say this, I don't know, but I said,
"If
you watched me from the roof, someone may be watching

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right now. Why don't you check the window just to make sure." He went to the window and that's when I made a break for it. You see how I use that Hollywood language, "made a break for it," but I too had learned from the movies. I ran to the door, unlocked it, got it almost open. He grabbed my neck and I let out a scream that came from I don't know where. My next-door neighbor opened her door and he fled. I didn't beat him off or fight him, but I wasn't raped. I outwitted him, computer-cold and scared out of my wits.

Unfortunately no comparative study has ever been made on the behavior of victims of attempted rape versus the behavior of victims of a completed rape. Impotence may be responsible for some of the thwarted rapes, but strong resistance on the part of the woman seems the more logical possibility.

Menachem Amir attempted to measure victim resistance to rape on a statistical basis. Since he chose to limit his study from the outset to completed rapes, a valuable chance to do a comparative study of victim resistance in thwarted rapes was denied him.

Dealing only with police reports on victims of completed rapes-in other words, with victims who decisively lost in their encounters-Amir found that 55 percent had displayed what he termed-submissive behavior,
27
percent had screamed and/or tried to escape, and another 18 percent fought back by kicking, hitting or throwing objects.*

Rapists brandishing weapons (ranging from guns and knives to sticks and rocks) accounted for one-fif th of all the Philadelphia cases and understandably these men elicited the highest percentage of submissive victims (
71
percent ) . Rapists who displayed no weapons but choked or punched and kicked their victims ( to achieve their goals but also as part of their raping pleasure) elicited a response that was far less submissive. Greater numbers of their victims screamed, fought and tried to escape. Of ten, Amir noted, a victim whose first reaction had been submissive began to resist "after [she] overcame her initial shock or when she realized what the offender was up to." Resistance, when it occurred, usually did

* Amir's overall figures included a high proportion of victimized children, who quite understandably proved to be the most submissive of any age group. Adolescent girls and adult women displayed submissive behavior in
51
per cent of their cases; children were submissive in 66 percent of their cases.

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not stop with the onset of the attack but continued throughout. When a victim understood that she was in for a rough, violent time beyond the act of rape, she screamed and fought back most gamely. The lowest percentage of submissive behavior ( in the neighbor hood of
30
percent ) occurred in the category of "brutally beaten" rapes. Victims who were choked in the initial overture, however, responded with greater passivity than victims who were grabbed, punched and beaten. Overall, fewer victims fought back in gang rapes than in single-offender encounters. Victims of the same gen eral age as their assailants showed the highest proportion of fight ing behavior.

When the New York Radical Feminists held our first speak out on rape, a majority of the women who testified said that once the aggression had begun they were convinced they were going to die. "This wasn't an act of sex I was going through-I felt I was being murdered," one woman recalled. In later speak-outs this theme was repeated.

TESTIMONY: Did you ever see a rabbit stuck in the glare of your headlights when you were going down a road at night? Transfixed like it knew it was going to get it-that's what happened.

Two associates at Boston College, Ann Wolbert Burgess, associate professor of nursing, and Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, assis tant professor of sociology, studied eighty rape victims who came to the emergency ward of Boston City Hospital. They reported their findings in the American Journal
of
Nursing. Burgess and Holm strom found that half the women in their sample had been threat ened with a weapon; another twenty-one reported being manhandled and twelve had succumbed to verbal threats alone. Af ter lengthy interviews with the eighty women the Boston Col lege professors stated unequivocally, "The primary reaction of almost all women to the rape was fear, that is, fear for their lives."

A quid pro quo-rape in exchange for life, or rape in exchange for a good-faith guarantee against hurtful or disfiguring physical damage-dominates the female mentality in rape.
In
situations involving dangerous weapons or groups of men, most women be lieve they are confronting the realistic possibility of death, or at least the probability of serious physical injury. They either gamble

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THE CRIME
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on the "fair exchange" of rape or they are terrorized into immobil ity, from shock or from a disbelief in their own capacity to success fully resist.

TESTIMONY: I was
19
and I was coming home from a Harvard weekend. I missed my bus connection so I decided to hitch. I had to get back to school for an 8 o'clock Monday class. I accepted a ride with a young man who seemed okay. We went for some coffee and doughnuts so that I could get an idea of who he was. There was nothing to get me alarmed. When we got back into the car he told me he had to stop and pick up some friends. I still didn't think any thing was wrong. His friends got into the car and then they drove me to a deserted garage.

They told me I'd better cooperate or I'd be buried there and nobody would ever know. There were three of them and one of me. It was about one
A.M.
and no people were around. I decided to co operate.

A weapon, unless one is familiar with weapons, is likely to produce a shock reaction in any person, male or female. Choking, unless one knows how to break the hold, can be even more effec tive, for nothing terrorizes faster than the inability to breathe.
In
addition to the normal reactive fear that is produced in women by the presence of an aggressing male intent on violence, the sheer physical presence of a number of potential assailants would serve to terrorize most females
OI
convince them that resistance would be futile, unless, of course, they knew how to fight. But the reasoning process, even in one-to-one situations without the presence of a weapon or a threat of death, is not necessarily rational under stress.

TESTIMONY: When I think about it now, I'm sure I could have fought him off . He was smaller than I was. But at the time I blocked everything out, I mean, what was happening.
All
I could think of was my new dress, which I had just bought but hadn't paid for, and my stockings. I kept saying over and over, "Don't rip my nylon stockings."

TESTIMONY: This was on an arranged date, my mother had arranged it with his aunt. He was an intern at
NYU
Med School and he asked me if I wanted to see where he lived, where the interns lived, before we had dinner. We got to his room and he threw me

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on the bed and raped me, just like that. Afterwards he got up as if nothing had happened. I thought to myself, I wonder what hap pens now. I kept thinking about
my
mother, she'd never believe it. I'll tell you what happened next. We went out to have dinner. We proceeded along with the date as if nothing had happened. I was in such a state of shock I just went along with the rest of the date.