Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (83 page)

precinct with their husbands, and those who had professional, middle-class occupations. )

TESTIMONY: They got more and more interested in the physical details. What did the man say to me? What did I say to him? Did he unzip his pants or take them off? How long did it take? In what position did he do it? Why did I help him? Did he have a climax? Did I? They made me tell the story over and over to different police men, ostensibly to check the details. When I told them he had en tered me from behind, they said that position was impossible. Had I been less frightened or demoralized, I might have pitied them for their unimaginative sex lives.

TESTIMONY: They rushed me down to the housing cops, who asked me questions like, "Was he your boyfriend? Did you know him?" Here I am, hysterical, I'm
12
years old, and I don't know these things even happen to people. Anyway, they took me to the precinct after that, and there, about four detectives got me in the room and asked me how long was his penis-like I was supposed to measure it. Actually they said, "How long was the instrument?" I thought they were referring to the knife-how was I supposed to know?
That
I could have told them 'cause I was sure enough lookin' at the knife.

In
1972
I was invited to address a seminar for police lieu tenants training for promotion to captain at the New York Police Academy.
I
spoke about rape and was met with a chortle of hoots and laughter from the thirty assembled men. "Honey, you don't believe there is such a thing as rape, do you?" a lieutenant called out.

"Don't you?"

"Noooo" came the nearly unanimous response. Months af ter the seminar I paid a visit to my local precinct in Greenwich Village and asked a sergeant to show me some rape statistics. He politely obliged. That month there had been thirty-five rape complaints, an advance of ten over the same month for the-previous year. The precinct had made two arrests.

"Not a very impressive record," I offered.

"Don't worry about it," the sergeant assured me. "You know what these complaints represent?"

"What do they represent?" I asked.

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"Prostitutes who didn't get their money," he said firmly, clos ing the book.

Despite their knowledge of the law they are supposed to enforce, the male police mentality is often identical to the stereo typic views of rape that are shared by the rest of the male culture. The tragedy for the rape victim is that the police officer is the person who validates her victimization. A police officer who does not believe there is such a crime as rape can arrive at only one determination.

TESTIMONY: They finally told me they thought I was lying. They said I'd probably been having sex with my boyf riend and probably was afraid I was pregnant. They also theorized that my boyfriend had set me up for
it.
They wanted to know if he'd ever asked me to have relations with his friends.

When Brenda Brown did her Memphis study, she found that only
i
.02
percent of all rape victims were prostitutes. In her report to her superiors she wrote, "This casts some doubt upon the persis tent comforting myth that many rape victims are actually prosti tutes who were unable to collect their fee." When New York City created a special Rape Analysis Squad commanded by police women, the female police officers found that only
2
percent of all rape complaints were false-about the same false-report rate that is usual for other kinds of felonies.

A lengthy analysis in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review attempted to measure the yardsticks that policemen use to "found" a rape. Rapes reported "within hours" and cases involving strangers, weapons and "positive violence" stood the highest chance of being believed. Rapes by strangers that took place in automobiles were considered more dubious than rapes by strangers that took place in the home or on the street. All dating rapes that occurred in automobiles were held unfounded by the police in this Pennsylvania study. Although the law does not mitigate the offense when the victim is judged to have been intoxicated, in practice the police "unfounded"
82
percent of these cases. Interestingly enough, the police seemed more ready to believe a complainant who claimed she had screamed than a complainant who said she had silently struggled.
In
the
Pennsylvania
Law
Review
study, black-on-black rapes were held unfounded by the police
22
percent

VICTIMS: THE CRIME
I
367

of the time, whereas only
i2
percent of the white-on-white rapes were unfounded. The authors wrote,
"It
appears impossible not to conclude that the differential . . . resulted primarily from lack of confidence in the veracity of black complainants and a belief in the myth of black promiscuity."

TESTIMONY: This was in Jacksonville, Florida, about 3 A.M., and I was traveling back to school, and here I am, in a bus station in an unfamiliar town. I was in Trailways and I had to make the connection to Greyhound, just one short block, they told me. A big, burly guy, he was black, was trying to talk to me, but I didn't want to be bothered. I went into the Jadies' room to try and duck him, and then I took my little suitcase and went out fast through a side door. I was totally unfamiliar with this town, but I thought I had gotten rid of the guy.

As I was walking along the street he fell into step behind me. He pulled a gun on me and instructed me to continue walking. Just looking around, the lighting was very bad, there was nothing but warehouses all around, deserted warehouses, that sort of thing. We went into one of them and he told me to go upstairs. He told me to get undressed. I did everything he told me, and if I didn't do it fast enough, he would put his gun to my head. It was like dying a thousand deaths that night. I kept praying, lord, just let me live through this. I was just beginning to live, school was going well, and here was something else happening to me.

Af terwards he took
$70
off me. He didn't even leave me a dime. I picked a quarter off the floor and he took that too. He threatened to make me walk down the street naked, but I guess he changed his mind. Eventually he left. I didn't know whether to get dressed or what. Final1y I got my nerves up and I dressed sort of haphazardly and took off running for Trailways bus station. I got there, I went into the baggage room and demanded that the guy there call the cops.

They came
30
minutes or so later. I'm on the floor, completely paranoid and crying. They took me back to what they call the scene. Eventually they said that the guy was my boyfriend and that everything was okay between us until he took my money. At that moment if I had had a gun I could have killed them all, I was angry

enough.

After the questioning I ]ef t my number and name and address so as they could reach me. Nothing was ever done about it. Some time later, when I was back at school, I tried to contact them. They hung up on me.

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In
a depressing aside to the University of Pennsylvania Law
Review
study, the authors noted that most complainants were not informed that the offenses against them had been unfounded. Rape complaints deemed barely credible by the police at first hearing were classified merely as "investigation of persons." Occa sionally police turned away a complainant without filing any re port, or proceeded to close the case without conducting an investigation. Since these complaints had never been entered on the police blotter as "rape," the authors concluded that the overall number of unfounded cases was considerably higher than the offi cial records might show. "Probably," they wrote, "at least
50
per cent of the reported rapes are unfounded by the police."

Rape as it must be proved in an American court of law is

the perpetration of an act of sexual intercourse with a female, not one's wife, against her will and consent, whether her will is over come by force or fear resulting from the threat of force, or by drugs or intoxicants; or when, because of mentai deficiency, she is incapa ble of exercising rational judgment; or when she is below an arbi trary "age of consent."

The jury deals with the same question that faced the police: Has a crime been committed? Unlike cases of murder, where the presence of a dead body points to the fact that there has been a crime, and unlike cases of robbery, where the physical goods, if recovered, are marked and tagged Exhibit A, and unlike cases of aggravated assault, where overt signs of physical damage are the main evidentiary proof, proof in a rape case is often intangible. The "perpetration of an act of sexual intercourse against a woman's will" leaves no corpus
delicti,
leaves no recoverable physical goods, and may leave no sign of physical damage.

What, then, does a jury start off with? The oath of a woman who says she was raped, and the oath of a man who denies it. There are a variety of criminal situations in which a jury must weigh "oath against oath," and juries, since juries have been in existence, have managed to convict or acquit based on whose oath they decided to trust. But rape is the only crime in which
by
law the victim is female and the offender is male.
In
a court of law, where the victim becomes the "complainant," or more harshly,

"prosecutrix," and the offender becomes the "defendant," oath against oath at all times means the word of a woman against the word of a man.

Because of the male-against-female nature of rape, because rape is a deliberate distortion of the primal act of sexual inter course-male joining with female in mutual consent-man's law has sought to measure such relative, qualitative and interrelated concepts as moral character, force, fear, consent, will and resistance to satisfy the overriding male concern that beyond the female's oath, her word, her testimony, there was not mutual intercourse and subsequent vindictiveness and wrath, but an objective, tan gible crime.

Lord Chief Justice Matthew Hale, the famous seventeenth century English jurist, assured himself of immortality when he wrote the words, "Rape is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent."

"An old saw that has been quoted by virtually every legal writer who has discussed rape," as Camille
E.
LeGrand put it in the California Law Review, Hale's quaint homily has poorly stood the test of time despite its popularity. Since four out of five rapes go unreported, it is fair to say categorically that women do not find rape "an accusation easily to be made." Those who do report their rape soon find, however, that it is indeed "hard to be proved." As for the party accused, tho never so innocent or never so guilty, except for the tradition of Southern interracial cases, by and large a successful legal defense is nothing short of a cinch.

LeGrand pointed out that irrelevant as Hale's old saw might be to the twentieth-century American experience, it was included as late as
1973
in California's standard set of jury instructions for cases of rape, where it was followed by the admonition, "Therefore the law requires that you examine the testimony of the female person named in the information with caution."