Rape is considered to be one element in the “Big Six” of the most common sex-related crimes. It is defined as the unlawful act of sexual activity forced upon a person who did not or was unable to give willing to give consent. There are four main types of a rapist that center around their modus operandi: Power Reassurance, Anger Retaliation, Power Assertive, and Sadistic. The goals of a Power Reassurance rapist are to gain a validation of their status and to validate their sexual adequacy. They view the act as a reassurance of a mutual relationship between them and the victim, and they usually force the victim into acting out their sexual fantasies. This could be done by demanding that the victim talks dirty or by asking reassuring questions …show more content…
First of all, the rapist has been described as having stalker-like (or Peeping Tom) tendencies as he is known to watch the women’s daily patterns over several days or hours; even knowing when one victim was moving from her apartment and that another victim has more than one job. Power Reassurance rapists watch their victims as a means of forming a connection with their lives. The rapist usually attacked at night, but would either wear a mask or cover the victim’s face with their shirt. This is a somewhat common tactic by Power Reassurance rapists so that seeing the victim’s discomfort does not ruin their fantasy of a mutual connection. Furthermore, the rapist would compliment the victims by saying that they were “fine” as well as other verbal cues that suggested mutual pleasure. Power Reassurance rapists believe that they have a special form of intimacy with their victims and that they actually enjoy having sex with them despite not having their consent. The rapist would threaten to kill or harm the women with a weapon, but in none of the cases (even in with the victims did not completely comply) did he actually hurt them. When faced against a victim who shivered and began praying out loud, he paused for a moment before finishing and threatened to come back to get her if she got AIDS or got pregnant. This suggested that there was a short …show more content…
His confidentiality tactics proved to also be effective because the report did not include any information about physical traits. The details focused solely on his actions and some of his victims. Also, him being a Power Reassurance rapist would support the idea of him being a loner, so nobody would be able to recognize him in any neighborhood that he chose to be
Sociological Analysis of Sexual Assault This essay will examine the social and cultural conditions, within the macro-diachronic and micro-synchronic theoretical models, that intensify or perpetuate sexual assault. I have chosen only one concept from each model because these are the only concepts that I feel that I can use to most accurately and comprehensively depict causes and reasons for why sexual assault is deeply entrenched in our social structure. I will thus explore, from these ideological viewpoints, some of the motivations and circumstances that lead offenders to sexual assault. I will also fuse some of the historical attitudes from which today's concepts have evolved into our contemporary understanding of these social phenomena. However, it’s important that we look beyond both offenders' motivations and history, and to the greater sociological view, if we are to correctly reconstruct acts of violence such as sexual assault.
The myth that men who rape women are sexually pathological has begun to be dispelled and replaced with an understanding that rape is an act of anger, power and control rather than lust. When people think about rape, they usually think of a stranger with a knife hiding in the bushes. He waits for a woman to walk by and then attacks. But that is not the only kind of rape. The majority of victims are raped by individuals they know or acquaintances.
Although the definition of rape might be concise, the crime itself can be extremely variable depending on the situation and predator. It was once widely conceived that rape and other sexual crimes where primarily lust motivated. Recent information, however, suggests that stimulus can be as multi-faceted as the perpetrator themselves. Discrepancies in such facets as motivation and opportunity are variations that can limit the profiling and apprehension of sexual criminals.
Groth (1979) recognised four types of rapists; power-reassurance, power-assertive, anger-retaliation and anger-excitation. According to Groth’s typology, Marc Ronald’s fits into two of the typologies, power-assertive and anger retaliation. Power-assertive rapists are those who experience feelings of inadequacy and have poor social skills; they doubt their desirability so result to using aggressive behaviour towards the victim to reinstate fears regarding masculinity. (Robertiello & Terry, 2007, p.509). Sex offenders that fall into this typology often use verbal intimidation against their victims to feel a sense of power.
This has lead to societies belief system in rape myths, statements such as “she was asking for it” or asking what the victim was wearing or how much they had to drink at the time of the assault creates an attitude towards sexual assault and reinforces the myth that offenders cannot control their sexual urges when multiple studies prove that sexual assault has nothing to do with sexual urges and everything to do with power and
To most Americans Rape has a tendency to be one of the cruelest forms of criminal violence. The victim can suffer from incredible injuries, and substantial amounts of embarrassment. Rendered powerless by physical force, threats, or fear, after which being forced to submit to sexual acts, including vaginal penetration, oral copulation, sodomy, and penetration opening with a foreign object, the victim is left virtually alone. Rape is an intrusion into the most private and intimate parts of the body, as well as an assault on the core of the self. Whether or not the victim acquires any physical injuries, the psychological impact of a sexual assault is severe. Additionally, the painful, post-trauma symptoms that usually always accompany rape are long-lasting. Even the victims who seem to have been able to move on with their life often find that an extreme feeling of powerlessness and vulnerability remains close and can easily, and unexpectedly, be re-experienced. A most important aspect in the long-term impact of rape is that the assault negatively changes the victim...
As Estrich demonstrates, the law on rape has major flaws. The law exposes traditions and attitudes that surround women and sex. It condones the idea that sex contains male aggression and female passivity. The law uses three different criteria to label an act of sex as rape: mens rea, force, and consent. Estrich feels that these features demonstrate sexist attitudes within the law. Our legal system abandon’s mens rea which is Latin for “guilty state of the mind.” It is the perpetrator’s ability to understand force and non-consent. A woman must demonstrate resistance. The man can escape by stating he did not realize the woman was not consenting. So, the court turns to the woman to see if she provided proper evidence that she did not consent to the sex.
One of Canada's foremost contemporary writers, Margaret Atwood is an internationally renowned poet, literary critic, novelist, humanitarian and political activist. Born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1939, she spent most of her childhood in the Canadian wilderness. She has won praise and acclaim for her ability to incorporate humor, biting wit, irony and symbolism into her writing style. Her themes usually depict the very nature of human behavior and issues of power between men and women as it relates to society ("The Writer." New York Times). Her very first novel, The Edible Women, published in 1970, explored issues of oppression, self-identity and power, as it relates to the broader social content of contemporary urban life and the sexual politics involved. She further explores those issues in "Rape Fantasies" first published in Canada in 1979 in her book The Dancing Girls and Other Stories. "Rape Fantasies" has become one of Atwood's best known works as it explores the issues of power between men and women, highlighting women's fears of crime and victimization, where safety depends on the ability to find a medium between trust, suspicion, fear, and isolation ("I Just Don't Understand It." Gale).
Susan Griffin’s Rape: The All-American Crime touches on many issues within American society. She begins by recounting how she was taught to be afraid of strange men from such a young age that she had not yet learned what it was she was so afraid of, and then goes into her experience with harassment, an experience shared by every woman at some point in her life. Griffin recounts the belief that all rapists are insane and the proof that they are just normal men and dispels the myth that rape is normal activity that is prohibited by society. However, she goes on to clarify that our culture views rape: “as an illegal, but still understandable, form of behavior” (Griffin 514). It seems that the wrongness of rape is determined by the situation in
The Merriam Webster dictionary Defines rape as “unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against the will usually of a female or with a person who is beneath a certain age or incapable of valid consent because of mental illness, mental deficiency, intoxication, unconsciousness, or deception”. Rape seems like an act that an individual would never think of committing. However, rape happens every day in many different instances, and what's worse, the excuse for certain rape cases. In my paper I'll be breaking down the social issue of rape through the structural functionalism theory, the conflict theory, and the symbolic interactionism theory. With the conflict theory I'll be examining
Burt explains that “the hypothesized net effect of rape myths is to deny or reduce perceived injury or to blame the victims for their own victimization” (Burt, 217). When men get raped they don't see it as getting raped. Yet, when it comes to women they are more easily blamed because of “poor choices” like walking down an alleyway late at night, wearing sexy clothes or for drinking too much, giving a man a “justifiable” reason for his actions. McMahon also describes how “common rape myths include the belief that the way a woman dresses or acts indicates that “she wanted it” and that rape occurs because men cannot control their sexual impulses” (McMahon, 357). Chapleau, Oswald and Russel also explicate how “benevolent sexism is associated with victim blaming to protect one’s belief in a just world” (602). Benevolent sexism is the reverent attitudes that reward women who are traditionally feminine and is similar to hostile sexism in the idea that hostile sexism is when women are objectified or degraded often presented as anger, resentment or fear, while benevolent sexism is just as harmful, but put into a positive disguise, in a casual nonchalant manner that doesn’t make it so
In “Sex and Violence: A Perspective,” MacKinnon turns her focus to the common definition of rape as a form of violence. The categorizations of rape, sexual harassment, and pornography as forms of violence are problematic in themselves because they do not capture the reality of sex. In fact, much of intercourse is about violence (MacKinnon p. 268), in the way that power and dominance are extremely eroticized, thus to say “rape is violence” is a misnomer. MacKinnon brings one’s attention to the construction of rape, which separates rape from intercourse based on the amount of force applied (p. 268). This definition is especially legitimate in the legal system, which derives solely from a male point of view: it is called rape when there is penetratio...
Sexual coercion is “The use of non-physical, controlling, degrading, and manipulative tactics to obtain, or attempt to obtain, unwanted oral, vaginal, or anal intercourse, including forced penetration and sex with objects.” (Bagwell-Gray, Messing, & Baldwin-White, 2015, p.323). It is distinct from intimate partner sexual assault in that unwanted sex is obtained through manipulative tactics and emotional and mental control rather than physical force (Black et al., 2011; Broach & Petetric, 2006; DeGue & DeLillo, 2005; Logan, Cole, & Shannon, 2007). When thinking of coercive control in intimate partner violence, it is clear that demands and threats can be implicit. For example, Dutton & Goodman (2005) describe how women report just knowing that if they did (or did not do) an action, “x”, then their partner would respond with a subsequent punishment, “y”. In studying intimate partner sexual violence, many women report such a type of implicit threat, knowing that they have to have sex with their partners when they did not want to in order to prevent dealing with their partners’ negative reactions. Non-consent outside the context of physical force may be difficult to identify because a woman may submit to coercive sexual tactics and consent to unwanted sex to avoid the negative outcomes of refusing it (Livingston, Buddie, Testa, & Vanzile-Tamsen, 2004) or out of perceived obligation to a spouse or partner (Basile,
Rape and sexual violence is a very serious problem that affects millions of people each year. Rape is someone taking advantage of another person sexually. Sexual assault can be verbal, physical, visual, or anything that forces a person to join in unwanted sexual contact or attention. ("Sexual Assault.") Rape is one of the most underreported crimes. In 2002, only thirty-nine percent of rapes and sexual assaults were reported to law officials. ("Sexual Violence: Fact Sheet.") Victims sometimes do not report that they have raped because of shame or feeling that it was their fault. It is never the victim's fault. "Victim blaming" is holding the victim of a crime to be in a whole or in partly responsible for what had happened to them. Most victims believe this. ("Myths and Facts about Sexual Violence.")
Rape is one of the most intimate crimes in the world. According to nolo.com legal encyclopedia rape in nonconsensual sexual intercourse that is forced upon someone that is not wanted. Statutory rape is when a person disregards the under 18 consent law and forcefully has sex with them. According to ular.edu there are many different types of rape such as anger, power, sadistic, stranger, acquaintance, and martial rapes. These different groups show that rape can happen to anyone at any time.