The Negative Effects Of Rape

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the legal definition of rape has been changed as it was narrow with the focus on gender and age. Rape was once defined as an act of sexual intercourse with an individual without his or her consent, through force or the threat of force. Rape is now understood as a pathological assertion of power over a victim. Rape can have a detrimental impact on a victim’s lifestyle because of the trauma one experience, and it may result in psychological or social behavioral changes, but society fails to realize how this trauma impacts and changes its victims.

Before we can continue any further as to how a rape victim is traumatized, we must first understand how an individual becomes a rapist. Surely this question must

Usually in a rape, more focus is placed on the rapist while the victim is forgotten and criticized by society for letting it happen. Society often fails to understand what the victim is going through, because in order to understand a rape victim, you must either have experienced it first hand, or learned about it, which most people do not. Recent research has established that rape and other forms of sexual assault have a traumatic and often enduring effect on the victim. For example, Burgess and Holmstrom (1974) found that rape victims experience a “rape trauma syndrome, consisting of an acute stage where the primary response is fear, followed by a reorganization stage, characterized by phobias, insomnia, sexual dysfunctions and other major changes in lifestyle” (Ruch, Chandler and Harter 248). Much trauma occurs as a result of shock; and rape victims go into shock while experiencing being raped because at the time they may not even know what’s happening and may even be in denial that it happened. Their denial supports our own, and choosing to ignore the victims’ side of the story, we are, in fact ignoring them when they are in a state of distress. Failing to acknowledge the rape victims shows how little we care about them and their state of