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RAPE |
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Rape is a crime where the victim is forced into sexual activity, in particular sexual penetration, against his or her will. The word originates from the Latin rapere: to seize or take by force. The Latin term for the act of rape itself is raptus.
Originally, the word rape was akin to rapine, rapture, raptor, and rapacious, and referred to the more general violations, such as looting, destruction, and capture of citizens that are inflicted upon a town or country during war, eg. the Rape of Nanking. Today, some dictionaries still define rape to include any serious and destructive assault against a person or community. This article, however, focuses primarily on sexual assault.
DATE RAPE
Date rape can mean all sorts of things and can apply to varying situations. There is a lot of information available on the situations that date rape occur in as well as the drugs commonly used.
Although UC Davis is considered a "safe" campus, even safe campuses contain dangerous elements. Davis experiences an average of 43 forcible sexual assualts (rapes) each year. By law, the University is required to publish its sexual assault statistics in an annual Clery Report. Below is a graph depicting the raw forcible sexual assault statistics for Davis from 2001 to 2003 (the 2004 stats come out at the end of 05, this year's stats will come out next year etc.) This goes to show that our sleepy little town is not without tragedy. -Note: For complete stats, see the Davis Clery Stats website link below.
What you can do
History
The concept of rape, both as an abduction and in the sexual sense, makes its first appearance in early religious texts. In Greek mythology, for example, the rape of women, as exemplified by the rape of Europa, and male rape, found in the myth of Laius and Chrysippus, were mentioned. Different values were ascribed to the two actions. The rape of Europa by Zeus is represented as an abduction followed by consensual lovemaking, similar perhaps to the rape of Ganymede by Zeus, and went unpunished. The rape of Chrysippus by Laius, however, is represented in darker terms, and was known in antiquity as "the crime of Laius", a term which came to be applied to all male rape. It was seen as an example of hubris in the original sense of the word, i.e. violent outrage, and its punishment was so severe that it destroyed not only Laius himself, but also his son, Oedipus.
In antiquity and until the late Middle Ages, rape was seen in most cultures less as a crime against a particular girl or woman than against the male figure she "belonged" to. Thus, the penalty for rape was often a fine, payable to the father or the husband whose "goods" were "damaged." That position was later replaced in many cultures by the view that the woman, as well as her lord, should share the fine equally.
Rape, in the course of warfare, also dates back to antiquity, ancient enough to have been mentioned in the Bible. The Greek, Persian and Roman troops would routinely rape women and boys in the conquered towns. Rape, as an adjunct to warfare, was prohibited by the military codices of Richard II and Henry V (1385 and 1419 respectively). These laws formed the basis for convicting and executing rapists during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453).
Since the 1970's many changes have occurred in the perception of sexual assault due in large part to the feminist movement and it's public characterization of rape as a crime of power but not of sex. In some countries the feminist women's liberation movement of the 1970's created the first rape crisis centers. This movement was led by the National Organization for Women (NOW) [1]. One of the first two rape crisis centers, the D.C. Rape Crisis Center [2], opened in 1972. It was created to promote sensitivity and understanding of rape and its effects on the victim.
Marital rape first became a crime in the United States in the state of South Dakota in 1975. It was not considered a crime prior to that year because, historically, a woman was considered to be the property of either a father or husband. A husband could not steal his own property. A related and archaic view according to religious factions was that the woman gave permanent consent when she married the man. In the 1980s, date or acquaintance rape first gained acknowledgment. On July 5, 1993, marital rape became a crime in all 50 states, under at least one section of the sexual offense codes. The Rape and Incest National Network (RAINN) [3] was founded in 1994 by a panel of people including Scott Berkowitz and the musician Tori Amos. In the United States, RAINN operates a 24 hour hotline that victims can use to get counseling.
On September 2, 1998 the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda made sexual violence a war crime. Current topics being debated are the peripheralized victims of rape — male rape victims of both male and female rapists, female-female rape and parental-rape incest victims, LGBT domestic violence and rape victims, marital rape victims and child sexual abuse victims. Other emerging issues are the concept of victim blame and its causes, female sexual aggression, new theories of rape and gender, date rape drugs and their effects as well as the psychological effects of rape trauma syndrome. Non-sexual usage of term
In its original sense, dating back to antiquity, "to rape a person" meant to capture the person for the purpose of enslavement, and was common in ancient warfare. In this context, the willingness of the victim is irrelevant to the categorization of the act as "rape". The "Rape of the Sabine Women" was a "rape" in this context. In Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, the word "rape" is used hyperbolically in a similar context, exaggerating a trivial violation against a person.
Though the sexual connotation is today dominant, the word "rape" is still sometimes used in a non-sexual context. For example, environmental destruction is sometimes described as "raping the earth", and the Rape of Nanking describes a violation both against a town, as well as the people. In "the rape of the Silmarils" in J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Silmarillion", the word "rape" is used with its old meaning of "seizing and taking away".
Sometimes, the word rape is used to dysphemistically describe forms of non-sexual unwelcome conduct ("My team got raped on the field yesterday."). It is argued by some that this usage is demeaning or disempowering to the victims and survivors of real sexual rape, because it ends up by weakening the force and horror of the word. Such metaphorical and hyperbolic usages are common with other words ("It was absolute torture" to mean ordinary embarrassment; or "I'm starving" to mean ordinary hunger), but survivors of rape and their supporters may find this type of usage deeply offensive, since it normalizes the term "rape" to cover mundane events.
LawCommon law
In the common law of the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, "rape" traditionally describes the act of a man who forces a woman to have sexual intercourse with him. Until the late 20th Century, forced sex by a husband against his wife was not considered "rape", since a woman (for certain purposes) was not considered a separate legal person with the right of refusal, or sometimes was deemed to have given advanced consent to a life-long sexual relationship through the wedding vows. However, most Western countries have now legislated against this exception. They now include spousal rape (vaginal intercourse), and acts of sexual violence, such as forced anal intercourse which were traditionally barred under sodomy laws, in their definitions of "rape". The term "rape" is sometimes considered "loaded", and many jurisdictions recognize, in its stead, broader categories of sexual assault or sexual battery.
U.S. Law
In the United States, there is no national rape law; instead each state drafts its own laws to deal with sexual aggression. More than half the states use narrowly defined, traditional laws that focus on the institutional, gender-specific (male perpetrator/female victim), and sexual nature of the crime. The remaining minority of states use liberalized laws that place greater emphasis on the individual, gender-neutral, and violent nature of sexual coercion. However, even with all the advances that have taken place, current laws in approximately 12 states still have not acknowledged female-perpetrated sexual coercion as a potential variation of sexual aggression. Thus there is no single, universal, gender-neutral legal classification about what constitutes rape in the United States in 2006.
English law
Under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which came into force on 1st May 2004, rape in England and Wales was redefined from non-consensual vaginal or anal intercourse, and is now defined as non-consensual penis penetration of the vagina, anus or mouth of another person. The changes also made rape punishable with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Although a woman who forces a man to have sex cannot be prosecuted for rape under English law, if she helps a man commit a rape she can be prosecuted for the crime. A woman can also be prosecuted for causing a man to engage in sexual activity without his consent, a crime which also carries a maximum life sentence if it involves penetration of the mouth, anus or vagina. The statute also includes a new sexual crime, called "assault by penetration", which also has the same punishment as rape, and is committed when someone sexually penetrates the anus or vagina with a part of his or her body, or with an object, without that person's consent.
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