“Fight the rape culture.”
Slogan seen at a protest of the Western Herald
Before feminists get all up
in arms to fun off and fight the rape culture, they might want to start
by fighting rapists first.
The number of women victimized
by rape and attempted yearly in our nation is staggering. According to
the National Crime Victimization Survey, 2 in 1,000 women over 12 are
the victims of rape/attempted rape. Although the incidence of rape has
declined in recent years thanks largely to demographic trends, it is still
intolerably high.
The reason rape is so common,
however, has little to do with the continued persistence of sexist jokes
and pornographic magazines. Instead, rape continues unabated because as
a society we’ve decided to stop punishing rapists and other violent
criminals.
According to the Bureau of
Justice Statistics’ “Felony sentences in the United States,
1994,” in that year there were 20,239 state and federal felony convictions
for rape.
For close to a third of felonious
rapists, however, such a conviction didn’t mean a whole lot. Twelve
percent went immediately to probation without serving a single day in
prison or jail beyond any time served while awaiting trial and sentencing.
Another 17 percent were sentenced to spend time in local jails where the
average sentence was a whopping 7 months.
Of the remaining 71 percent
incarcerated in prison, the mean maximum sentence was 13 years and 7 months
which sounds impressive until you start digging around to find out how
long such convicts actually serve.
A 1995 Department of Justice
study, “Prison sentences and time served for violence” reveals
those convicted of rape served on average only 56 percent of their maximum
sentence. Half of all rapists served actual time of less than four years.
Those incarcerated for violent
crimes are fully aware they will almost certainly never serve their maximum
sentence. Convicted rapists reported they expected to serve only 55 percent
of their sentence.
In summary, this is the sort
of deterrent the criminal justice system offers a potential rapist. Even
if he is one of the minority of rapists to be caught and convicted, he
has close to a 1 in 3 chance of receiving only probation or an extremely
short jail sentence. At worst he can expect to spend 4 or 5 years in prison
provided he is cooperative with his jailers at which time he will likely
be paroled.
Thus, the potential sanctions
of rape are exceedingly low and nowhere near high enough to act as an
effective deterrent.
It is this sort of system which
allowed Christopher Evans Hubbart to be convicted in 1972 of raping 14
women and then set Hubbart loose after only 6 years in a state prison.
Hubbart began raping again the day he was released and in 1982 was incarcerated
again for raping 10 more women. Released again in 1990, Hubbart kidnapped
another woman for which he served 5 years.
Ironically, this outcome is
the result of the indelible influence of an ideology promoted by leftist
criminologist and sociologist who advocate ideas similar to the notion
of the rape culture myth. A classic example of this is Jeffrey Reiman’s
Marxist analysis of crime, The Rich Get Richer, The Poor Get Prison
which is currently being used in some sociology classes at Western Michigan
University.
Reiman blames crime on what
he believes are structural inequalities in capitalist economies. A detailed
debunking of this claim is beyond the scope of this column, but it is
Reiman’s conclusions which are of interest here. If crime is indeed
manufactured by society, whether through the economic system or through
cultural attitudes toward the sexes, the inescapable conclusion is that
it is society rather than criminals who are to blame for crime, including
rape.
According to Reiman, the notion
and practice of punishment is itself an idea which serves class functions
rather than justice. Feminist legal theorists such as Catharine MacKinnon
have wholeheartedly embraced this idea and argued that men who rape women
are not to blame for their violence and indeed should not be subject to
punishment. In her 1993 book, Only Words, MacKinnon agreed with
the defense put on by Thomas Schiro who repeatedly raped, tortured and
murdered a woman in Indiana in 1981.
Schiro’s defense was
that he was not criminally culpable because he had viewed pornography.
The U.S. Court of Appeals rejected this novel defense, but MacKinnon lapped
it up, arguing because “pornography makes rapists unaware that their
victims are not consenting,” Schiro should have been released.
This is where fighting the
rape culture leads – to the denial of personal responsibility and
accountability for individuals who engage in violence.
Of course no one bothers protesting
women like MacKinnon for their views on rape. In fact she is celebrated
and mindlessly worshipped for being on the cutting edge of feminist legal
theory. When SAGE protested the Herald publication of ads for Deja Vu,
her name was uttered not a few times by the erstwhile opponents of the
rape culture.
Three strikes laws for violent
criminals, truth in sentencing laws, and an end to the war on consensual
crimes such as drug trafficking, which absorb far too many resources,
will deter and punish rapists. Fighting a war against “sexist”
advertising and dumb blond jokes will keep activists busy for awhile,
but accomplish little else.
Postscript: since this essay was published, I have received several
complaints from sociology students who claim this piece misrepresents
Jeffrey Reiman’s views on crime. Namely, they claim that Reiman does not
try to absolve criminals of responsibility — one industrious student
even wrote a paper on the subject citing this column as an example of
how erroneous information on the Internet can be.
Those who make such bizarre
claims need to more carefully read Reiman, since he directly contradicts
this view in the appendix to The Rich Get Richer, and the Poor Get
Prison, in which he outlines the Marxian theory of criminal justice
which he states is “different from (though not incompatible)”
with his own. And what does Reiman believe this different, though not
incompatible Marxian critique of criminal justice implies?
On the alienation charge, the criminal is at best relieved of responsibility
because he has been shaped by the social system to have antisocial attitudes
and fated by that system to have antisocial attitudes and fated by that
system to experience need and insecurity that, together with those attitudes,
lead to crime. On the slavery-maldistribution charge, the criminal is
at best a victim because he is the object of the unjust coercion or
expropriation characteristic of private ownership of means of production
… on both charges, Marxism does imply reduced or no blame for (most)
criminals; but it does not imply an celebration of their acts … crime
and criminality must on the whole be placed by Marxism among the costs
of capitalism, lined up alongside poverty, unemployment, pollution,
and the rest (Reiman 1990, pp.177-8).
This is completely consistent with Reiman’s own view that workers in
capitalist societies can’t freely choose to do certain jobs.
Finally, note that I do not claim
that Reiman believes rapists and other criminals should go unpunished
— a view which I ascribe only to Catharine MacKinnon. It is folly, however,
for Reiman and his adherents to believe that this is an intolerable extension
of their views. Western culture has a long history of exempting individuals
from punishment (or providing lesser punishments) for crimes when the
criminal had no or diminished responsibility over his actions. The most
obvious example is laws treating insane individuals differently than sane
individuals who, like lower class criminals in Reiman’s view, have a diminished
capacity to choose.