Victimization and the rape rhetoric

Heather Mac Donald has come under a scathing attack for her LA Times and City Journal piece on “the campus rape crisis myth”. I doubt that no response was more intemperate than the one which appeared on the LawandLetters blog entitled “Take Back the Rhetoric on Rape” by Belle Lettre.

Belle Lettre in the first sentence of her post sets the tone of what was to follow- “I do not believe in this stupid article by conservative Heather Mac Donald arguing that the statistics on campus rape are overblown.”

After this “informative” intro sentence, she states the following-

I do share in the views of Tracy Clark-Flory, who disputes the main “arguments” made by Mac Donald, and attacking the main tenet of Mac Donald’s article: that girls are getting wasted and laid, not raped, and so it’s their own damn fault, and that sexual restraint is the problem!
Mac Donald explains that the statistic originated from a survey by Mary Koss, a University of Arizona professor of public health. It found that 15 percent of women had been raped, 12 percent had experienced an attempted rape; therefore 27 percent had either experienced a rape or attempted rape. Koss attempted to strip her questions of the word “rape,” so as to lessen the social stigma facing her respondents; she didn’t ask them whether they had been raped but whether they had experienced a range of incidents that are, by definition, rape. For instance, she asked: “Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?” Understandably enough, some have criticized her approach, noting that the question could be misinterpreted to mean, “Have you had sex under the influence and regretted it the next morning?”

But, these concerns have already been invalidated! In 1999, researchers set out to test whether Koss’ question was actually getting at the rape question. They asked: “Have you engaged in sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to but were so intoxicated under the influence of alcohol or drugs that you could not stop it orobject?” And, what do you know, this much more precise question yielded similar results; 17 percent of female students responded “yes.” Not to mention, these findings have been duplicated by a number of other studies — look here, here and here, just for starters.)

Mac Donald ignores these inconvenient facts and simply notes that subsequent studies show a “divergence between the victims’ and the researchers’ point of view.” Consistently, researchers are far more likely than the respondents themselves to define nonconsensual sex as rape. No! You mean there’s a widespread resistance among rape victims to labeling such a traumatic experience by its culturally loaded name? Next, Mac Donald will argue that a woman isn’t abused, isn’t a victim of domestic violence if she doesn’t personally choose that label — regardless of whether her experiences define her as such. (Apply that to any number of abuses, illnesses or crimes.)

…

It’s a pity Mac Donald went through all this trouble to explain why so many women are resistant to calling a forced, nonconsensual sex act “rape,” when researcher are not. She need only look at the prevalence of victim-blaming attitudes like her own.

And this, my friends, is why sociological studies that demonstrate empirically when and generate theories as to why victims report/underreport, leading to a study of victimology really matter.

The dankprofessor believes that neither Tracy Clark-Flory nor Ms. Lettre invalidate Heather Mac Donald’s basic thesis- “Believing in the campus rape epidemic, it turns out, requires ignoring women’s own interpretations of their experiences.”

It is axiomatic that in social science research that researchers do not obscure or attempt to invalidate the reality, the meanings, the interpretations of their research subjects. As a professional sociologist, I know that such is a cardinal rule for all social scientists, whether they be qualitative or statistically orientated. Of course, no such rule is relevant to the ideologically committed. No one who takes sociology seriously, and Ms. Lettres professes to take the discipline seriously, starts out by labeling the article one is critiquing as stupid.

The bottom line is that Lettre and Clark-Flory insist on labeling women as rape victims even when these women do not apply the label to themselves. In other words, they know these women better than the women know themselves. One of the worst forms of degradation is when persons simply ignore the reality of others, when the ideologically orthodox ignore the rights of others to identify themselves as they wish to be identified. Such in my opinion is a basic human right, the right to answer the question “Who Am I?” “How do I identify myself to myself?” Such is a basic right whether it be applied to religious identity or ethnic identity or political identity and even to the identity of rape victim.

Ms. Lettre and Clark-Flory may be doing good work in their attempt to help victims of rape which represents a crime of both sex and power. The irony is that they end up engaging in a form of power abuse when they attempt to apply a rape identity to those women who reject this identity.

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Barry M. Dank aka the dankprofessor™
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