Patriarchal Social Scripts and Child Sexual Abuse

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On similar lines, Otterbein[ 49 ] examined 17 cultures and reported that cultures with rigid sex-role systems showed higher sexual violence. The sociocultural theory, thus, explains sexual violence in terms of social expression of male power or patriarchy. If one agrees with this hypothesis, it would mean that patriarchal societies will witness more sexual violence compared to the gender-equal societies. Thornhill and Palmer[ 50 ] collate these two hypotheses, arguing that the socially learned behaviors known as culture are largely biological and hence an overlap of biological and cultural factors occurs in sexual violence.

Cultural sanction of violence also may encourage sexual violence.

Highlights

For example, higher rates of rape were observed by Le Vine[ 51 ] in the Gusii or Kisii tribe of Kenya. In Gusii marriages, sexual aggression is a sanctioned behavior, wherein men are encouraged by other society members to use pain and be sexually aggressive on their wives during sexual intercourse. This is done in order to show one's power. It is argued that the higher rates of rape among the Gusii occur when marital sexual aggression overflows into the premarital or extramarital area. Whether sexual violence is influenced by biological or cultural factors, it has major influence on the mental health and functioning of the victim especially due to the social responses to the violence.

Although the issue of sexual violence has remained largely ignored until now, ignoring it further is no longer acceptable. It, thus, becomes crucial to acknowledge that sexual violence transcends national and cultural boundaries. In the absence of such acknowledgment, sexual violence may continue to grow. The causes of sexual violence are complex and like many other crimes, sexual violence may not be completely understood and explained by a single factor; culture is one of the many factors that may be important in our understanding of sexual violence.

It is an important research question as to what causes variation in the incidence of sexual violence in different cultures. Cross-cultural aspect of sexual violence is a highly under-investigated and under-researched area. It is high time we start understanding barriers and cultural strengths that are responsible for higher or lower rates of sexual violence cases in different cultures. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Indian J Psychiatry v. Gurvinder Kalra and Dinesh Bhugra 1. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.

This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract Interpersonal violence whether it is sexual or nonsexual, remains a major problem in large parts of the world. Culture, gender, sexual violence, women. Attitudes Across cultures, attitudes toward gender are likely to affect how male-female relationships are viewed, and subsequently how the sexual offenders and the victims are viewed. Stereotypes Burt[ 29 ] described rape as the psychological extension of a dominant-submissive sex-role stereotyped culture.

Consequences of sexual violence Sexual violence can have widespread consequences not only violating its immediate victims but also the wider meaning of freedom and basic human rights. Understanding of socio-sexual processes Cultural variations in gender roles and permitted gender behaviors may play an important role in cases of sexual violence by men from one culture on women from a different culture. Biology versus culture Sexuality like various other biological processes is said to be controlled by genetic factors.

Footnotes Source of Support: Nil Conflict of Interest: World Health Organization; World report on violence and health. Rape in cross-cultural perspective. El-bushra J, Piza Lopez E. Its scope and relevance. Baron L, Straus MA.

Access Check

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The effects of clothing on dyad sex composition on perceptions of sexual intent: Do women and men evaluate these cues differently? J Appl Soc Psychol. Abbey A, Harnish RJ. Perception of sexual intent. Achieving these goals has often involved arguing that certain kinds of encounters that have previously not been socially or legally recognized as rape should be so recognized—thus, challenging overly restrictive ideas often encoded in law about what counts as rape Burgess-Jackson , ; Sanday , ; Bevacqua Obvious examples include the abolition of marital-rape exemptions and the recognition of date and acquaintance rape.

There are varying feminist views about whether and how the concept of rape, and hence its framing in the law, requires further renegotiation or expansion. Both social and legal understandings of rape are typically based at least partly on the notion of consent. Many laws also include a force requirement, about which more below. To consent to something is to reverse a prima facie supposition about what may and may not be done.

In most contexts, there is a standing presumption that one does not have access to and may not make use of another's body, property, personal information, or other elements of his or her personal domain. This presumption is reversed, however, when and for as long as the other consents to such access.

Consent thus alters the structure of rights and obligations between two or more parties. Assuming for the moment that, in sexual encounters, rape exists where consent is lacking, the question then becomes what counts as consent.

Women's sexual consent has in many instances been understood quite expansively, as simply the absence of refusal or resistance; feminists have criticized this approach on the grounds that, among its other untoward implications, it regards even unconscious women as consenting MacKinnon b, ; Archard , A vital task on the feminist agenda has been to challenge and discredit such ideas—to deny that what a woman wears, where she goes and with whom, or what sexual choices she has made in the past have any relevance to whether she should be seen as having consented to sex on a particular occasion.

Consent in general may be understood as either attitudinal or performative Kazan Because the kinds of behaviors mentioned above such as wearing revealing clothes, going somewhere alone with a man, or engaging in heavy petting have often been claimed by perpetrators to constitute evidence that a woman was in a mental state of willingness to have intercourse, feminists have often rejected attitudinal accounts in favor of performative ones; with a performative account, in contrast, a defendant can be challenged to articulate exactly what the woman said or did that constituted her consent to intercourse.

An added advantage of a performative account is that it suggests that sexual consent is not a woman's implied default state, but rather must be actively and affirmatively granted. One limitation of a purely performative account of consent is that it does not take into account the context in which the relevant behavior or utterance occurs.

INTRODUCTION

The question is what other contextual constraints and pressures may also undermine the validity of a woman's apparent consent. There are many kinds of explicit and implicit threats that render a woman's consent to sex less than meaningful: Which if any such nonviolent coercive pressures should be regarded as rape, either morally or legally, is a matter of some controversy Schulhofer ; Burgess-Jackson , Viewing at least certain kinds of nonviolent coercive pressures as incompatible with meaningful consent may yield the conclusion that some quid pro quo sexual harassment is also rape Falk In the most general terms, a mens rea requirement means that the prosecution must show not only that nonconsensual sex occurred, but also that the man was in a certain state of mind with regard to the woman's lack of consent.

Just what that state of mind is—what counts as mens rea in cases of rape—is a matter of some dispute Burgess-Jackson , — The most conservative position—defended most famously in the DPP v Morgan decision Baron , —holds that a man has mens rea only if he believes the woman is not consenting or that she is at least probably not consenting. On this view, a man who sincerely believes that the woman is consenting is not guilty of rape, no matter how unreasonable his belief may be under the circumstances.

A more moderate view is that a man has mens rea if he either believes the woman is not consenting or believes unreasonably that she is consenting. Thus, in jurisdictions where this understanding of mens rea is in force, the question of whether the woman actually consented often gives way—particularly in cases of date and acquaintance rape—to the question of whether the man reasonably believed she consented.

Theorists have different views about the conditions under which it is reasonable for a man to believe that a woman is consenting to sexual intercourse. Archard argues forcefully against this view, however, pointing out that any such conventions are likely to be ambiguous and not universally understood particularly since research shows that men routinely interpret women's behavior in more sexual terms than women mean or intend , that a man risks doing serious harm by relying on his beliefs about such conventions, and that there is a ready alternative to risking such harm, namely, inquiring explicitly as to his partner's consent or lack thereof.

Pineau believes that this model is the backdrop against which many people base their judgments about reasonable belief in rape cases. Communicative sexuality is most likely to be rewarding for both parties, allows them to promote each other's sensual ends non-manipulatively and non-paternalistically, and observes norms appropriate to friendship and trust.

In short, if a man does not engage in communicative sexuality, then he does not really know whether his partner is consenting; thus, if he nonetheless believes that she is consenting, then that belief is unreasonable. Finally, some feminists have argued that rape should be a strict liability offense, that is, one with no mens rea requirement at all. Proponents of this approach believe that a gender-neutral standard of reasonableness is impossible given the differences between men's and women's social positioning.

They point out, for instance, that men have greater social and in most cases physical power than women and, relatedly, that women's beliefs and reactions are shaped by the constant threat of male violence with which women live Kerns Because of these differences, women and men often have divergent perceptions of interpersonal behavior Scheppele , Opponents of the reasonable woman standard contend that it is both possible and desirable to account for common differences between men's and women's physiologies, social experiences, and perceptions without importing gender into the definition of reasonableness itself.

In many jurisdictions, the law defines the crime of rape as comprising two separate elements: As West observes, in such jurisdictions. West explains that, historically, rape law has seen two kinds of forced sex as consensual: Cases of nonconsensual but unforced sex, on the other hand, include those in which the victim is induced to have sex through fraudulent misrepresentation for instance, a doctor telling her that sex with him is necessary for her cure , and those in which she is coerced through nonviolent means for instance, a professor telling her that she must have sex with him to pass the course.

Most feminists see the dual requirement of force and nonconsent as redundant at best and, at worst, as defining many rapes out of existence. Feminists differ, however, as to how rape laws should ideally be structured. Perhaps the most common view is that the force requirement should be eliminated, and rape defined simply as nonconsensual sex, with differing degrees of severity depending on whether and how much force and violence are employed Estrich While some state statutes are now written this way, they often build physical force into the definition of non-consent; thus in practice they function very much like the dual requirement of force and non-consent Anderson a, Another alternative is to eliminate the nonconsent requirement, defining rape simply as forced sex.

This approach has the advantage of focusing on what the perpetrator did, rather than on how the victim responded that is, on whether her behavior constituted, or could reasonably have been seen by the perpetrator as constituting, consent. A third approach is to separate the two elements into two separate crimes, one based on the use of force and the other on the lack of consent. McGregor defends this idea, proposing that:. Schulhofer argues, in a similar vein, that the law should recognize two different offenses: Some commentators have observed that developing such a lesser offense may aid in winning convictions, as juries are reluctant to convict nonviolent offenders of rape.

Recent scholarship includes some novel approaches to the legal definition of rape. She explains her approach as follows:. MacKinnon also recommends the passage of new, sex-equality-based civil rights laws that sexual assault victims can use against their attackers. According to the No Model, a sexual act is consensual unless the victim says no or resists physically.

Feminist Perspectives on Rape (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

According to the Yes Model, a sexual act is rape unless consent is affirmatively granted by verbal or physical behavior. Furthermore, both the No and Yes models rely heavily on men's ability to interpret women's nonverbal behavior, despite strong evidence showing that men routinely fail in this endeavor: Finally, both models in practice tend to assume that a woman's willing participation in non-penetrative sexual activity is a reliable indicator of her consent to penetration for instance, Anderson points out that according to Schulhofer, an advocate of the Yes Model, a woman's engaging in heavy sexual petting typically indicates her affirmative willingness to have intercourse.

This assumption, Anderson emphasizes, is not only often untrue but, in the age of AIDS, especially dangerous. This requirement of consultation before penetration distinguishes Anderson's approach from Pineau's, despite their shared emphasis on communication; in addition, Pineau's model retains an overall consent standard whereas Anderson abandons that standard. Unless and until a relational context has been established that enables partners to interpret reliably each other's nonverbal behavior, the negotiation must be verbal.

The negotiation model is gender-neutral, requiring that any person who initiates sexual penetration consult verbally with his or her partner of either gender to come to a mutual understanding of whether both parties want penetration to occur. The negotiation model thus differs at least in spirit from even a version of the Yes Model that requires verbal consent, in that it emphasizes mutuality rather than a one-sided permission-seeking. It bears noting that successful rape prosecutions depend not only on how rape is legally defined but, at least equally importantly, on the general public's willingness to believe women's testimony rather than seeing them as lying or confused and to recognize particular encounters as instances of the applicable legal definition that is, to see this behavior as force, or this utterance as expressing nonconsent.

The continuing prevalence of such rape-supportive beliefs can render even well-intentioned prosecutors unwilling to pursue legitimate cases, given the likelihood that juries will refuse to convict. Feminist theorists have often sought to articulate a more richly textured sense of rape's wrongness, and of its distinctive harms, than the law alone can provide.

No doubt both the wrong and the harm of rape are complex and multifarious; these interpretive frames suggest emphases that may be illuminating in different contexts and for different purposes. While this view has rarely been defended by feminist philosophers, it has been prominent in some feminist anti-rape public education and activism.

One feminist theorist often claimed to have held this view is Susan Brownmiller ; see Cahill , Thus, in addition to challenging victim-blaming assumptions, feminists often emphasized rapists' non-sexual motivations, such as anger and the desire for dominance and control; on this view, the rapist is a violent criminal like other violent criminals, not just a guy seeking sex a bit too vigorously. Similarly, this approach emphasizes that rape victims are real crime victims, not vaguely titillating people who had some overly rough sex and might just have liked it.

Rape's sexual nature is central to understanding both its perpetrators' motivations and its effects on victims, not to mention the crime's broader social and ideological roots and consequences. While perpetrators differ in their strongest occurrent motivations, it is important to ask why so many men who wish to harm or violate women do so in a sexual manner. Furthermore, some rapes do occur because a man wants to have sex, and perhaps would even prefer it if his partner consented, but is prepared to proceed without her consent.

Furthermore, many rape survivors are damaged specifically in their sexuality, facing difficulties in their sexual relationships in the months and years following the rape. The violation of bodily and sexual autonomy is no doubt among rape's most central harms.

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Because a person's body is at the very center of her domain and is the locus of the properties and capacities that make her a person, the intentional invasion of the body is an especially egregious attack: Thus, rape treats the victim not as a person but as an object, and one with a purely sexual function. Frye and Shafer emphasize that rape's communication of this message constitutes one significant element of its harm: It is not surprising, then, that many rape survivors describe feeling not only worthless, but also numb, absent, or deadened.

Some recent discussions emphasize that a full account of rape's harm must incorporate both its denial of victims' personhood and its intimate, sexual and bodily nature. The humiliation and shame often experienced by rape victims are predictable results of experiencing total subjugation and the intimate loss of control of one's body.

Sexual violence against women: Understanding cross-cultural intersections

A distinctive set of harms enters the picture when, as is increasingly common, women and girls are violated while unconscious, often with pictures or videos taken and circulated. As Kelly Oliver points out, "lack of consent is valorized within popular culture to the point that sexual assault has become a spectator sport and creepshot entertainment on social media … sex with unconscious girls, especially accompanied by photographs as trophies, has become a goal of some boys and men" , In such cases, Oliver observes, "The trauma of victimization not only becomes public but also infinitely repeatable.

It can go viral.

It doesn't go away" Cressida Heyes provides a phenomenological account of the devastating harms of raping an unconscious victim. Raping someone who is unconscious, Heyes contends,. The assumption that such rapes are less harmful than the rapes of conscious victims--since the rape itself is not directly experienced--is therefore badly mistaken, Heyes argues. The victim of unconscious rape, she points out, "struggles to feel safe lapsing into the one form of anonymity that is biologically and existentially necessary for human life, yet ultimately she will have no choice but to revisit this place over and over … no one can avoid going to sleep for very long" , Many rapes lead to additional harms beyond those intrinsic to the rape itself.

Some rapes cause pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases including HIV infection , and some rapists physically injure their victims. Due to both low reporting levels and low conviction rates, relatively few victims see their rapists punished; many of those raped by relatives, co-workers, friends, or other ongoing acquaintances must then face continuing interaction with the rapist, while those raped by strangers often fear that the rapist will find and re-victimize them.

With or without these additional harms but especially with them , rape constitutes severe trauma. Undergoing trauma shatters the victim's most basic assumptions about herself and her safety in the world. According to Brison, who survived a violent rape and attempted murder, trauma. With its profound effects on social connection, cognition, memory, and emotion, trauma disrupts the continuity of the self. To reconstitute the self in a new form, the survivor must construct a meaningful narrative that incorporates the trauma, but many survivors face obstacles in this endeavor such as disordered cognition, memory gaps, feelings of despair and futility, and the lack of an audience willing to hear, believe, and understand their story.

For many women, rape is not a one-time event; rather sexual violence and exploitation are, for at least some period of time, routine conditions of their lives. Such women experience female sexual slavery, defined by Barry as any situation in which. As Barry observes, such situations include battering relationships, most prostitution, and the sexual abuse of girl children, all of which are common around the world. It is thus important to consider the distinctive effects of such repeated and routine sexual trauma. This diagnosis is intended to encompass various forms of humanly inflicted trauma, not only sexual trauma.

The damage of such prolonged trauma to a victim's personality may be so severe as to constitute what Frye has called mayhem: Rape is unquestionably a gendered crime: In light both of these numbers and of rape's broader ideological dynamics and social consequences, feminists have long contended that rape harms not only its individual victims, but also women as a class. Understanding how rape harms women as a group requires analyzing it not only as an individual act but also as an institution—that is, a structured social practice with distinct positions and roles, and with explicit or implicit rules that define who may or must do what under what circumstances Card Feminists have highlighted the ways in which the institution of rape reinforces the group-based subordination of women to men: Feminists have long claimed that, in patriarchal cultures, rape is not anomalous but paradigmatic—that it enacts and reinforces, rather than contradicting, widely shared cultural views about gender and sexuality.

A core dynamic of patriarchal sexuality, on this view, is the normalizing and sexualizing of male or masculine control and dominance over females or the feminine. This dynamic finds expression in a number of beliefs about what is natural, acceptable, and even desirable in male-female sexual interaction: One study of undetected, self-reported acquaintance rapists found that these individuals' propensity to rape was significantly related not only to their acceptance of rape myths and of traditional ideas about male and female sexuality, but also to their belief that male sexual aggression is normal Hinck and Thomas , Such beliefs have repeatedly been shown to play a role not only in men's self-reported likelihood of committing rape, but also in people's tendency to define rape more restrictively, and to attribute responsibility and blame to rape victims , Some have further contended that many rapes, being at least partially motivated by group-based animus as expressed in rape-supportive beliefs, should be categorized as hate crimes Wellman On this view, rape is a political practice by which spurious beliefs about gender and sexuality are expressed, inscribed, and enforced via the violation and control of women's bodies.

This underlying gender ideology helps to explain why, when men and boys are raped almost always by other males , they are often seen as having been feminized, treated like women and thus rendered shamefully woman-like. Many feminists have emphasized the role of rape in controlling women's behavior through fear. Card argues that rape is a terrorist institution, one which—despite its admitted differences from acts more normally labeled terrorism, such as bombing and hijacking—advances its political purpose, the continued subordination of women, by terrorizing a target population Like all terrorism, she contends, rape has two targets: Even women who, because of their conformity to these rules, do not feel afraid of being raped have nonetheless, Card points out, been terrorized into compliance.

A central element of rape as a terrorist institution, Card claims, is a protection racket in which men, as the group both creating the danger and proposing to deliver women from it, dole out protection—sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent, often illusory—in exchange for women's service, loyalty, and compliance. Women who are not offered protection, or who decline it when offered, are then frequently blamed for being raped. Hence her duty to control, conceal, and monitor her body and its movements, so as not to bring disaster upon herself. By molding women both to femininity and to self-blame, the threat of rape thus systematically undermines women's capacity to resist not only rape itself, but various other elements of their oppression as well.

Rape's role in increasing the burden of fear in women's and girls' lives leads Burgess-Jackson to highlight it as an issue of distributive justice , He contends that the state's obligation to advance justice requires that it take steps to redistribute fear so that women no longer bear it as an unfair and disproportionate burden; furthermore, he claims, since men as a class are overwhelmingly the cause of women's fear, most or all of the costs of such redistribution should be borne by men.

Rape is a tool not only of patriarchy, but also of racism, colonialism, nationalism, and other pernicious hierarchies. These and other power relationships in turn make women and girls even more vulnerable to rape. In virtually any situation where women and girls belonging to especially desperate or powerless populations are at the mercy of men in authority—from female inmates and girls in foster care, to undocumented immigrants, to refugees dependent on U. In the United States, the racial dynamics of rape are shaped by a long history of white men raping their African-American female slaves.

Because the women were chattel property, the owners and often overseers could and did use them sexually at will, with complete legal and social impunity. Because children born of slave mothers were slaves, regardless of their paternity, many slave owners benefited from rape by producing more slaves for themselves.

Roberts emphasizes, however, that. Slaves were frequently forced into undesired sexual liaisons with each other as well, based on the whims or the breeding plans of their owners. Collins points out, however, that unlike lynching, black women's sexual abuse by white men during and after slavery did not become a central or universally understood icon of American racism.

Black women's unrapeability was not only written into law, but reinforced by a racial ideology that defined them as lascivious and promiscuous by nature. This same racial ideology stereotyped black men as savagely oversexed and thus sexually dangerous, especially to white women. The post-Civil War terror campaign of lynching, which continued through the 's, was frequently claimed to be punishment for black men who had raped white women, although in fact only a minority of lynching victims were even accused of having done any such thing Hall , ; Davis , , and of those, many had in fact had consensual relationships with white women Hall , The racist association of rape with black men rendered rape by white men comparatively invisible, thus making white men as a group unaccountable for rape Davis , , a dynamic that continued well into the 20 th century Dorr These destructive racial stereotypes remain powerful today, exerting influence on people's judgments of whether a rape has occurred, how serious an offense it is, and who is to blame Foley et al.

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