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A History of Sexual Assault
Until recent years, rape and other forms of sexual assault were defined as harm to the male who had an association with the female victim. So rape of a married woman was a crime against her husband, of an unmarried woman, against her father, etc. Women, viewed as property of a man, had no say in the legal or social definitions of rape until the second wave of the women's movement in the late 60's. And, until very recently, it was legal for a man to rape his wife. In Virginia, both marital rape and marital sexual assault laws were enacted with penalties ranging from probation with counseling to a possible 20 years, depending on any defense motions to defer the judgment.
The prevalence of alcohol use in sexual assault among young people is a subject of much debate. However, experts across the board agree that alcohol does not make a person rape any more than it makes a person batter or even kill. Rather, substance use lowers inhibitions to feelings and attitudes already present in the assailant prior to the assault. Alcohol or drugs may seem to give a person a motivation to assault. Conversely, victims are more vulnerable because their judgment is impaired and because their physical ability to react to danger or threat is hampered, sometimes severely.
It is because of the feminist movement that rape, sexual assault, incest, child sexual assault, and battering, have been redefined, at least in part, to match the realities of those who live with this fear on a daily basis. Men who are victimized as adults or children experience trauma equal to that of females. Emotional trauma may be more severe for females.
In part, this may have to do with the fact that most women still must struggle against a system which places them in a position of having to work harder, against difficult odds and a hostile climate, to gain acceptance in the world as human beings. Rape is an act of possession, of power, of control. It is used as a political tool in war (the Serbian "rape camps" are not a new concept; what is new is that they are institutionalized) as a means of social control and torture, and has been since the beginning of recorded history (witness the "comfort girls" in Japan and use of inmates for prostitution in Nazi concentration camps in WWII, mass rapes of hundreds of thousands of Bengali women during the Pakistani/Bengali war, rapes of school girls in Kenya, mass rapes of women by armed forces in Somalia and Guatemala), and yet only now is rape recognized as a form of political oppression and torture. Black feminists have compared the rape of women to the lynching of African-Americans.
The assault of a college student has been trivialized and minimized for years, but its impact is unmistakable. Unlike men, who also suffer individually from sexual violence, women decline job promotions, avoid using library resources at specific times, or even all the time (because of the presence of molesters in the stacks) or the University's computer facilities late at night, even avoid night courses which may be critical to their academic careers, because of the fear of rape. The effect is a form of class oppression. In the United States the frequency of sexual violence is a reminder to all women that the struggle for equality is far from over; that in the end, they are still objects, still possessions of men.
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