Rape

Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement is about “healing and action. Everything else is a distraction” (Burke 2019). That is, Burke helps people develop local resources for survivors of sexual violence, and local strategies for the prevention of sexual violence: healing and action. This essay is focused on Burke’s “community healing circles.” These are small groups of people who meet to talk about the sexual violence they have suffered. Using her own theory of insults, Daly describes the damaging insult that results from (...) sexual violence, and proposes an explanation of how Burke’s community healing circles help survivors to overcome that harm. She then briefly considers how similar practices could be used in other contexts. Her central contention is that sexual violence expresses a profound lack of respect, and that this tends to diminish survivors’ sense of self-worth. Sharing these experiences with similarly-situated people can help survivors recover their dignity. She proposes two mechanisms involved in this recovery: First, being treated with respect counters the tendency to believe that one does not deserve respect. Second, understanding your experiences can be easier when you see them reflected in another. (shrink)

Vast research has sought to better understand the origins and development of rape myth beliefs given the problematic influence of such misconceptions throughout global societies and criminal justice pathways. The current research aims to build on this body of literature by examining the contribution that psychopathic personality traits (affective responsiveness, cognitive responsiveness, interpersonal manipulation, egocentricity) and emotional intelligence may have upon rape myth beliefs. Furthermore, this study will investigate the extent to which sociodemographic characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity, education), and prior (...) experience of sexual victimisation, contribute to variance in rape myth acceptance scores. In total 251 participants (M Age = 31.66) completed an online, self-report questionnaire which included contemporary measures of psychopathy and rape myth acceptance, never previously tested in combination. Results of a hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicate that egocentricity, age, and gender were significantly associated with rape myth beliefs. Emotional intelligence, as well as affective and interpersonal traits of psychopathy, were not directly related with rape mythology. Findings are interpreted alongside previous research, where we suggest there is an urgent need for larger, nationally representative samples, systematically recruited from the general population to help clarify uncertainty in existing literature emerging from small-scale opportunistic datasets. (shrink)

This exploratory essay proposes a simple process model for adaptive power that can be used as a mental shortcut in women of color emergent-strategist feminist organizing in the US. Adaptive power describes the adjustive mechanisms and political technologies in effect during long cycles of liberation struggles and their causal influence on social inequality. The essay frames the current moment in American politics as both a predictable result of the adaptive powers of white supremacist structures and as a leverage point for (...) feminist social change. Its purpose is to affirm the varied strategies of democratic and feminist organizing happening across movements in a way that holds the line against despair, facilitates long-term change, and challenges the proliferation of single-axis narratives about authoritarianism that exclude gender-based violence or downplay the confluence bewteen rape culture and white supremacy. As a practice-based essay, it draws from experience in grassroots organizing and from a theoretical blend of ideas like dynamical systems theory, political epistemology, and women of color feminism. (shrink)

Moral encroachers claim that the moral risks of falsely believing something raise the threshold of epistemic justification, thereby making justification and knowledge harder to come by. Leary argues that there’s a tension between moral encroachment and #BelieveWomen: there are certain paradigm cases involving rape reports about which most proponents of #BelieveWomen would agree that the hearers in these cases are justified in believing the accusation, but moral encroachment suggests they are not. This tension cannot be easily avoided by claiming, as (...) some encroachers do, that the moral risks of not believing the accusation lower the threshold of epistemic justification: it’s unclear that this view succeeds at delivering the result that hearers are epistemically justified in believing the accusation in the relevant paradigm cases, and even if it does, its explanation of why hearers are justified in believing the accusation is demeaning toward victims. The tension also cannot be avoided by interpreting #BelieveWomen in an alternative way, as other encroachers do, that is compatible with claiming that hearers in the relevant cases are not epistemically justified: the salient alternative interpretations of #BelieveWomen are either implausible and unsatisfying to victims or they undermine the main motivations for encroachment. So, encroachers have more work to do to show that this tension can be resolved. (shrink)

Accounts of structural violence characterize the institutional and bureaucratic production of systematic population-level harms as violence while also construing these harms as inadvertent and unintentional. We argue that such conceptions are poorly suited to capture the relationship between administrative systems and the production of violence under settler colonialism. We offer an account of administrative violence as an organizing feature of settler colonial institutions that produces population-level harms for some and benefits for others, by design, as a rule rather than an (...) exception. We theorize three epistemic mechanisms of administrative violence: simplification, containment, and epistemic apartheid. We demonstrate how settler administrative systems use such mechanisms to automate the production of harm for targeted populations. (shrink)

Structures of oppression and administrative systems in white supremacist settler colonial societies rely on epistemological foundations to orient them toward their goals of containment and land dispossession. Structural gaslighting refers to the justifying stories and mythologies produced in these societies to normalize, obscure, and uphold structures of oppression. Such epistemic legwork often works by naturalizing socially produced inequalities through positing biological or cultural deficiencies in the target populations. This paper develops the concept of structural gaslighting introduced in Berenstain (2020) as (...) “any conceptual work that functions to obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm that they produce and license” and explores its relationship to scientific and philosophical knowledge production. Case studies including historical and contemporary forms of scientific racism, philosophical justifications for ableist violence, and the link between disableization and dispossession for the purpose of settler colonial land theft are considered. (shrink)

Seja na ficção científica, nas mitologias, seja na materialidade da estigmatização de indivíduos monstrificados, a monstruosidade sempre ocupou um lugar liminar: nem fora nem dentro, mas sempre ao alcance do humano. Dialogando com estudiosos das teorias da monstruosidade, das teorias feministas e dos pensamentos contracoloniais, busco, nas páginas que se seguem, compreender os significados dos monstros para a reiteração da humanidade do Eu, em oposição à monstruosidade dos Outros. As reflexões que aqui se seguem se voltam à investigação de uma (...) dubiedade: ao passo que o monstro, enquanto criação humana, é constantemente perseguido por seus criadores, transformado em alvo a ser eliminado, também se percebe um desejo do humano pelo monstro, um desejo que penetra – e ultrapassa – a seara sexual. O caráter abjeto do monstro se mescla com sua objetificação; o desejo de morte contra o monstro entremeia-se ao desejo pelo monstro, de forma que seja possível pensar não em uma oposição entre objeto e abjeto, mas sim em uma qualidade ꜵbjeta, através da qual se manifesta a necrossexualidade: o desejo sexual movido pela morte, pela repugnância. A partir disso, almejo dissertar sobre a ideia de monstrofilia necrossexual: o desejo filial do humano pelo monstro que opera simultaneamente, senão a partir, do desejo tanatológico. (shrink)

Rae Langton and Caroline West argue that pornography silences women by presupposing misogynistic attitudes, such as that women enjoy being raped. More precisely, they claim that a somewhat infamous pictorial, ‘Dirty Pool’, makes such presuppositions, and that it is typical in this respect. I argue for four claims. (1) There are empirical reasons to doubt that women are silenced in the way that Langton and West claim they are. (2) There is no evidence that very much pornography makes the sorts (...) of presuppositions that Langton and West's explanation of silencing requires it to make. (3) Even ‘Dirty Pool’, for all its other problems, does not make such presuppositions. (4) Langton and West misread ‘Dirty Pool’ because they do not take proper account of the fact that pornography often traffics in sexual fantasy. The broader lesson is that we need to read pornography more sensitively if we are to understand its capacity to shape socio‐sexual norms (for good or for ill). (shrink)

After #MeToo, academics have become increasingly focused on the liberal concept of consent. Either problematized as a means of distinguishing between sex and rape, or vaunted as a tool for having better sex, consent remains central to discussions of sexual violence. Returning to Andrea Dworkin’s thought, this article argues that contemporary feminists must move beyond consent and recenter the problem of violence to theorize rape. Dworkin, alongside Catharine MacKinnon and Carole Pateman, critiques consent for disguising the violence of rape, sex, (...) and pornography. By defining violence as a process of objectification, Dworkin exposes rape, pornography, and most controversially, consensual heterosexual intercourse as “a new kind of death.” She, in turn, calls for the feminist exercise of violence as a tactic of disclosure that promises to make visible patriarchal violence hidden by consent and sexualization. Moving beyond consent to recenter the problem of violence, I conclude, opens up new avenues for feminist action and brings into view the seemingly unthinkable possibility of a world without rape. (shrink)

United States law and culture have yet to find a constructive and fair way to talk about rape, especially in “non-paradigmatic” rape cases like acquaintance or date rape. Particularly on college campuses, acquaintance rape is an ongoing, severe problem. Leading legal minds disagree sharply on how to address it. In part, this polarizing debate stems from our collective inability to free our language of the myths and stock stories that plague the subject of rape. No court case better exemplifies the (...) problem than the notorious decision of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in Commonwealth v. Berkowitz, one of the most widely taught rape cases in the United States. In his empirical study of attitudes on rape, Professor Dan Kahan used the Berkowitz facts in part because they are such an iconic representation of some of the more difficult and troubling issues surrounding acquaintance rape. In that study, Kahan concluded that whether people perceive a story as describing “rape” depends primarily on cultural cognition, meaning the cultural group to which the reader of the story belongs. The text and substance of the law’s definition of rape mattered little. Kahan concluded that if we wish to change outcomes in rape cases, the cultural understandings of rape, more than the law, must change. This essay takes Kahan’s conclusion that cultural understanding is the primary driver of rape outcomes and asks the question: from where does that cultural understanding come? In no small part, this essay argues, those cultural beliefs come from the law, particularly from legal narratives. The facts of judicial opinions reflect the judges’ cultural understanding of rape and then that cultural understanding becomes what rape is (and isn’t). That image of rape then powerfully influences cultural understanding within and outside of law. It is a recursive process by which legal narratives create and reinforce cultural understanding which then itself creates and reinforces legal narratives and so on in an endless loop. In this way, law is neither irrelevant nor innocent in the outcome of rape cases. It is just exerting its influence, often imperceptibly, through rhetoric. (shrink)

This essay engages with Cressida Heyes’s Anaesthetics of Existence (2020) on two points. First, it raises worries about Heyes’s apparent association of anaesthetic time with feminist resistance. Second, it reconsiders Heyes’s account of the specific harm involved in raping unconscious individuals, as well as her account of the sort of agency nullified by rape more generally, by appealing to the notion of interpersonal spatiality.

Anti-pornography feminists have famously argued that pornography silences women: specifically, pornography causes women to be illocutionarily disabled in some real-life sexual contexts so that they are unable to refuse sex by saying ‘no’. Call this view Silencing. Some philosophers object to Silencing because it seems to entail that, in some cases, a rapist’s blameworthiness is significantly diminished. If the woman cannot refuse sex by saying ‘no’, and this allows the man’s belief, that she consents, to be rational, then the man’s (...) blameworthiness for rape is significantly diminished. The objection is that something must be wrong with a view like Silencing that allows rapists to escape the moral hook when, intuitively, they should not. In this paper, I defend Silencing from this objection by appealing to insights from the literature on moral encroachment in order to argue that it is not rational for the rapist to believe (or accept) that the woman consents. (shrink)

The gray area of sexual violations generally refers to ambiguous sexual experiences that are not readily distinguishable from rape or sex. Such experiences are describable as ambiguous or complex in a way that, to some, seems to defy existent categories of sexual experiences. This leads some feminists to approach the gray area as a puzzle that must be resolved either by understanding it as a new category, or by upholding existing rape categorization. Rather than dispelling the gray-area ambiguity by resolving (...) conceptual puzzles, I assign the gray-area ambiguity a positive analytical role by attending to it in a historical and dialectical light. By tracing histories of feminist antirape discourse, I elaborate a way of understanding the “gray area” of sexual violations, articulating it as a historical condition affecting the interpretive possibilities of our sexual experiences. Such an approach underscores the potential of the gray area to inaugurate feminist critique in virtue of its status as a historically specific yet ambiguous horizon where our experiences can contradictorily seem not-like rape, but not-like sex. (shrink)

In this paper, I use the example of rape myths to argue that certain real-life phenomena compel us to adjust our philosophical methods such that we explicitly endorse feminist commitments and strive for democratic practices in our philosophical thinking. The concept of rape has evolved significantly over the past few decades both in law and common usage. But despite decades of work to dispel rape myths, they persist and interfere with the proper application of the concept. This paper aims to (...) account for this problem and propose a solution. First, I consider three examples that show how rape myths and other problematic schemas can distort our dominant working understanding of phenomena. All three examples are cases of grave injustices to the victims. I suggest that a revisionary project of conceptual amelioration can help counter injustices like these. In a second step, I argue that problematic schemas (such as rape myths) not only distort our working understanding or the accurate application of an existing concept, but can furthermore interfere with our philosophical analyses—even in cases of amelioration. As a solution, taking clues from theories of epistemologies of ignorance, I propose a more democratic and progressive method for engaging in conceptual amelioration. (shrink)

Gender-based forms of administrative violence, such as reproductive violence, are the result of systems designed to enact population-level harms through the production and forcible imposition of colonial systems of gender. Settler statecraft has long relied on the strategic promotion of sexual and reproductive violence. Patterns of reproductive violence adapt and change to align with the enduring goals and evolving needs of settler colonial occupation, dispossession, and containment. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to end the constitutional right to abortion in (...) Dobbs v Jackson is but one instance of this larger pattern. We analyze reproductive and obstetric violence and the structural trauma they produce through the lenses of i) historical continuity and ii) the global architectures of neoliberal settler capitalism in order to connect reproductive rights rollbacks in the U.S. with the expansion of reproductive violence across a world connected by colonial globalization. (shrink)

This study examines the ethical and legal issues faced by girls/women requesting abortions who were victims of rape, aspects which have received little attention to date. This is a retrospective study using an approach and legal issues relating to incidents of unwanted pregnancy resulting from rape as reported in Turkish newspapers from 2010 to 2018. A total of 95 articles were discovered and categorized. These were then evaluated for content and analyzed in terms of the ethical issues related to the (...) cases. Of the articles,14 involved rape-related pregnancy cases. The six cases chosen for analysis in this study were carefully selected from newspaper reports between 2010-2018. The victims who requested abortions were between 9 and 26 weeks pregnant and aged 14-26 years old. Turkish courts approved only two of the victims' requests. The cases in this study were evaluated by the authorities solely on legal grounds. The stress experienced by victims of rape is exacerbated by compulsory pregnancy; the fact that these victims were not allowed to terminate their pregnancies resulted in their further punishment. Requests for abortions should be assessed not only in terms of legality but also based on medical and especially ethical issues. (shrink)

Empirical research has distinguished moral judgments that focus on an act and the actor’s intention or mental states, and those that focus on results of an action and then seek a causal actor. Studies indicate these two types of judgments may result from a “dual-process system” of moral judgment (Cushman 2008, Kneer and Machery 2019). Results-oriented judgements may be subject to the problem of resultant moral luck because different results can arise from the same action and intention. While some argue (...) luck should not bear on persons’ culpability, Victor Kumar has argued that the tendency to hold unlucky agents responsible for harm is justified by consequentialist aims of punishment (Kumar 2019). In contrast, judgments that focus on acts and intentions may be primarily retributive. Kumar claims that judgments focused on results track external, public harm because this increases the reliability of punishment and better achieves instrumental aims, including deterrent effect. In this chapter I examine rape cases using Kumar’s theory of punishment. Rape involves outcomes that are not publicly available. If judgments of punishment depend on outcomes, then we would expect such judgments to be less stable for those instances of wrongdoing that lack public outcomes such as rape, because such judgments would rely instead on often biased and unreliable inferential processes to establish the presence of mental states, which are essentially private. In this way Kumar’s theory actually predicts the way in which we see criminal justice institutions fail with regard to arrest, prosecution, and punishment related to rape; and we might expect similar failures for other crimes that lack publicly available results. In sum, a fundamental problem with institutionalized punishment centered upon results may be that some crimes sit within a moral blindspot. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide an in-depth examination of the fundamental elements of rape, specifically focusing on intention and consent, within the context of “deceiving someone into having sex”. The analysis will involve exploring model cases and scrutinising the intentions of both the deceiver and the deceived in relation to consent. Through conceptual analysis, the concept of “deceiving someone into having sex” will be clarified, drawing insights from typical applications of this concept. Additionally, this paper will critically evaluate the main (...) arguments against these conceptualisations of “deceiving someone into having sex”. This is done to demonstrate the flaws that undermine these arguments, thus highlighting the insufficiency of these approaches in fully discrediting the concept. Moreover, it will be argued that deceiving someone into having sex can be regarded as a form of coercion, and thus rape, aligning with the established criteria for identifying rape cases. In conclusion, this paper argues that the conception of “deceiving someone into having sex” as a form of rape challenges the narrow framework through which we traditionally understand rape, necessitating the recognition that the scope of the concept of rape extends beyond our previous limits. (shrink)

In September 2018, a controversial judicial sentence concerning sexual violence caused a public outcry in Portugal. The court decision invoked the alleged environment of mutual seduction, the use of much alcohol consumption, and the lack of serious injuries to justify the suspended penalty. Stemming from the idea that understandings of what journalism is and what it should be are profoundly ideological and that notions of what it means to be and to behave like a woman and as a man have (...) been developed based on shifting realities within generalised patriarchal structures, this article intends to critically analyse the news media coverage of the controversial judicial sentence on this rape case in Portugal exploring the implications objective-based journalism entails for gender equality. As such, it will identify the shortcomings of objectivity and its leeway when covering sexual violence exploring how objective-based journalism provides room to negotiate practices, norms, identities, and meanings concerning sexual violence, particularly rape and rape myths, and questioning whether a margin of maneuvre is enough to deconstruct patriarchal assumptions of feminity, masculinity and sexuality. (shrink)

Feminists are divided on whether consent should be employed in legal definitions of rape. Catharine MacKinnon has criticized the usefulness of consent in enabling legal systems to recognize and prosecute instances of rape (MacKinnon 1989, 2005, 2016). In a recent article in this journal, Lisa H. Schwartzman defends the use of affirmative consent in rape law against MacKinnon’s critique (Schwartzman 2019). In contrast to MacKinnon, Schwartzman claims our understanding of rape must include both force and consent components. In this paper, (...) I will argue in agreement with Schwartzman and against MacKinnon that the legal definition of rape should include an affirmative consent component. I will take Schwartzman’s discussion as my point of departure and consider whether she has responded adequately to MacKinnon’s criticisms of consent. I will argue that her responses are not fully adequate. In particular, she has not successfully rebutted the argument that an appeal to consent is unnecessary once we have accepted an expanded definition of coercion. I will then provide a more affirmative defense of affirmative consent in response to MacKinnon’s most challenging criticism. (shrink)

I argue that resistance violence is physical force carried out by members of politically vulnerable groups. It is not reducible to self-defense because it does not always involve protecting the life of the actor but, instead, is an expression of establishing one’s dignity and humanity. Applied to women as a vulnerable class in the face of sexual violence, this article looks at a case study of an enslaved teenager named Celia who killed her owner in order to end his sexual (...) abuse. Various philosophies of epistemic injustices (including Fricker, Pohlhaus, Medina, Dotson, Mills, and Card) establish that socially/politically dominant groups help create a context in which compartmentalization, active ignorance, and inconsistencies contribute to the conditions in which marginalized groups reside in spaces of little to no protection from the state. As such, resistance violence emerges as a legitimate option. Selective epistemic attention that fails to contextualize resistance violence supports unjust systems. (shrink)

Prolife theorists typically hold to the claim that all human beings possess equal moral status from conception and consequently possess a right to life. This, they believe, entails that abortion is impermissible in all circumstances. Critics characterize this as an extreme anti-abortion position, as it prima facie allows no exceptions, even in cases of rape. Here, I examine whether the prolife claim regarding equal moral status is compatible with a more attractive moderate stance that permits an exception in the case (...) of rape. I show that Judith Jarvis Thomson's analysis of rights can be used to modify the prolife position in this way, but that doing so involves concessions that prolife theorists are unlikely to find acceptable. (shrink)

In this paper I will use sex by deception as a case study for highlighting some of the most tricky concepts around sexuality and moral psychology, including rape, consensual sex, sexual rights, sexual autonomy, sexual individuality, and disrespectful sex. I begin with a discussion of morally wrong sex as rooted in the breach of five sexual liberty rights that are derived from our fundamental human liberty rights: sexual self-possession, sexual autonomy, sexual individuality, sexual dignity and sexual privacy. I then argue (...) (against the standard interpretation) that experimental findings in moral psychology show that the principle of respect for persons—a principle that grounds our human liberty rights—drives our intuitive moral judgments. In light of this discussion, I examine a puzzle about sex by deception—a puzzle which at first may seem to compel us to define 'rape' strictly in terms of force rather than sexual autonomy. I proceed by presenting an argument against the view that, as a rule, sex by deception undermines consent—a position held by prominent thinkers such as Philippe Patry (2001), Onora O’Neill (2003), Rubenfeld (2012), Tom Dougherty (2013a, 2013b), Joyce M. Short (2013), and Danielle Bromwich and Joseph Millum (2013, 2018). As we will see, sex following deception to increase your chances does not always constitute rape. Lying about your age, education, job, family background, marital status, or interest in a relationship, for example, does not make your sex partner incapable of consenting, which is to say that sex by deception need not be rape. I even go so far as to say that sex with another person that is facilitated by withholding information about having a venereal disease shouldn't be classified as rape. Although sex by deception doesn't compromise consent, it nonetheless violates the principle of respect for persons, not by vitiating sexual autonomy and compromising consent, but by failing to respect other sexual rights, such as our rights to sexual dignity, individuality, and privacy. (shrink)

Helen Frowe (2014) depicts the following fictional case: Fran is being raped by Eric and can’t stop him with violent resistance. Nevertheless, she resists and breaks Eric’s wrist. The infliction of defensive harm on Eric is intuitively permissible, yet it runs counter to the dominant view that defensive harms must stand a reasonable chance of success. Call this the Success Condition (SC). To solve this problem, Daniel Statman (2008) contends that even if Victim’s defensive harms fail to prevent her rape, (...) they do prevent the destruction of another good, her honor, and thus SC is satisfied. Recently, Joseph Bowen (2016) has critiqued Statman’s proposal by showing that honor-based justifications for defensive harming are too permissive. In this paper, I contend that Statman’s proposal is too restrictive. First, I review Statman’s accounts of honor, dishonor, and non-honor. Second, I argue that Statman’s account requires Fran’s honor to be lost or damaged if she doesn’t resist—a highly offensive conclusion about rape victims. Third, I explain why the best alternative to this (i.e., allowing Fran’s honor to be maintained either way) satisfies SC but not the necessity condition. I conclude that we ought to reject Statman’s solution. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss rape myths and mythologies, their negative effects on rape and sexual assault complainants, and how they prejudicially construct women qua women. The backdrop for the analysis is the Belfast Rugby Rape Trial, which took place in 2018. Four men, two of whom were well-known rugby players, were acquitted of rape and sexual assault in a nine-week criminal trial that dominated local, national and international attention. The acquittal resulted in ‘I Believe Her’ rallies and protests across (...) Northern Ireland. Of concern were the deeply sexist and misogynistic text exchanges among the acquitted about the complainant and women more generally. One month after the trial, the Criminal Justice Board of Northern Ireland commissioned an independent review of the arrangements to deliver justice in cases of serious sexual offences. The Gillen Review proposed 16 key recommendations, among them measures to dispel rape myths and the role that Relationship and Sex Education in schools could play in combatting these myths. I will explore these issues using Miranda Fricker's construction of epistemic injustice. I argue that there is little appreciation of the profound impact that routine testimonial injustice—where the credibility of a speaker is deflated or undermined on account of her social identity—can have on the wellbeing of speakers and how it ramifies with other forms of injustice. To illustrate, I draw on neurological explanations to show why attributions of sexual consent are unjustly sustained in cases of rape and sexual assault. (shrink)