In the United Kingdom today only 5,6% of reported rapes end in a conviction. ”I think there should be a Women: where not to go tourist map,” says historian Joanna Bourke, only half joking. It was these statistics that enraged Bourke and transformed the writing of her latest book, Rape, A History from 1860 to the Present.
”I was forced, in a sense, to put myself in this book, because researching it made me realise that it’s not out there, it’s here. It’s happened to my friends, it happens to one in five women, and the conviction rate is shocking.”
Whereas previous studies of rape have focused on the victims, Bourke’s approach has always been to take a cold, measured look at those who carry out acts of violence, as she has done in works including An Intimate History of Killing and Fear: A Cultural History. ”All my previous books were about perpetrators, so it seemed natural to continue to focus on them. That’s the way you understand something, then you can defuse it, by demystifying it.”
The previous books were shrewdly detached, but there is an undercurrent of anger this time round. The book explores how the cultural perception of rape has changed, quoting from prison journals, medical textbooks and trial reports. Essentially, Bourke demands: ”Who are these violent people, and what can we do about them?”
There is, of course, no conclusive answer. She discusses the crime and wonders about the punishment. Imprisonment? Castration? She painstakingly describes the rape myths that have allowed perpetrators to ”get away with it”, such as the 19th-century theory that you can’t rape a woman who resists. (”It is impossible to sheath a sword into a vibrating scabbard,” as one 19th-century judicial textbook declared.)
And Bourke doesn’t shy away from discussing female rapists. ”That was really hard, on a personal and ideological level. I always thought they were imitating men . . . but they weren’t simply adopting a masculine form of aggression; female perpetrators perpetrate in a female way. If you ask the question, ‘Were you sexually assaulted or raped as a child?’, all of a sudden mothers, babysitters, teachers become the perpetrators. I found that very distressing and unexpected, and it’s true that a tiny, tiny 1% of convicted rapists are women.”
Bourke leans forward in her book-lined room in London’s Birkbeck college. ”Whatever period you look at, rapists try to adapt the social mores of the day to explain away their abusive behaviour. So the 19th-century rapist left money behind — these were poor guys, not wealthy — and he would say, ‘I press this coin against your breast because you’re not worthy of me putting it on the mantelpiece.’ Why does he say that? Well, working-class men put their wages on the mantelpiece, so he’s treating his victim like a whore. But after the 1970s the rapist tries to make it into a dating encounter — he’ll leave the woman at a bus stop, give her the cab fare, ring her afterwards.”
She leans back. ”That’s why history is so great — you see how things change over time. I’m a naturally happy person and some of my friends say I think too optimistically, but there have been times when there hasn’t been a major problem with rape. In the ‘long 19th century’ (1840s to 1914), Britain had very low levels of stranger rape. ”Rape rates really started increasing during war periods (1914-18, 1939-45), and then rose dramatically from the early 1960s onwards … If it changed before, it can change again. I’m hopeful.”
Bourke, who describes herself as a ”socialist feminist”, is clear that legal reform is needed, but also believes ”that men should step up to the plate. Women are told how to fight back, to get good locks for our doors, to be sensible. It has become our responsibility to make sure ‘they’ don’t do something to ‘us’. And when you know that a lot of rapes are committed by husbands, boyfriends and acquaintances — well, it’s outrageous. I can’t work out why people aren’t more outraged. But this epidemic of sexual violence doesn’t do men any favours either. Not normalising it, not naturalising it, making it seem abhorrent — that’s one of the ways forward.”
For her next book she is thinking of writing something about male erotics. ”There’s a lot written about negative male sexuality, so it would be interesting to look at what good male sex would be, from both the male and female perspectives.”
Bourke’s unflinching curiosity, combined with her insistence that the lessons of the past can transform the future, allows her to imagine a time ”in which sexual violence has been placed outside the threshold of the human”. It’s a visionary outlook, a world where good sex replaces bad. — Â