RAPE - TORONTO RAPE CRISES CENTRE

WE COULD FILL the rest of this book, a hundred books, with images of rape, and they would all be different. The point is this: there is no typical "rape victim"; and, conversely every woman and girl is a typical rape victim sigh with relief and think, "Well, I'm not like her. It's okay- I'm safe." As woman, we come up with all kinds of fictions to get us through our days and nights, fictions, which [persuade us that we are safe, and it will not happen to us. Perhaps without the fictions, we would not be able to get out of bed in the morning or to step outside the door. But the truth is that there is a not a girl or woman in this society who is not vulnerable to rape. Rape crisis workers are raped. Women living in suburbia with a husband and two children are taped. Old women, little girls, women in wheelchairs, lesbians, virgins, women of every race and class, of every size and shape are raped.

There are no rules, no handy set of guidelines to follow, which will prevent us from being raped. As woman, we are told to think that, if we behave in the right way, dress the right way, live a certain kind of life, then we will be protected somehow. We want desperately to believe that we have some margin of choice in the matter and that women who do get raped have simply made wrong choices: they dressed wrong, or went to the wrong place, or were too friendly, or not friendly enough. But a major point of this article is that when if comes to rape, we have no choices because we did not create the rules. When it comes to rape, we are all backed into the same small corner.

Rape is a man not taking "no" for an answer. It is a man assuming that the answer is "yes," without stopping to check, and assuming that he has the right to do this. Rape is any sexual act with which the woman does not consent. It is also any sexual act, which a woman is forced into committing because the rapist threatens her: perhaps to take away her job or her children, or to tell her boss she is a lesbian, or to cut off her welfare of unemployment cheque, or anything that will put him into a coercive position of power.

With the growth of the woman’s movement and feminists’ developing understanding of sexism, women began to realise that the fact of rape has major implications for us. We began to see that we live in a sexist society – in a society where woman, simply by virtue of the fact that we are woman, are denied the same opportunity, potential, and basic right to self-determination accorded to men. We also saw that simply by virtue of being female, women are vulnerable to all kinds of violence, both subtle and blatant in form: we are far more likely than men to be battered in our marriages and are more likely to be murdered by our spouse; we are more likely to be committed to psychiatric institutions and given shock and drug treatments; as females, we are more likely to be incestuously assaulted.

Rape is just one aspect of the violence done to women. But, like all other forms of violence against women, it stems form sexist values and beliefs. Women are seen in our society as objects existing for male pleasure, as passive and not knowing what we want, as needing and wanting to be dominated and controlled, as generally less valuable than men. We are encouraged to think that, if we are raped, it will be our own fault. Therefore, we live in fear of rape and assault and stay inside after dark or seek the protection of male friends, husband, policemen, when we do go out. Yet we are deluded when we think we are protected: these men are as likely to be rapists as are strangers on dark streets. In Canada, 1 in 17 women have been raped (kinnon, p.2). At least 50 percent of all rapes are committed in the home, as I will discuss in more detail later.

Through the feminist movement, we came to understand that “rape” is not simply an issue affecting individual women, but rather social and political issues directly connected to imbalance of power between men and women. Not coincidentally, other political movements of the early 1970's adopted the word "rape" in its broadest sense. The key aspects of the word – dominance, a violent taking away of control, and a violation of pride and dignity – came to be used by Vietnam war protesters, who spoke of the “rape” of the land, and socialists who criticise the “rape” of Third-World cultures by North Americans and Europeans. The domination and subjugation that is inherent in the word “rape” are part of the reason why it is such a powerful word for women in relation to their own experiences of assault. When, in 1983, the word “rape” was taken out of Canada’s Criminal Code and replaced with “sexual assault” a number of women were angry and upset. The intention, which was to make it clear within the law that rape is an act of violence rather than of sex, was good. However, these women felt that the word “rape” was the only word, which captured the meaning of the experience for women.

As women’s consciousness became raised around issues of rape and sexism, it became clearer that the legal system was not unique in its inaccurate portrayal of rape. As women spoke about their experiences of assault, we began to hear jokes in a new way and to see books, films, television programs, advertising and pornography in new ways. We realized that there was a whole package of myths and lies about rape with which we had grown up and which were still widely believed. We are taught all myths about rape, which encourage us to keep the truth locked deep inside. These myths teach us that rape happens to other women, but not us, if we have already been raped, that it will not happen again if we simply walk on a different street or wear a different skirt or avoid a certain bar. These myths are dangerous and harmful because they not only allow us to deny our vulnerability to rape; they also encourage us to feel guilty when it happens and to blame other women who are raped. Barriers are set up which keep us from talking to one another about our similar experiences and fears. The myths about rape mask the problem, keep us from getting at its roots, and discourage us from asking the key question: why is it that we live in a world where women are raped and assaulted daily by men who claim they are not responsible for their actions and who are almost never make to account for what they have done?

One of the most commonly held myths is that only young, conventionally attractive women are raped. We are taught to believe that women over 30, girls, large women, physically challenged women –any woman who does not fit the glossy airbrushed image of sexual attractiveness – do not get raped. But they do! Elderly women, women in wheelchairs, the mothers of girls who have been raped all call rape crisis centres. Often, they are frustrated because when they have related their experiences to friends, family, and professionals they are met with disbelief. An American study notes that the Washington D.C. Hospital emergency ward treated rape survivors ranging in age from 15 months to 82 years of age. Lorenne M.G. Clark and Debra J. Lewis also conclude in their study of rape in Canada “there is no evidence what so ever that any one, or even any numbers of rape victim form other women” (p.78). In other words simply by virtue of being born with female bodies, we all face the possibility of being raped at some point in our lives.

Another myth about rape is that men rape because of loss of self-control. This is closely connected with the myth that rape is a sexual crime, rather than a violent attack directed against a woman’s sexuality. Once we know that not only “sexy” and “pretty” women are raped, and then it becomes easier to understand the lie behind the myth of lost self-control. If men are not choosing the women (or girls) they rape on the basis of sexual attractiveness, then they are not motivated by a purely sexual lust, but by a desire for (in the rapist’s eyes) power. Rape has nothing to do with a woman’s attractiveness; rather it is rooted in the rapist’s need to force women into submission, to violate and degrade, and to be in a position of complete control.

The fact that most rapes are pre-meditated, particularly in cases where the rapist is unknown to the woman, further disproves the myth that rape is a crime of passion and abandon. In cases where the woman is on a date or where the rapist is a friend, the rape may not be clearly pre-meditated. In such cases, the rapist is usually acting on an assumption that he deserves and has a right to have sex with the woman because he bought her dinner, or gave her a ride home, or was invited into her apartment. Here, the rapist is also not raping because of raging lust, but because of a prior assumption that he has a right to the woman’s body regardless of whether she consents.

The myth of rape as a sexual act rising from loss of control is extremely dangerous to women. First, the mistaken perception of rape as sexual in nature makes it seem potentially enjoyable for women, rather than acknowledging that it is an act of violation, which leaves women in a state of humiliation, degradation, fear, and rage. Second, it encourages rape to be seen as an isolated act which individual erotically charged men commit against individual women who probably wanted it or deserved it anyway. It is not seen as an act that is closely tied in with the power that men have in our society and women’s corresponding status as objects of male pleasure. Third, it implies that rape will exist as long as men are sexual beings, which leaves women in a state of the power that men exercise in the world, it becomes clear that women can work towards eradicating rape by trying to change that power imbalance and men’s attitudes.

An often-repeated myth about rape is that women “ask for it.” The idea that women enjoy and consciously or unconsciously provoke rape is the bases for the ever-popular remark “lie back and enjoy it” and is constantly used to make us feel guilty. Our experience has been that most women feel in some way guilty for having been raped. As well, family, friends, and lovers very often increase the woman’s sense of guilt through their own attitudes and comments. Because of guilt and shame, women often withdraw and remain silent, rather that talking to one another and seeking support. So, again, the core of the problem is masked. The question generally asked is “Why were you raped?” rather than “What is it about him and about the world that caused him to rape you?”

Another popular myth tells us that women are usually raped by strangers in alleys, parks, and cars. Rape is seen as a crime of the streets committed by strange men lurking behind buildings and bushes. In reality, most rapes take place indoors, often in homes. In recent studies, the estimate of the number of rapes committed in private dwelling ranges from 51.9 to 67 percent (kinnon, pp.14, 84n.). We would tend to support the higher figure since most studies are based on reported rapes, and experience shows us that rapes committed in public places are more likely to be processed through the court system. Women raped in homes are less likely to be believed and less likely to report. Most women are raped by men with whom they are acquainted (kinnon, pp.14-16). Again, women raped by strangers are more likely to report and to be believed (Clark and Lewis, p.92; Kinnon p.8), so the number of women raped by acquaintances, friends, relatives, husbands, lovers, and co-workers is much higher than indicated in existing studies.

The stranger- in- the- alley myth ignores most of the situations in which women are raped. It encourages women to think that they will not be raped by their doctors or psychiatrists in their offices, by their bosses and co-workers on the job, by their teachers in school or by their husbands or lovers at home. As well, the myth, in conjunction with the fiction that women ask for it, is constantly used to make women feel guilty about walking out of doors, especially at night, without male protection. What the myth does not tell us is that we are as likely and probably more likely to be raped by any of these men as we are to be raped by a stranger on the street.

Rape and the fear of rape is clearly an enormous problem for women in our society. The function of all of the above-mentioned myths is to cover up the basic issues at the heart of that problem. These myths hold the morals and beauty of a woman responsible for rape, thus denying that all women are vulnerable to rape, when, in fact, they are; they teach that only a few strange men are rapists, when, in fact, women are raped by every type of man conceivable; and they encourage women to think that rape is somehow our fault, rather than placing our anger and blame where it really belongs. As we talk to one another about the reality of our experiences of rape and assault, the myths begin to fall apart. Our heads fill with questions and our hearts with anger. We begin to fight back and work hard for our basic right to live in a world in which no woman is ever raped, a world in which every man would find it unthinkable to force sexual contact on an unconsenting woman.

By the mid-1970’s women had begun to fight back together. The first rape crisis centres were being formed in the country and, at the first meeting of the Canadian Association of Sexual Centres (CASAC) in 1978, the anti-rape movement had blossomed to include 21 rape crisis centres. In 1982, the number of centres in the country had reached 48. For the first time ever, women had a place to go for support where they were not blamed, judged, or disbelieved. Rather, they were listened to, validated in their feelings, and shown that they were not alone. Rape crisis centres also began to provide advocates for women as they went through the police, legal, and medical systems. But, from the beginning, the rape crisis centres in Canada saw their purpose as being far more all encompassing than providing support and advocacy to individual women. CASAC began with a vision of a world where it would be inconceivable that men would rape. Part of their constitution states that “The intent of the Canadian Association is… to act as a force for social change regarding rape and sexual assault at the individual, the institutional and the political level.” The first goal of the association is “to work for the prevention and eradication of sexual assault.”

The past ten years have been a time of rapid growth and struggle for ht anti-rape movement in Canada. As women became more aware of us, our understanding of rape and violence against women grew. What we heard from women strengthened and re- inforced our original conviction that there was a huge gap between what women actually experienced and what society told us about rape. Our increasing experience as advocates for women going through the police, medical, and justice systems also taught us about how rape is viewed by society. The first thing we learned about the system is that most women who are raped do not have their cases heard at court. We found that almost everyone, including the system, assumes that most of the calls we receive are from women who want to report a rape that just occurred and who will be processed right through to court. Contrarily, most of the women we talk to are either unwilling to report the rape, or are not believed or are dismissed because there is insufficient evidence in the case. Many of the women who call rape crisis centres are women who have buried a rape in the backs of their memories for months or years and have reached a point where they are unable to cope anymore. Often they have never told anyone. At the same time, however, we did go through the system with enough women to become increasingly critical and outraged at the abuses women suffer at its hands.

For a woman deciding to report a rape, informing the police is usually the first step. Class and race have an enormous effect on the police’s decision to classify the report as founded or not, there are other factors which affect the decision as well. Clark and Lewis found that a woman is less likely to be believed if she has been drinking before the assault; if she accepts a ride home from the rapist or is hitchhiking; if she has had a long-standing relationship with the rapist; if she is not injured physically (and if she is injured, the more serious the injury, the better her chances); if she is under 19 or over30; and if she is separated, divorced, or in a common-law relationship (pp.78-94). (I would add to this list if she is a lesbian.) The key concern here is that, when a woman reports a rape to the police, it is her behaviour, which is at issue. Clark and Lewis concluded: “What is clear…is that it is the behaviour of the victim and not the behaviour of the accused, which plays a decisive role in the subsequent fate of rape cases” (p.65). The Ontario Provincial Police’s Survey of Sexual Offences with the OPP Jurisdiction during the Six-Month Period of April 1978 to September 1978 is blatant in its bias against women: “With the exception of 29% of the rape offences, or rape offences that were unprovoked, the victims showed a great lack of discretion. Promiscuity was a predominant factor” (kinnon, p.55)

Two recent trends in British Columbia and Ontario, indicative of the continuing tendency to treat the survivor with suspicion, are the use of the lie detector tests and the threat of public mischief charges. Police are now asking some women who report to take lie detector tests, and, as the Status of Women Council’s Report on Sexual Assault in Canada notes, they are not necessarily used in a supportive manner. The report mentions a case involving a 16-year-old incest survivor who was asked; “who were you sleeping with when you 13 ½ years old?” and “Who are you sleeping with now?” (kinnon, p.30).

Public mischief charges are threatened either when the woman is not believed, or when, after making a statement, she decides she does not want to proceed with the case (often as a result of the treatment she had encountered).

It is not surprising then that many women decide not to report rapes. In 1979, 3,888 rapes and 8,167 indecent assaults were reported to police in Canada (kinnon, p.1). Police estimate that this figure represents only 1 in every 10 rapes; recent studies have estimated the reporting rate to be about 1 in every 25, a more realistic figure. Of the 3,888 rapes in 1979, only 67.7 percent were classifieds “founded”, and charges were laid in 985 cases (kinnon, p.31). All other considerations aside, the percentages of “founded” rapes and the number of charges laid from these reports do not provide high incentives for women to report.

It would be a mistake, however, to make the police the sole or even primary villains in the scenario. Once we see that lawyers, judges and parliamentarians-the lawmakers in this country-are primarily white, middle-class heterosexual men, then it becomes obvious in whose interest the law is made. The police are the front-line enforcers of a system that does not see women as a priority. It is only to be expected that individual police officers reflect that system’s sexism, racism, and classism, and, in order to find real solutions to the problem of rape, the entire system has to be examined and radically restructured.

If a woman’s report is classified as “founded”, she is subjected to a physical examination for the purpose of finding medical evidence. In Ontario a standardized evidence-collection kit is used on every woman who reports. The kit was developed in the late 1970s as a result of a situation where rape cases were often thrown out of court because insufficient evidence had been collected. The examination is extremely thorough, and it is not hard to imagine how it feels to be internally examined, usually by a male doctor, shortly after being raped. (This is one of the major reasons women talk about feeling like they have been raped a second time.) Other aspects of the examination which take away from the woman’s dignity and increase her discomfort are the plucking of twelve public hairs; photographing of bruises and abrasions; the fact that she is told upon reporting not to urinate or bathe; and the sexism of doctors who may feel compelled to make unnecessary comments or to question the woman about her sexuality or the rape. (One woman was recently asked upon walking into the examining room, “So what makes you think you’ve been raped?”) The examination, which should not normally take more than 1 hour, has been known to take as long as 3 hours because many doctors still are not familiar with the relatively new kits.

For women who make it through the police and medical procedures, the next obstacle to be faced is the court system. Much has been made in recent years of the injustice of Canadian rape laws and the practices of the court system. As with the police, the primary focus has been on the survivor and on her sexual history and practices, which were often laid, open to judgements from the jury, judge, and defence attorney. The real issues have tended to become lost in the rush to discredit the woman. Because rape is considered a crime against the state, the woman’s fate is placed in the hands of the crown attorney assigned to the case. Like the police, he or she can drop the case if he or she believes the woman to be lying or if there is insufficient evidence.

Before the law was changed in 1983, it was weak and not reflective of women’s experiences of rape in several ways. Women could not charge their husbands with rape; the underlying belief here was that once a woman had married she was consenting to sex with her husband whenever he wanted it for the rest of her life. Another problem was that "rape" was considered to be rape only if the woman's vagina was penetrated by a penis. This ignored the preference of many rapists for bottles, broom handles, sticks, guns, and other inanimate objects, as well as the frequent occurrence of anal rape. The law also placed the onus on the woman to prove that she had physically fought back, so proof of physical injury was often necessary. This ignored the power difference between men and women, which enables men to use numerous forms of non-physical coercion (threats of loss of employment, or of danger to the woman's children, for example). As well, the law placed rape under Section IV of the Criminal Code along with public, moral, judgements of the victim, rather than naming rape as the brutal assault and violation that is in women's experience.

Despite all of the horrors of the system, the injustices faced by all women who report, and the added injustices faced by women who are doubly and triply oppressed, the institutions have adamantly encouraged and continue to encourage women to report rape. Women who chose not to report are often made to feel incredibly guilty by friends, family, and co-workers, who frequently wonder if the woman is telling the truth about her experience. If you were really raped, the line goes, and then would you not be trying to put the guy behind bars so that he could not do it again? The institutions tell us that they cannot stop rape unless we report rapists. Yet, when this line of reasoning is carefully considered, it becomes clear that reporting rape in our society as it now exists has very little to do with eradicating rape. As previously stated, a significant percentage of women's claims are classified as "unfounded" (32.3 percent in 1979). It is estimated that in 1979, only 5 percent of rapists were convicted of the crime (Kinnon, p.34). The following year, 1980, the conviction rate was 4 percent. The Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women notes that based on a reporting (to the police) rate of 1 in 10 rapes, then the real convicted rapists is between 2 and 3 years (kinnon, p.34). Very few prisons in Canada have treatment programs for offenders, and once they are released, the majority of convicted rapist’s rape again.

All things considered, the legal system offers women few reassurances that it is effective in stopping rape or providing justice. After enduring the whole police-medical-legal process, a process that generally takes a year or more of a woman's life, women are often left in one of two positions. When the rapist is acquitted, the woman often feels shame, an overwhelming sense of futility, and outrage. When the rapist is convicted, the woman is still often left drained and embittered by the entire process, wondering at the shortness of the sentence, and afraid for her safety once he is released. If we look at rape as an act, which takes a woman's control over herself away from her, then it becomes clear why so many women describe their experience in the justice system as a second rape. Women are shuffled from police to doctor to crown attorney with very little say in what happens to them. The woman hating, which is the cause for the rape itself, is often paralleled by the sexism women face when confronting the institutions.

Many women who are raped come, as a result of the rape, into contact with psychiatrists, psychologists, or other mental-health or social workers. This contact can come about through a range of circumstances varying from a woman being sent to the psychiatric ward of the hospital because she is deemed to be "hysterical" when she comes to be checked out, to a woman being referred to a psychologist by her doctor, to a woman who has gone to see a therapist for other reasons being told that it is essential that she "work through" the rape with him. Psychiatric institutions have the power to commit women against our wills, to administer drugs and shock treatments against a woman's will, and to label and define a woman's experience for her based on theories of behaviour and personality created by men. Because women are stereotyped as being irrational, "hysterical" (the root of the word "hysterical" being "womb"), it is easy for psychiatrists to discount our feelings and realities and prescribe routine treatments. Anyone in this society who is unable to afford a private therapist is particularly vulnerable to the injustices as is anyone who is not a member of the dominant culture: women and men of colour, for example, are two thirds more likely to be admitted to psychiatric institutions at some point in their lives than white men.

For a long time women who were raped were told by psychiatrists and psychologists either that they secretly wanted to be raped, or they were lying (witness Sigmund Freud's decision that all of the women who talked to him about being incestuously assault were imagining it.) Our treatment at the hands of the mental-health-care system has often been similar to a rape: but being believed about a rape is similar to not being believed when we say "no"; being committed to an institution or given shock treatment is similar to the loss of physical control in a rape; being reduced by a therapist to a "rape victim," rather than being seen as an individual woman, is similar to being reduced to a walking set of female genitals by a rapist. Another problem with the mental-health system is that women in its care are often raped and assaulted by therapists and, when women are institutionalized, by other personnel.

Since the late 1970s, in large part because of the work done by rape crisis centers in the area of public education, therapists have began to pay attention to the area of public education, therapists have began to pay attention to the issue of rape. There is even an official label now for what a woman experiences after being raped: the "rape trauma syndrome". Articles, books, and entire conferences have been devoted to the "treatment of the rape victim." Many, many women are still told by mental-health workers that they were raped because they subconsciously wanted it, or because they have a victim mentality, which draws rapists to them. Still, the mental-health system has been developing its awareness of rape to the point where rape has come to be seen as a mental-health issue. What this means, is that the system perceives rape to be a problem affecting individual women, which can be taken care of with the proper understanding of the rape trauma syndrome on the part of the therapist.

This is in many ways a dangerous notion. Rape is, quite simply, not a health issue that has to be faced by individual women in the way that some individuals have to be treated for broken legs or cysts or hay fever. A former group of female psychiatric inmates put it quite clearly in a Phoenix Rising article on mental health and violence against women: "The first problem is that the mental health system is enveloped at all. Violence against women is not a personal or individual issue, but a political reality. The concept of 'mental health' implies a corresponding pathology, but women who are survivors of violence are not ill. Women who are raped need to know that they are not alone in what they have experienced and felt that most women in this country are either raped or sexually assaulted. Giving women this context for their experience often makes for incredible anger-some-thing which most mental-health workers are not particularly comfortable with, particularly, in this instance, if they are male. It all so often leads to women wanting in some way to change society so that women are no longer vulnerable to rape, something else which mental-health workers are not equipped to help women do. Treating an individual woman for rape trauma syndrome may help her feel better in the short term. It does not guarantee in any way that the woman will not be raped again (a fear of many women) and it certainly does nothing toward ending rape. Individual treatment encourages women to see themselves as helpless victims rather than helping them try to change the fact that women are victimised.

In assisting the women who were processed through the different legal and social institutions, it was apparent to anti-rape workers that women are not all treated in the same way by those institutions. The likelihood of a woman's case making it through to a trial depends not only on her age, marital status, and whether or not she knew the rapist, it also has a great deal to do with whether or not she is white, and whether she is employed or is on welfare. As our analysis of sexism within institutions developed, so did many women's understanding of how those institutions also reflected the racism and classism of North American Society.

The same built-in structures and attitudes which take control and self-determination away from women work in similar ways to take those things away from working-class men and women and people of colour. Much of this becomes obvious in looking at the differences in women's experiences of the justice system. Because the police have the power to decide if a case is "founded" or "unfounded" (the distinction is supposed to be based purely on whether there is enough evidence to get the case into court, although decisions often have a strong basis in the police's judgements of the woman reporting the rape), they have a direct influence on which women's cases end up in court. And, because the police's judgements reflect the biases of controlling institutions, the women who are most likely to be believed are white, middle-class, married (though being a youthful virgin is almost as good), and professionals of homemakers. The fewer categories that a woman fits, the less are her chances of being believed.

American studies have made clear the links between the woman's race and the police's willingness to follow up on the case, as with the police in Pennsylvania who had a "lack of confidence in the veracity of black complaints and a belief in the myth of black promiscuity". Canadian studies are deficient in not drawing links between racism and women's treatment by the justice system. Cark and Lewis did find, however, clear evidence of class biases on the part of police, stating the women classified by police as "professional" were most likely to be believed, while those classified as "unemployed", "idle", or "on welfare" were by far the least likely to be believed (pp..91-94). These judgements are also likely to be made by judges and juries when, and if, women end up in courts, thus lessening the likelihood of conviction.

Working class and immigrant women and women of colour are placed in a particular double bind where rape is concerned. They are, if anything, more vulnerable to rape than other women because they have less power. For instance, the status of working-class women renders them particularly vulnerable to rape by employers or social workers, if they are on government assistance, because of economic dependence. Immigrant women, particularly those on visas or in the country illegally, are often the targets of employers, and not infrequently of the various officials with which they come into contact. The fact that working-class women and women of colour are less likely to be processed through the legal system, and are, therefore, less protected under the law, makes them safer targets for rapists.

Another factor in their vulnerability to rape and assault is the classism and racism inherent in the goddess / whore dichotomy still operative in our society. The women who are characterized as goddesses will always be white and middle class. Women not fitting into these two categories are more easily perceived by men as being sluts, "animals," and available as objects for male gratification and therefore, for rape.

Prostitutes and strippers are also extremely unlikely to be processed through the legal system when, and if, they report rapes. By the very nature of their job, they are seen to have given up the right to consent. The recent comments that a Hamilton, Ontario, judge made while he was sentencing a man who had raped and exotic dancer are a case in point. The judge commented that the woman was in a profession which "provoked lust," thus justifying his light sentence of 2 year-less-a-day. The implication was that the crime was not a serious as other rapes and that the woman should expect to be raped and assaulted because she is and exotic dancer. Once again, it is those who are least likely to be believed who are most vulnerable to rape because of their working conditions.

While rape continues to exist in our society because of men's ability to rape and get away with it, the structures of our society are reflected in the treatment of rapists by the courts and in the popular myths about which men rape women. It is no coincidence that, as with any other crime, the men most likely to be convicted are working-class men and men of colour. They are also likely to receive the harshest sentences. This is made crystal clear in a statistic Angela Davis refers to in Women, Race and Class: of 455 men executed between 1930 and 1967 on the basis of rape convictions, 405 were black. One of the main dangers of such biases on the part of the justice system is that it leads to a stereotype of the rapist as being black and / or working class. This is not only racist and classiest, but the adjunct to the stereotype is that white doctors, executives, politicians, professors, and social workers do not rape when, in fact, they rape as much as anyone else. In actuality, because of the power they have over their patients, employees, students, and clients, they are almost provided with a license to face without suffering consequences. The myths are also extremely harmful to women in that they teach a sense of false security. All types of men are potential rapists, and solutions to the problem will not be possible until we are aware of this.

At the same time, the anti-rape movement has had to begin to look at its own attitudes. Like the women visible in the forefront of the women's movement in the 1970s, the women who formed the first rape crisis centres in Canada were, not working-class women, but usually student's professionals and were generally white. They were the ones who had the leisure time and the access to seed money and resources. Because they generally did not have trade union struggles or anti-racist struggles as their primary issues, they had the energy to mobilize around the issue of violence against women. The anti-rape movement also presented, and in many cases continues to present, a heterosexual face to the world, although much of this has changed thanks to the criticism and struggles of lesbians within the movement. Like the women's movement, the anti-rape movement has come under criticism, such as that voiced by Angela Davis, both from working class women and women of colour. Davis, for example, criticises the North American anti-rape movement for not seeing or not being vocal about the racism inherent in the “myth of the black rapist”, (the myth that black men rape more frequently than other men and that they rape white women) and for contributing to the perpetuation of this myth (p.171). Davis also criticises the anti-rape movement for seeing rape as an incident isolated form racism: “An effective strategy against rape must aim for more than the eradication of rape-or even of sexism-alone “(p.201). If we are truly to create change, then it has to be for all women. Practically, and in the short term, we need to be changing our attitudes if we are to be useful to the woman on the other end of the crisis line tells her to go on a vacation, to have some time to herself, in order to get over her rape. A woman of colour who is being sexually harassed at work is not getting counselling if she is told casually that she should quit and get another job. Neither is a woman who can barely speak English who is told repeatedly over the phone that cannot be understood.

Women who are active in trade unions, welfare rights, Native rights, or Third-World struggles who are in rape crisis centers, or who come out to anti-rape demonstrations, are unlikely to continue to do so when we make no mention of their struggles in our public education and do not bother to support their struggles. Until we understand that the same system that denies Native land claims and continues to allow workers to become diseased and die because of unsafe working conditions is the system that allows 98 percent of rapists to go without penalty, we will never get anywhere. Until those of us who are white and middle class examine the benefits we get from that system through our privileges, and until we begin to change our attitudes in the same way we expect men to change their sexism, we will not be able to change that system.

Gradually, over the past ten to fifteen years the legal, medical, and psychiatric systems have come under more and more criticism for the way they have treated women who are raped. As the anti-rape movement began to speak more publicly about women’s experiences, the media began to present rape as being more than a sensational occurrence. Soon the news was full of indignant stories about women being refused rape examinations at hospitals, policemen commenting that women provoke rape, and the ordeals of women going through the court system. By the mid-1970s rape was a popular issue in the public eye. Suddenly federal, provincial, and municipal governments, police forces, and hospitals were taking the heat for years of indifference and poor treatment of women. In response, these institutions began to make changes, some of which were useful, some of which have merely clouded the issue, and few of which may prove to hinder the goals and objectives of the anti-rape movement.

During the second half the 1970s the federal and many provincial, and municipal governments, police forces, and hospitals were taking the heat for years of indifference and poor treatment of women. In response, these institutions began to make changes, some of which were useful, some of which have merely clouded the issue, and few of which may prove to hinder the goals and objectives of the anti-rape movement.

Rape crisis centres were, right from the beginning, very critical of police, legal, and medical procedures. Yet government-funding bodies were generally very eager to make sure that centres were “liaising” (to use the popular government terminology of the time) with these systems to ensure better care for women. This was often an unrealistic expectation since many hospitals and police forces, at least in the beginning, wanted nothing to do with rape crisis centres. Rape crisis workers were often perceived as unprofessional, improperly trained, and threatening. The idea was that doctors, psychiatrists, and policemen knew far more than any woman off the street possibly could and should, therefore, be left alone to do their jobs.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s this attitude had begun to change in some places. Government funding of crisis centres and rape research had made the truth obvious: rape was a problem of huge proportions in this country and the professionals were not only not solving the problem, they were often making it worse for the individual women they treated. Changes have been most apparent it urban centres across Canada. Many cities have set up task forces responsible for overseeing all of the systems and agencies working with rape in their city and for trying to effect change within those systems. Most of these cities, including Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, and Hamilton, have established what are know as “protocols” dealing specifically with reported rapes. This means that police, hospitals, crown attorneys, and often the rape crisis centre have standard procedures for handling rape cases and work together as a team. Usually, the rape crisis centre will be called in periodically to train emergency-room personnel and police investigators who work with women who are raped.

Another procedure, which seems to be increasingly popular, is to establish a rape treatment centre in the city. The treatment centre is set up in a hospital, and all women in the city who seek medical attention after being raped are referred to the particular hospital. The treatment centre may simply be comprised of specially trained medical personnel intended to examine the physical and forensic aspects of rape, or it may include counsellor-therapists employed to counsel and / or refer women to psychiatrists at the hospital or to outside therapists. Clinical research may also be conducted at the centre. The trend towards the establishment of treatment centres was reinforced in the Ontario Ministry of Health’s decision in early 1985 to spend $150.000 to create five new treatment centres in Ontario in addition to those existing in Toronto, London, and Hamilton

Changes have also been made in the justice system. Most provinces have now introduced standardized sexual-assault evidence-collection kits. These kits must be used by the medical personnel who examine a woman intending to report a sexual assault. They were developed in response to complaints from crown attorneys and judges that cases were being thrown out of court because evidence had been gathered inefficiently. In the past five years, most police forces in large urban centres have also set up crisis-intervention units or specially trained sexual-assault investigation teams who work closely with crown attorneys and treatment-centre personnel. Perhaps the most sweeping changes in the country are the changes to the Criminal Code made in 1983.

Bill C-52 removed the crime of “rape” from the Criminal Code and replaced it with three levels of sexual assault: basic sexual assault; sexual assault with intent to commit bodily harm; and aggravated assault. The three levels cover the whole spectrum of sexual assault, ranging from verbal harassment to rape with weapons, which cause severe physical damage. The intention behind the change in terminology was to avoid the moral stigma connected to the word “rape” and to stress the violent nature of the act.

One of the positive aspects of the change is that the old restrictive definition of rape is gone. Various forms of rape (oral rape, rape with objects, anal rape) are now technically regarded with equal seriousness. As well, the new definition admits that a woman can be raped by her husband. The new law will also make it more difficult for a defence lawyer to bring up a woman’s sexual history, and a woman’s testimony need not necessarily be corroborated. Because lawyers will be able to plea-bargain charges down to the first level of sexual assault, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years with 2 being the usual sentence-as opposed to the former maximum penalty of life imprisonment for rape-juries may be more likely to convict.

Unfortunately, despite the changes, a great deal will be left to the discretion of individual judges. For example, the new law allows that if a man had “honest reasonable belief” that he had obtained consent, and then the act is not considered a sexual assault. Women’s groups campaigned hard against the inclusion of those three words in the law, but our objections were disregarded. The inclusion of the clause means that any man can plead honest reasonable belief. It is then left up to an individual judge to rule whether this was so. The clause undermines some of the changes in the law: for example, a husband can plead that he honestly believed his wife was consenting because she had consented every other time they had sex.

The changes in the law may well make it easier to apprehend and convict rapists. This was certainly the government’s and legal system’s intentions in making the changes. But, as Barbara James points out in her article, “Breaking the Hold: Women against Rape,” the changes are “essentially semantic”:

The reform proposals do not consider or challenge the pervasive system of violence and power that exists in society. As feminists we cannot realistically expect from a legal system that is designed to provide protection of private property, changes that would upset the existing balance of power by eliminating an essential means of social control over women. But prevention of rape and far-reaching social changes have never been within the realm of the legal system, and we are calling into the wind if we ask that such change be generated from within the legal system.

As a result of institutional reforms, there has been a flurry of activity across the country in the systems and agencies that work with rape: committees have been struck, consultants hired, research conducted, and programs established. Much of the activity has been directed towards developing procedures for the treatment of rape “victims” to ensure that their treatment is consistent and supportive. The other intention has been to make it easier to apprehend and prosecute rapists. Rape has become a concern not only for groups of women organized around the issue, but for professionals and lawmakers and enforcers. Thus, rape has become a source of funding and employment. The discovery, on the part of the social-service industry, that rape was an issue which could be funded was similar to the same industry, that rape was an issue which could be funded was similar to the same industry’s more recent discovery of the problem of incest as described by Louise Armstrong: “You could hear the gears of specialization grinding, the carving up of victim-populations, the negotiations for turf, the vying for funding, for prestige, for place, Never having heard it before, I did not then identify the hum and buss as the sound of persons professionalizing”. The past five years have indeed seen a scrambling for funds and prestige as rape has become popularized and placed into the hold of professionals and institutions.

There is no questions that money, time, and energy is now being spent on the problem of rape (even though crisis centres which remain outside the institutions are still scrambling for basic funding). The institutions, which have been so severely criticized, can now point to their treatment programs and special co-ordinations and sexual-assault teams and imply that they are now in the process of getting the problem of rape under control. But how do these changes affect women? And will these changes work towards stopping rape?

In areas where police and medical reforms have been made, the chances of a woman being treated sympathetically and efficiently when she chooses to report a rape are much greater than they were ten or even five years ago. There are still women in these cities who wait 7 hours for a rape examination, who are denied their requests for female doctors even at rape treatment centres, and who undergo examinations lasting 3 hours. There are still women in these cities being raped by policemen. Women who report rape are still not believed by policemen (one sexual-assault investigator recently commented that “80 percent of women who come in to report rape are lying”). It would be ludicrous to think that the sexist attitudes of those working within the systems can be changed overnight when fifteen years of the women’s movement has not been able to stop sexism. Those working within these institutions would argue that it is mainly a question of time before the reforms that have been institutionalised take effect so that all women who report are guaranteed proper treatment at the hands of doctors and police.

This may well be true; however, these changes will only affect some women directly since only 1 in 20 women report rape. The reforms affect all women in that they encourage us to believe that something is really being dome about rape. One of the dangers for women now is that, because of the changes, women can be make to feel even more guilty than in the past if they choose not report a rape. The argument goes: now that the police and doctors and lawyers have done what they can to make it easier to report, women have to play their part and come forward so that rapists can be apprehended. This argument, first of all, does not take into account the fact that many of the reforms are only as good as the individual attitudes of the individual police, doctors, and judges working within the institutions. Second, it ignores many of the real reasons why women chose not to report rape such as fear for their safety, their jobs, and their families, as well as their own sense of guilt, shame, and humiliation.

The reforms are also problematic in that women can be persuaded to believe that, because to government is spending money and changing laws and doing research, and because the police and hospitals are creating special programs that will make us safe, that this will stop rape. The truth is that it will not. Institutions cannot stop rape though they can make it easier for individual women who are raped.

If we accept that rape exists in our society because men are socially conditioned to think that they have a right to sex on demand and to need to feel dominant and in control of women, then it becomes clear that all of the best police and court procedures in the world will not put an end to rape. Funding for rape crisis centres and hospital treatment centres will improve the lot of women who are assaulted, but it will not stop rape –nor will keeping women behind closed doors (as we know, women are probably more vulnerable to rape in the home than on the street), or dressing us up in burlap bags. Until men understand how their social conditioning affects their attitudes toward women and that rape is the result of these attitudes, women will continue to be raped.

The process of dismantling attitudes built up over years of social conditioning in an individual man’s life, and over centuries of Western culture is a long and painful one. Women can help men do some of this work: we can tell men how it feels to live with the fear of rape, to see our bodies being abused daily everywhere we look, and can, thus, help men see the damage created by their attitudes and show them what needs to be changed. But the actual burden of changing attitudes rests upon men.

A number of men have already started to take on some of this work. Several anti-sexist men’s groups have formed in Canada. One of the most active and longest-running groups is Vancouver Men against Rape. The group’s basis of unity acknowledges that all men are in some way brought up to enact sexist behaviour-of which rape is the extreme end of the scale:

As men we are socialised (more or less successfully) to embody, accept and collude in a whole continuum of sexist ideology and practice against women and against each other. Our attempts at anti-sexist politics must take this unpalatable fact into account.

Such men’s groups can be useful in working towards and end to rape in that they are tackling sexism, which lies at the roots of rape, head-on. Of all the other social-service agencies, government funding bodies and other assorted agencies and groups, which have made rape their concern in the pasty ten years, rape crisis centres are the only ones whose stated goals include eradicating rape. This is, in fact, the primary long-term goal of the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres. Rape crisis workers realised early on that this was a necessary goal, primarily because of our experiences of counselling the survivors of sexual assault day after day. After talking, for example, to a woman who has been raped four or five times in her life and realizing that we could not guarantee to her that it would not happen again, or after counselling a woman who has been raped and cannot go outside her house because of her fear of being assaulted and then realizing that she has very good reasons for being afraid, we understood that band-aid solutions, patting a woman’s hand while she cried, simply was not enough. It was not enough for the women we counselled, and it was not enough to keep us going. What we came to see very quickly was that, though the women we counselled were in crisis, they were not the ones who were messed up; it was the world around them that was a mess. And, unless we were working toward changing that world, and offering women alternatives and ways to fight back against what was wrong in the world, we as counsellors were not worthy of their trust. So rape crisis centres organized Take Back the Night marches as a way of asserting the basic right of women to walk unprotected and free from fear on the streets. We began to educate public school children and community groups and labour groups in rape prevention and sexism in an attempt to change attitudes. Many of us started organizing self-help groups for sexual-assault survivors, helping women to see that they are not alone or to blame. Rather, the responsibility for what happened to them rests squarely on the shoulders of our male-governed society. Some of us began helping women who wanted alternatives to the legal system to plan confrontations with their rapists. We began acting as a voice of criticism of the systems, particularly the justice system that work with women who are raped. In short, over the past ten tears, rape crisis centres in Canada have worked to build an analysis of why rape happens; to criticize the elements of your society that perpetuate rape, with and aim to changing those elements; and, in the meantime (for we have never been idle dreamers), we have tried where we can to offer women alternatives to the existing systems (Psychiatric, legal) and to act as their advocates when they are dealing with these systems.

This role is, however, growing more and more difficult to maintain. As the issue of rape has become popular and professional, more government funding has been made available for rape crisis work. Yet the government is willing to fund only certain kinds of work. They are not particularly interested in long-term goals like the eradication of rape, so they are not generally willing to fund public education work even though rape crisis centres have adamantly maintained that this is a crucial part of their work. They are even less willing to fund such political actions as Take Back the Night marches and other forms of demonstrations. And, obviously, being the government, they are not willing to fund rape crisis centres to criticize governmental actions and policies publicly. Social-service agencies whose primary concern is crisis intervention are seen as safer and more desirable to fund. In the past five years or so, a number of social services that had not previously had sexual-assault programs have set up programs funded by government.

This leaves rape crisis centres in an awkward position. Some centres have chosen to consider themselves as social-service agencies and have, as a result, received increased funding. They have hired professional administrators to run their centres and psychologists and trained therapists to do counselling. The danger for these centres is that the long-term goal can get lost in the statistics and forms of bureaucracy. As well, women who have perceived rape crisis centres as becoming clearly separate from the systems that oppress women and as existing primarily as advocates for assaulted women, may feel that such centres are too much like the rest of the system of professionals that they have been dealing with and, thus, choose not to for to the rape crisis centre for support.

Other centres have been separating themselves more and more clearly from professional agencies as those agencies expand their rape treatment programs. Vancouver Rape Relief, for example, stated in the February 1985 issue of Off Our Backs,

We want the women who call us to know the difference between us and the hospitals, police, court, etc... so we stay as separate and independent of them as we can... We believe criticizing the actions of individuals in these institutions and the politics of the institutions themselves is a more effective use of our time and political clout than sitting on the board or doing training seminars.

Increasingly, rape crisis centres are faced with the choice of employing more specialized professionals at the expense of their status as grassroots organizations working both to take care of the needs of individual women and to perform the enormous task of changing a sexist society into a society that is safe for women, or fighting to stay grassroots at the expense of funding and co-operation form legal, medical, and government institutions.

While the pressure to become professional poses the major challenge to the anti-rape movement in Canada today, the other enormous challenge being taken on by at least some sectors of the movement is the need for coalition work with other political groups whose goals are similar or interconnected. The anti-rape movement will never achieve its goal of a world safe for women until it is a movement, which incorporates the interests of all women. As Angela Davis stated in her International Women’s Day address in Toronto in 1985,”... if a black woman is attacked, all women are attacked. “Davis went on to speculate that in the 1980s progressive political movements have a better understanding of the connections between oppressions, a realization that as women, working-class people, people of colour (and we would add, gays and lesbians) we need to help one another in our struggles in order for any of us (and all of us) to win.

What this means for the anti-rape movement is that we need to make the connections between the fact that women are denied control over their bodies and the fact that working-class people labouring in factories with unsafe working conditions are also denied control over their bodies. Just as women do not have freedom of movement on the streets, neither does black South Africans and neither did Japanese Canadians or European Jews during World War II. Just as violence against women limits our right to consent to sex, homophobic biases against women limits our right to consent to sex; homophobic biases deny lesbians and gay men the right to choose their sexual partners. Once we recognize these connections, then action follows necessarily: we begin to support the struggles of unions, gay and lesbian rights groups, Third-World and anti-racist groups, and other progressive political movements. We do this by showing up at demonstrations and rallies, keeping petitions in our offices, inviting other groups to workshops for our education, and drawing the connections between the struggles in our public speaking. It also means that, as a predominantly white and middle-class movement, we need to struggle to change our classism and racism. If we expect to broaden our base as a movement or to do coalition work with other groups, then we need to make sure that we are knowledgeable about and prepared to support the struggles of other oppressed people. Only through such united struggle, through the day-to-day grassroots organizing, will we move from small changes in attitudes and actions to a society where no class or race or group of people will dominate another-a society where no woman will be raped or dominated in any way by a man.

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