Rape is a Theoretical Crime: Part 2 - Understanding Rape Myths

Rape myths decriminalise sexual violence by setting unrealistic conditions for ‘real rape’. Anything outside those conditions makes women responsible, men unaccountable and victims unreliable.

Image generated by AI

Rape myths have been the subject of discussion and research since the 1970s, and there’s a huge body of research on the influence they have on the legal system, people who commit rape and people who have been raped. I’ll get into the effects of this, but first I think it’s helpful to ground rape myths in the wider myths about gender, because they don’t just suddenly come alive after a woman has been raped and disappear back into the ether after a trial. They permeate all aspects of our lives and set the conditions that make rape so common and rapists so unaccountable (as outlined in part one of this series).

The Opposite Sex

Gender myths are an exercise in opposites. They’re based on the belief that all people are divided into two genders, each of which is defined by its contrast to the other. In this mythology, strength is masculine because weakness is feminine. Men are logical, objective and rational because women are emotional, sensitive and empathetic. Successful performance of a person’s gender is dependent on how starkly they can show themselves to be the opposite of the other gender. For example, female bodies tend to have less hair and muscle than male bodies, so femininity is enhanced by removing body hair and masculinity by increasing muscle mass. Brash, arrogant, vulgar, forceful men can be elected president. Women who display those characteristics have trouble getting a job.

Gender myths also define ‘good’ and ‘bad’ men and women within their gender roles. ‘Good’ men are strong, powerful, stoic, virile, protective and honourable. ‘Good’ women are submissive, empathetic, nurturing, selfless, fertile, and passively alluring. ‘Bad’ men are aggressive, violent, domineering, and cruel. ‘Bad’ women are weak, hysterical, vain, frivolous, provocative and duplicitous.

We’re all influenced by gender myths. Regardless of age, race, gender, or choices, we all grow up with the relentless battering of gender myths from how we dress our babies and the toys we give our toddlers to the stories we tell our children. They continue in adolescence and adulthood in online games, news, advertising,books, tv and movies art, sport, education, politics and of course, in easily accessible, free online porn. From infancy, people’s perception of our gender and how we conform to it affect how they treat us and even how much they like us. Even people who choose or are born to live outside the gender binary and people who consciously reject gender myths still live in the same world as the rest of us and can’t escape those definitions.

Rape myths cluster around the gender myths about sex and credibility, which dictate that masculine sexuality is virile, active and dominant, while feminine sexuality is passive, alluring and dangerous. Men, because they are supposed to be rational, logical and protective, are inherently trustworthy. Women are deemed to be weak, emotional, and vindictive and are therefore inherently untrustworthy.

‘Real’ Rape

When all this mythology is applied to sexual violence you get the myth of ‘real rape’. It has a specific script that lists all the conditions that must be met before a rape can be taken seriously, where everyone can believe the person who says they were raped and demand accountability from the person who committed the rape.

The ‘real rape’ script is where a pure, innocent girl is attacked at night in a public place by man she does not know. He is an immediately recognisable monster motivated by overwhelming lust for her beauty. He uses physical force to penetrate her vagina with his penis. She screams, fights back and receives visible physical injuries. After the rape, her attacker flees, and she immediately reports the rape to police, where her story is taken seriously, her injuries are documented, her attacker is identified, and the case quickly proceeds to trial. She cries every time she talks about the rape but is never angry, vengeful, or numb. Tears are the only sign of trauma she ever displays. From the very first report to police right through to the cross examination at trial, she remembers, in precise chronological order, all the details of the attack and this recollection is unwavering regardless of time or circumstance.

Anything that deviates from this script means it wasn’t a ‘real rape’ and the victim becomes the suspect. Not only is her credibility diminished and the devastation of being raped erased by these deviations, but her alleged rapist becomes the object of sympathy. If she’s not a pure young girl and it wasn’t a real rape, she must be a vindictive liar. She is getting back at a good man who rejected her lewd advances, or she’s after the buckets of cash the victimised men pay bad women to reclaim their good name, or she’s hiding her immoral activities from the judgement of more worthy observers.

Rape myths also weave themselves into myths about race, age, disability, and sexuality. The fetishisation of women of colour and the revolting myths that black women are ‘oversexed’ or Asian women are ‘hypersexualised’ immediately places them outside the pure young girl requirement for ‘real rape’. Equally, racist myths about black men being incapable of controlling sexual urges (particularly their desire to rape white women) cast them into the monster myth and highlights white men as the protective white knights who could not possibly fit the monster role. Women who have been drinking, flirting, having fun, wearing revealing clothing, actively pursuing sex or relationships (aka the ‘Tinder Rape’) are not pure or innocent, so they don’t fit the ‘real rape’ script. Nor do older women (who are presumed to have lost all sexual interest and desirability) and people with disabilities, who are also presumed to have no sexuality or desirability. Straight men, trans people, non-binary people, lesbians, and gay men also don’t fit the real rape script and are assumed to be over-sexed liars.

What does rape really look like?

There is no script and there is no such thing as ‘real rape’ There’s just rape.

While acts of sexual violence may have some common characteristics, the experience and circumstances are different for every person. Very few of those experiences, however, fit the ‘real rape’ script.

In 2020, the Australian Institute of Criminology put together a comprehensive list of research and data that debunks every aspect of the ‘real rape’ script. It’s well worth a read, but in summary it shows:

• Sexual violence is most often committed by men against women and appears to be more common in young people, but people of all ages and genders experience sexual violence.

• Most sexual violence happens in private homes.

• Race does not make someone more or less likely to commit rape or sexual assault.

• While rape can be opportunistically about sexual gratification, it is often more about power, dominance, and control.

• The person most likely to commit sexual violence is a man known to the victim (usually her intimate partner). They do not look like monsters, they just look like ordinary men.

• Visible physical injuries are rare.

• Fear is the weapon most often used to impose silence and minimise resistance.

• Most people don’t report rape and many who do find it frightening and stressful. Some police officers are supportive, others are contemptuous. There’s no way to know which one you’ll get.

• False reports to police are very rare, probably less than 5% and most of those are not malicious.

• Numbness is a common response, but different people have varying emotional responses, and they often change over time.

• Trauma can make memories fragmented, confused, and inconsistent. This does not mean they are false.

• Alcohol is sometimes used, either deliberately or opportunistically, as a weapon to incapacitate victims.

• Where rape and sexual assault are committed by someone in a relationship of trust and/or power with the victim, fear and control make it unlikely the victim will instantly end the relationship or cease communication with the perpetrator.

Where did rape myths come from?

In western civilisation, they’re historical, even biblical, and embedded in all forms of storytelling.

Rape myths, and the gender myth from which they’re created, are embedded in the stories we tell our children. Last year, when I was writing Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children, I was struck by how closely the fairy tale princess trope aligns with the ideal victim in the ‘real rape’ script. They’re both young and beautiful, without being at all sexual. They’re trustworthy because of their proven purity and unselfishness, which they demonstrate by contrast to their villainous counterparts – the wicked old witch, evil stepsister, or malevolently sexual bad fairy (aka, the vindictive, avaricious harpy who lies about rape to serve her own ends). Think Cinderella and the evil stepsisters, Sleeping Beauty and the bad fairy, or Snow White and the Wicked Queen. They’re all variations on the old whore/Madonna dichotomy, or what Anne Summers called Damned Whores and God’s Police.

Rape myths are embedded in ancient mythology and modern memes. They’re in tv shows, movies, social media, comic books, and even in romantic fiction.

Free online porn, which is easily accessible and viewed by most Australian men, sometimes depicts violent and degrading acts against women. Pornography, however, is not one monolithic thing. Some porn shows consensual, even loving activity. Evidence on the effect of watching porn is as mixed as the content in porn, but most reliable research suggests that adult men who have hostile attitudes to women and sex will reinforce those attitudes when they watch violent and aggressive porn. Adult men who don’t have such attitudes don’t routinely watch that kind of porn for sexual gratification and it doesn’t seem to affect their belief in rape myths if they do see it. The proliferation of free online porn is relatively recent, so research on the effect of porn on children and young people is still emerging. Some research indicates porn is ‘normalizing sex acts that most women do not enjoy and may experience as degrading, painful, or violating’ but sex, sexuality and beliefs are so complex it’s difficult to pin them all on one activity.

All these occurrences don’t operate independently. The myths that start in childhood are confirmed by widespread and consistent repetition over a lifetime of consuming stories and ideas. Even when they just flicker across our screen, each tiny instance reinforces the thousands that came before, until they harden into unexamined belief that they must be true, if only because they’ve always been true.

This is not to say we’re all wandering about pinning RAPIST signs on black men, giving comforting hugs to slim white girls who regret consensual sex, and stoning older women when they tell us about martial rape. Nor does it mean every police officer and juror who hears a rape allegation is briming over with misogyny, eager to colour the case with shrieks about lying sluts and hard-done-by white men. That’s not how rape myths work. They’re movable, changeable, sub-conscious beliefs that form over time and sit in the back of our minds to help us manage difficult or complex situations. Rape myths are a familiar story that repetition has turned into a reliable and relatable story. Most people probably don’t think about it very much, but if they are given what they need to replace that story with a new one that makes emotional sense as well as logical sense, they can and will change their beliefs.

Where this becomes difficult is in the strength of the real rape story and the dearth of stories that don’t fit that script.

Historically, rape was a crime against property, in which a man either abducted a woman to marry her and claim any wealth owed to her husband, or ‘stole’ her virginity and thereby reduce her value as a potential wife. This was not a crime against the woman who was raped, rather it was a crime against the man who owned the right to her body and property. Ownership demands exclusivity.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says the word rape probably comes from the Latin rapere, meaning to ‘seize, carry off by force, abduct’. Interesting, the word ‘rape’ has never been used in legislation about sexual violence against children. Possibly because sexually abusing children did not confer property rights upon the abuser, particularly if the child was a boy.

Rape myths have been embedded in legislation for hundreds of years. The corroboration rule required judges to instruct juries in sexual violence trials that they could not rely on evidence from women and children unless it was corroborated by witnesses. It was based on the myth that women commonly lie about rape. While it existed before his time, the doctrine of corroboration is often attributed to Sir Mathew Hale, a barrister, judge and strict Puritan, who sentenced at least two women to death for witchcraft in the mid seventeenth century. Hale, like many pious misogynists, was deeply concerned about women being ‘malicious and false witnesses’ against men of ‘good character’.

Hale was also the judge who said rape is ‘an accusation easily to be made, hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho’ never so innocent’ In other words, women can just cry rape whenever they want, and men can’t defend themselves. This quote became known as the ‘Hale Warning’ and was often read out in courtrooms during rape cases until the late twentieth century.

This fear hasn’t gone away just because we don’t burn witches anymore. The 2021 National Community Attitudes Survey in Australia found that over 40 percent of young men agree that ‘it is common for sexual assault accusations to be used as a way of getting back at men’ and one in four agree that ‘a lot of times, women who say they were raped had led the man on and then had regrets’.

Surveys can anonymise rape (it’s about a concept, not how you react if it’s your mate who is accused or your brother who is charged) and there’s always the possibility that people will give a response they think is acceptable rather than how they would react to a real life situation. The Australian National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety addressed this gap with a series of interviews and discussion groups about rape stories. Almost all the participants (male and female) started with a default position of mistrust and suspicion of the woman who said she’d been raped. Most of them referred directly or indirectly to the ‘real rape’ script and almost none of them thought to ask about the supposed rapist’s efforts to establish consent. Determining his guilt or innocence was not about evidence or facts, it was about his character - was he a monster or a good guy. Monsters are guilty, good guys are not. Or so the rape myths tell us.

---

The next instalment (part three) in this series will investigate how rape myths impact people who have been raped and people who commit rape. Part four will look at rape myths in the legal system. Then I’ll move on to law reform and alternative forms of justice.

If you want to read the next instalments in the series and haven’t already subscribed, you can sign up below. I will do my best to keep them all outside the paywall, but if you can afford to subscribe it’s only $10 a month and every subscriber helps me slice away time from chasing paid work to do this work.

Also, in case you haven’t seen it, my new podcast is out now: Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children is loosely based on the themes in my book of the same name. You don’t need to read the book to listen to the podcast, but you can find out more about both here.

---

Helplines

In an emergency, where you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call police on 000

If you want to ask for anonymous advice for yourself or someone you know, call one of the helplines listed below or talk to a trusted GP or nurse practitioner at your local medical centre.

1800RESPECT
24/7 support for people impacted by sexual assault, domestic and family violence and abuse.
Ph: 1800 737 732
www.1800respect.org.au

Sexual Assault Crisis Line
24/7 Support for victims of sexual assault
Ph: 1800 806 292
www.sacl.com.au

Full Stop Australia
24/7 National violence and abuse trauma counselling and recovery service
Ph: 1800 385 578
www.fullstop.org.au

Men’s Referral Service
24/7 Support for men who use violence and abuse.
Ph: 1300 766 491
www.ntv.org.au/get-help/

Blue Knot Foundation
Phone counselling for adult survivors of childhood trauma, their friends, family and the health care professionals who support them. Available between 9am and 5pm, every day.
Ph: 1300 657 380
www.blueknot.org.au

Lifeline
24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services.
Ph: 13 11 14
www.lifeline.org.au

Suicide Call Back Service
24/7 suicide prevention support
Ph: 1300 659 467
www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au