(triggering, as is linked story)

I just started reading Joanna Bourke’s Rape: Sex, Violence, History and so far I am really impressed with it. The book is focused on exploring why people commit sex crimes, but in the first chapter she explores the history of rape myths (in England, Australia, and the US), giving you a pretty good idea of where our warped opinions on sexual violence and victim-blaming come from.

The history is really fascinating, albeit disturbing. I was shocked by the claims of forensic professionals and physicians (throughout the 19th and into the 20th century) that a woman couldn’t really be raped by a single man, since a) a man would obviously be put off by any real struggle and quit and b) a woman really should be able to fend off a man using her “hands, limbs, and pelvic muscles.”

Then there were those who argued that perhaps women could be raped, but only the wealthy ones:

In the words of J. Dixon Mann in an influential forensic textbook of the 1890s, ‘women of the lower classes’ were ‘accustomed to rough play with individuals both of their own and of the opposite sex,’ and thus had ‘acquired the habit of defending themselves against sportive violence.’ Their ‘capacity for defence’ rendered them capable of frustrating the attempts of any ‘ravisher.’ In case the point was not clear enough, Mann candidly contrasted these sturdy working women with their more ‘delicately nurtured’ counterparts who might be ‘so appalled by the unwonted violence that her faculties may be partially benumbed and her powers of resistance correspondingly enfeebled.’ (Bourke, 27)

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Bourke gives us Michael Ryan’s Manual of Medical Jurisprudence (1831), in which Ryan expresses anger over the attention being paid to working class children who showed signs of venereal disease, since he was sure their symptoms were “nothing more than the everyday ‘purulent discharges’ physicians should expect in grimy children.” Bourke writes,

As late as the 1940s, physicians were reminded that ‘in most cases of assault of this type the children come from the poorer classes of home where the daily tub is not the rule.’ Therfore signs of redness or irritation of the child’s genitals were probably due to threadworm, not abuse. (Bourke, 30)

Seeing this kind of rape-apologism and victim-blaming based in class isn’t surprising exactly, but it still stings to read. And one can see that we have indeed come a long way…but…

This week CBS News released the findings of their investigation into why there are at the very least 20,000 rape kits in the U.S. that were never sent to the labs for testing: Exclusive: Rape in America: Justice Denied. This doesn’t even include the rape kits that are sent to the lab but “remain untested for years.” How does this happen? Well, each kit costs $1500 to process. And then there’s this:

Valerie was told her rape kit wasn’t tested because they didn’t have the money. But when we caught up with Kenton County prosecutor, Rob Sanders, he told us something else.

Keteyian asked, “Why wasn’t the rape kit tested in the Valerie Neumann case?”

“The results of the DNA test would not have made the case one way or another,” Sanders said.

Sanders said his office made a “judgment call” the case was unwinnable in court — claiming there were issues with Valerie’s memory and the alcohol involved.

Well, that’s sobering, isn’t it?

I understand the factors that make rape potentially far more difficult to prosecute than other crimes, but the idea that women’s cases aren’t being investigated because someone makes a ‘judgement call’ that basically, to use the words of J. Dixon Mann, she didn’t use her ‘powers of resistance’ as much as she could have is really gross and unsettling. And I would love to see the income/race breakdown of the women whose kits went untested…

The comments on the CBS piece are predictably horrible, and do even more to make me feel like I’m living in the 19th century. Folks are so convinced that the ‘rape crisis’ is overly inflated by the media; that the numbers can’t possibly be right; that rape is taken EXTREMELY seriously. So seriously that tens of thousands of women don’t even have their evidence processed?