Rape - A male perspective
Uploaded by kharding on Mar 08, 2002
According to government figures, the average British woman in 1991 stood a one in 7,539 chance of being raped during the course of the year. In the twelve-month period up to October of that year some 3,900 women were raped. That marked a 17 per-cent raise on the previous year. This was said to be due to the fact that more women are prepared to report cases of rape. Vast numbers of women say that they feel unsafe on the streets after dark. They are terrified of being alone in a railway or tube carriage. Black cabs are now considered too dangerous for women when they were once considered a woman's safest refuge. It's suggested that the number of rapes that are reported form a tiny proportion of the total that are committed. A survey of some 2,500 female college students organised by the Cambridge Students Union claimed that one in nine had been the victim of rape and one in five had suffered some form of attempted rape. In the vast majority of cases, men who had known the victim had carried out these rapes.
In the autumn of 1991, a decision by the Court of Appeal overturned the traditional view that there was no such thing as rape inside a marriage. According to some rape crisis centres, 1,370,000 women had been raped by their husbands.
As a man how am I meant to respond to such statistics? First I feel shame and then a sense of denial. I even question the way in which the research was carried out. What were the questions? How was rape defined? Who replied? You will note that in the case of the Cambridge survey, respondents were volunteers and, therefore, self-selecting. They may, even, have had axes to grind. Dare I even suggest that man-haters conducted the surveys? The London Rape Crisis Centre produced a guidebook called Sexual Violence: The Reality for Women and described rape as: 'All sexual assaults, verbal and physical, that we all suffer in our daily contact with men. These range from being "touched up" and "chatted up" to being brutally sexually assaulted with objects. Throughout this book we use rape to describe any kind of sexual assault.' Next time I'm in a club and some girl asks me to buy her a drink should I scream rape? With quotes like these being read by women how can the human race...