Rape culture

Rape culture is a sociological concept for a setting in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality. Behaviors commonly associated with rape culture include victim blaming, slut-shaming, sexual objectification, trivializing rape, denial of widespread rape, refusing to acknowledge the harm caused by sexual violence, or some combination of these. It has been used to describe and explain behavior within social groups, including prison rape and in conflict areas where war rape is used as psychological warfare. Entire societies have been alleged to be rape cultures. The notion of rape culture was developed by second-wave feminists, primarily in the United States, beginning in the 1970s. Critics of the concept dispute the existence or extent of rape culture, arguing that the concept is too narrow or that, although there are cultures where rape is pervasive, the idea of a rape culture can imply that the rapist is not at fault but rather the society that enables rape. The term 'rape culture' was first coined in the 1970s in the United States by second-wave feminists, and was applied to contemporary American culture as a whole. During the 1970s, second-wave feminists had begun to engage in consciousness-raising efforts designed to educate the public about the prevalence of rape. Previously, according to Canadian psychology professor Alexandra Rutherford, most Americans assumed that rape, incest, and wife-beating rarely happened. The concept of rape culture posited that rape was common and normal in American culture, and that it was one extreme manifestation of pervasive societal misogyny and sexism. Rape was defined as a crime of violence rather than a crime of sex as it had been before and the focus of rape shifted from desire for sexual pleasure to one of male domination, intimidation and a sense of control over gender norms. Rape also started to be reexamined through the eyes of the victims rather than the perpetrators. The first published use of the term appears to have been in 1974 in Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women, edited by Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson for the New York Radical Feminists. In the book, the group stated that 'our ultimate goal is to eliminate rape and that goal cannot be achieved without a revolutionary transformation of our society'. This book, along with Susan Brownmiller's 1975 Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, was among the earliest to include first-person accounts of rape. Their authors intended to demonstrate that rape was a much more common crime than previously believed. In the book, Brownmiller comments upon the idea that women never spoke about rape because women would never want to be open about a 'crime against their physical integrity' which explained the general public's ignorance over how often rape was occurring and to whom. Brownmiller, a member of the New York Radical Feminists, argued that both academia and the general public ignored the incidents of rape. She helped spark psychologists to begin observing and studying what sparked this 'rape supportive culture'. Her book, Against Our Will, is considered a landmark work on feminism and sexual violence, and it is one of the pillars of modern rape studies. Sociology professor Joyce E. Williams traces the origin and first usage of the term 'rape culture' to the 1975 documentary film Rape Culture, produced and directed by Margaret Lazarus and Renner Wunderlich for Cambridge Documentary Films. She said that the film 'takes credit for first defining the concept'. The film discussed rape of both men and women in the context of a larger cultural normalization of rape. The film featured the work of the DC Rape Crisis Center in co-operation with Prisoners Against Rape, Inc. It included interviews with rapists and victims, as well as with prominent anti-rape activists such as feminist philosopher and theologian Mary Daly and author and artist Emily Culpepper. The film explored how mass media and popular culture have perpetuated attitudes towards rape. In a 1992 Journal of Social Issues paper entitled 'A Feminist Redefinition of Rape and Sexual Assault: Historical Foundations and Change', Patricia Donat and John D'Emilio suggested that the term originated as 'rape-supportive culture' in Brownmiller's Against Our Will. By the mid-1970s, the phrase began to be used more widely in multiple forms of media.