OPINION A lot has been said about the ‘boys make mistakes’ comment that one of our great leaders made. A lot has been said in response, as well. Much of the commentary has been along the lines of how that’s a crude and horrible comment to have made when the so-called ‘mistake’ the boys make can potentially scar and ruin the victim’s life.
But what if it weren’t so? What if rape did not have the power to destroy a woman’s life? Rape is very rarely simply about sexual desire. If you’ve got desire and nowhere to put it, as it were, all you need is a fairly cheap internet connection, a desktop that comes quite cheap now, electricity that most have access to for at least a little while and their own hand. Failing that, their imagination and their own hand will do.
Rape is about power – and a sense of entitlement that they must and should have that power over the victim. It’s about how the forced act of sexual intercourse takes away the bodily autonomy of the person and leaves them at the rapist’s mercy. It’s about the control that they have over the victim, and how they can do whatever harm they wish to her. It’s a way of punishing her. Just lust can be satiated without coercion or violence; lust for power over another person cannot.
I firmly believe that the law should focus on how victims are treated rather than on harsher punishments for rapists, because the latter will not stop rape. There will always be people who are predators by nature or nurture – the ones who prey on those they see as weak, simply because they can. There will always be ones who want to punish a woman for stepping out of bounds. As long as society says that sex is a way to control a woman, to destroy her life, to punish her, this will not stop.
Rape is such a grievous offence because of the effect it has on the victim during the act and after it – not because of the physical harm if causes, unless it’s a particularly violent act of rape. It makes her feel like she is less because she was raped. It makes her ashamed of what happened to her. It makes her feel as if she has been violated, body and soul.
But the real question is why this particular crime has the power to make a victim feel more violated than she would be if she had been hit on the head with a rock or punched in the gut repeatedly, both of which could cause death more easily than rape could. If the ideas of a woman’s honour, her family’s honour, her value, her worth and her autonomy weren’t tied in with the act of sexual intercourse, would rape really be as common as it sadly is today? If it could no longer punish, it could no longer be used for power.
Our views on what a ‘fallen woman’ is and how she must be treated give this one act so much power. We define so many of our morals and values based on sex. Virgin till she weds: good girl. Premarital affair: fallen woman. Sex with more than one man: whore. Wears clothes that reveal parts of body that we have sexualised through our perception: slut. So many of our judgments of a person revolve around how we perceive their sexual experience, or lack thereof.
If sex and all things sexual were no longer used as ways to measure a person’s worth and value, would sexual assault have more impact than any other kind of serious physical assault? This way of defining morals and values is what gives the act of rape the power to destroy lives. Through rape, the entire worth of the individual can be shattered according to our current world view.
If we changed the way we view women and how we define them into different types of women depending on sex, rape would no longer accomplish its aim of asserting complete control over the victim’s identity. Rape would be an offence that causes grievous bodily harm, and would be punished as such by the legal system.
Victims who come forward would be treated like any other victim of assault. Being a rape victim would no longer be the woman’s only identity in society’s eyes. The potential impact being raped has on a woman’s life would be diminished, and with that, rape would stop being the most effective way to take away her self.
Sex, in short, would not be a way to control or punish anybody. It would simply be a physical act which, when done within the intimacy of a trusting relationship, is pleasurable and fulfilling. It would be an act which, when performed without consent, becomes assault – one which has no long-term effects on a victim that a mugging wouldn’t have.
It would still be a traumatising, mentally and physically exhausting and a draining experience. But it would be something she could put behind her without having to suddenly be shifted into another category of women – that of the rape victim. The fallen woman who is not to blame (this does depend on whom you ask), but is nonetheless now worth much less than the virgin.
If rape can destroy a woman’s life, it says more about how little value we put on a woman’s life than anything else. If that is so, what would stop a rapist from just killing the woman to avoid identification if the death penalty awaits him when caught?
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