Question & Answer: Defining Rape
Taken from this post. Made rebloggable by request.
Anonymous asked: Hi. Someone sent me this in an “ask” and I don’t know how to respond to it and thought you’d have a great response: A few feel that a broadened definition of rape desensitizes people to the concept. Intimidation is seen as more heinous than inebriation is seen as more heinous than coercion, ad infinitum. I don’t personally believe that anyone benefits from a created spectrum, though its a consistently-regurgitated thought. So, by placing all means under the same umbrella, is the term cheapened?
I’m implicitly wary of the assumption - sometimes tacit, but often overt - that rape exists on a continuum: that some rapes or forms of assault are worse than others, and that acknowledging the ‘lesser’ varieties somehow cheapens the impact of the ‘greater’. It seems grossly inappropriate to try and objectively predetermine the suffering of victims in accordance with a scale whose only point of reference is physical trauma - or, indeed, to behave as though their emotional trauma ought to be measurably linear, proportionate with how strongly they fought (or were able to fight) against it.
It doesn’t - shouldn’t - cheapen our understanding of rape to acknowledge the range of assaults that fit the description, because the whole point is that the damage caused by rape is more than physical. We as observers don’t get to determine how legitimate the trauma of victims is, or judge how extensive we think their suffering ought to be on the basis of what happened, or say their assault was ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than someone else’s assault just because they bruised less. It cheapens the testimony of victims to say they can’t describe their experiences as rape simply because they consented at first but changed their minds, or weren’t fully conscious while it happened, or because a different kind of penetration took place to the one we first thought, or for any one of a thousand other reasons that are based on our assumptions as observers rather than their experiences as victims.
The definition of rape is not being broadened; rather, its actual breadth is finally being acknowledged. And frankly, if the primary reaction this provokes in people who *haven’t* been raped is worry that they won’t be able to sympathise as fully with Victim A because something different happened to Victim B, then the problem has nothing to do with the definition of rape and everything to do with a failure of empathy.
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