I’ve been reading various discussions about the gang-rape of a 15-year-old girl in California and the aftermath. (Warning: the article is intense and potentially triggering.) One constant, as with almost every such conversation, has been the mindset when it comes to rapists and abusers.
There’s a strong sense of us vs. them. How could they do this? How could the bystanders just watch? I’ve come across various theories–they were poor and desperate, they were in a gang, they were drunk…
We want our villains to be easy to identify, like on TV. We recognize the bad guys the instant they enter a scene, complete with foreboding music. We cringe as the poor victim is attacked, but we rest easy knowing we were smart enough to recognize the villain for what he was. He’s one of them. Because humanity is broken into two distinct groups:
There’s a clear boundary between the groups. That works for me, because it excuses me from having to worry about my own behavior. I’ve never gang-raped a girl. I’ve never beaten my wife. I’m safely in the “normal” circle.
It’s comfortable. The evil rapists and abusers are over there, and us normal folks are over here.
Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work like that. People don’t fall neatly into categories. I’ve found it more helpful to look at behavior, like so:
There’s no “us” vs. “them.” No neat boundary separating good guys from bad. We all fall somewhere on the curve, and that position isn’t constant. Do you think the guys who gang-raped that girl woke up one morning and decided to be rapists? In most cases, it’s a behavior that changes over time, moving further and further to the right side of the curve.
One day it’s a shouting match with my girlfriend. Maybe I use body language to intimidate her into backing down. Eventually, when that doesn’t work, I grab her. Not hard enough to bruise, just enough to let her know who’s boss. A month later, I’ve stopped being quite so careful about the bruising. Step by step, my behavior becomes more abusive.
Likewise with rape. Maybe it starts by trying to pick up a girl at the bar. Trying to talk a woman into going home with you is just part of the game, right? If that fails, I can buy her a few more drinks to loosen her up. Then maybe a few more–it was her own choice to get drunk, right? Or maybe I just spike the drinks to speed things along…
Our society has strong attitudes about what it means to be a man. Real men are strong and in control. We go after the things we want. We’re assertive, even aggressive when necessary. We’re determined, and we don’t take no for an answer. Given all that, do you think it’s coincidence that men commit 95% of rapes?
How could they stand by, refusing to call 911 while a girl was raped in front of them? We’ve all stood by and done nothing at one point or another. Every one of us has heard someone making sexist comments and failed to call them on it. We’ve wondered if someone was being abused, but kept silent because we didn’t know what to say or how to ask.
If your response to all this is “But I’m not a rapist,” “All men aren’t rapists,” or the ever-popular, “Why do you hate men?” congratulations–you’ve missed the point. It’s not about you. It’s about recognizing that the “me” vs. “those people” approach doesn’t really work for understanding or ending rape and abuse.
Discussion welcome, as always.
Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.
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Comments
But let me frame it in another way. I've been thinking along these lines recently. So here goes. Fully 4% of the population are sociopaths. Another 1% have schizophrenia. Something like 3 to 4% have bipolar disorder. All told, about 1 in 4 adults suffer from some kind of mental illness and about 6% suffer from a serious mental illness.
Now, it is NOT true that everyone who suffers from mental illness is violent--far from it. Most are not violent, even among sociopaths. But I invite you to consider the overall effect on society when one quarter of us are impaired by mental illness, and when 1 in 20 are totally disabled by it. It is not hard to imagine that every single one of the kids involved in the brutal incident with the rape of the young girl are emotional cripples who lack any kind of empathy and are driven in their actions either by anger or sadism.
It is interesting to look at rape as a manifestation of the universal darkness in every soul, but I am not sure this is the *right* incident for that perspective. I do not think it is at all incorrect for people of good character to vigorously condemn this crime and all who were involved in it, rather than somehow taking some of the blame. I do not think most normal, mentally healthy adults would be wrong to see a categorical difference between themselves and someone who would stand by while a young girl is raped. Granted, some of the bystanders may have been confused, basically decent young people who have not developed enough strength of character yet to resist peer pressure or to risk retaliation in order to stop a crime, but I've got to say that this crime was not committed by "good boys" who woke up one morning as Eagle scouts and found themselves rapists by midnight. No, one thing that is generally true is that people don't change, and these fifteen guys were probably messed up a long time before they found each other and victimized a young girl.
It was a gradual slide from maybe thinking it was ok to slip one to a drunk girl who was too drunk to say no to raping some poor fifteen year old with a bunch of your mates. Not everyone is going to undertake that same moral slide, but in most people the potential is there.
In most people the potential to do LOTS of horrible things is there and denying that, othering the people who do commit such crimes, is understandable but not necessary useful in finding ways to prevent it in future.
:-)
(In the old Soviet Union terms, anyone who opposed the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was, by definition, insane. Therefore, using the psychiatric hospitals to confine and "treat" dissidents became totally logical.)
I agree somewhat with cathshaffer on this one. Some people *are* in a separate circle of the Venn diagram.
Given that what that actually shows is that men commit 95% of reported rapes -- no, that I don't think is a coincidence.
Given anecdotal evidence that men who report being raped by women -- regardless of how much force the women use -- are jeered at, I do not think that we can assume that what it coincides with is actual relative use of force between the sexes.
Also, no problem with anonymous comments in this case, but please provide some way to for the rest of us identify you as opposed to other random anonymous commenters. Thanks!
Then again, I believe I would have stopped giving shocks in the Milgram experiment, but most people didn't.
I don't know. But I absolutely agree that the apathy is a huge problem, and needs to be stopped.
I'd lay cash money on the line, though, that some of these guys - especially the ring leaders - were bullies. I'm also willing to bet that this was not the first girl they brutalised. Probably not even the second.
I'm just glad that the news and the "experts" have been using the word RAPED, and not "assaulted".
Now if we could only get folks to use the word rape for examples which aren't so extreme...
On a side note, tested my glucose level for the first time today. Do you keep a journal for that purpose?
My own sense of things is that I can come to a logical - even if it's logic that supposes some things that aren't logical for me personally - conclusion as to how and why things happen. But.
It might be that I'm getting cranky as I get older, it might be I'm losing an ability somewhere, some level of tolerance... but. I can sit and figure out why and how and be understanding of situations like this but I just come down to a gut reaction of "yeah, but it's just wrong."
I get how knowing and understanding something can help toward making sure other people don't do the same things, ways of avoiding the paths that led to these events. And yet at some point I get tired of figuring it out and just want to say "yeah, ok, but WRONG".
As to the separate vs continuim thing... I've got many many many maaaaaaaaaa(did I mention many?)aaaany thoughts on that but no clear solid form I could possibly articulate. Think I've spent half my life trying to do that.
None of which takes away the urge to demand "WTF is wrong with you people???" when I read about something like this.
I'm sure he never thought of himself as a rapist -- it was a slippery slope where he bullied her a little more and a little more, and started to follow her around, and then, eventually, he was telling her that he'd hurt her if she didn't have sex with him. But the end result was that he raped her.
It makes me really angry, not just that he did it, but that the whole 'nice guy' versus 'horrible rapist' dichotomy made my friend feel like a bad person for having been raped.
http://jdawson001.livejournal.com/10220
Jenn
I'm afraid I can't get past 'That poor girl' to offer anything intelligent right now, though I read your post before the article and I agreed with what you said. It IS a spectrum and it is something that develops over time.
That poor girl.
And that last one is soo dangerous. It's easy to say it was an accident. Or that he never meant for it to hurt so much. But it's little thoughts like that that are the counter part to the "bar scene drink incident" you mention, Jim. A woman can be brain washed into believing that she would never pick a bad guy. it's even worse when they can't see it, and never tell anyone how bad it is.
Even girls who think they are strong and even a little bit of the feminist mentality. Girls who think "I am stronger than that! I would say something if it happened to me!" can become victims. The worse are the boyfriends, women are far more suspicious of a man they aren't trusting. But when it's a boyfriend, they believe they care about each other. Unfortunately his form of caring, isn't always the nice kind.
http://www.genjipress.com/2009/10/clenc
I have a thesis that both dissents from and integrates with Jim's POV. I'd be very curious to see what other people think of it.
People in general tend to have a pretty strong concept of their own self-image (for instance: "I am a Good Person.") Because they don't particularly want to believe themselves *not* to be Good People, they will (usually subconsciously) put spin on the things they think or do to support the theory that they are good. So the guy who punches his girlfriend, faced with admitting that he did something bad or coming up with a "reason" why he did it, will usually convince himself that she deserved it for some reason (or the devil made him do it, or...), since otherwise he'd have done something that a nice guy wouldn't do. And from the first little justification he'll start adding more, because if it's bad to continue to behave that way, then he's got to face up to the idea that maybe it wasn't right to do the first time.
The introspective person may catch him or herself before getting too far down this sort of path, but in general it's the sort of thing that people don't even notice. And once you get into the habit of convincing yourself that something of this sort is ok, then things that would otherwise tell you you were screwing up will not even register, or be immediately dismissed as attacks on you, or worthless arguments. And yet, in unrelated aspects of your life, you're still likely to be the same "nice person" you were before.
This is perhaps not the best summary (for that I'd strongly recommend reading Mistakes Were Made, but not by me, which is an absolutely fascinating book, if horribly depressing in parts) but I hope I've conveyed the general idea.
I struggle with this. Not in the sense that I'm just on the edge of rape or violence, but in the sense that I know that the only thing stopping me is me. I'm a physical guy*, and I am not unschooled in the application of violence. Makes it very convenient when walking through the dark, questionable neighborhood, but there's a big difference between looking like a predator to keep the other wolves at bay, and actually being a predator.
*Which is weird for me to say, because I was always younger and smaller than the other kids in school, and then I started college at 15, which made for an even bigger gap. My mental image of myself is of the 98-pound nerd, but actually, I'm 5'11" and 200 pounds, only ten pounds or so of which I'd prefer were relocated. I learned to act tough when I really wasn't very, because when I didn't, I paid for it. Now I'm grown into myself, the habits remain...
-JM
because I come at it from the perspective of a person who had a physically violent temper in her teens. As in, yes, I sometimes took a swing when I was mad.
I fought badly, and I did few people any actual harm. And I knew, when not in a temper, that it was wrong, and tried to rein it in alone. And I was a geek and a weakling, so I was more likely to be the target of derision, not to try and deride others. And I was considered intelligent and got good grades, and did art and writing, and had family who came to parent-teacher days, or talked to the school after an incident, so the teachers thought me worth taking the time on, because they saw me throwing away real potential. (And right there, I suspect, is a whole other post on assumptions about who's worth it...)
However, looking back at myself, I've realised something. I *could* have slid into being the bully. I could have gone far enough to turn into the person who abuses their SO or their spouse.
In this world, every peer I respected or liked turned colder to me if I lashed out. Every authority figure I respected, and every family member I loved discouraged me in every way possible, and tried to find alternate releases.
If, instead, I had a teacher I'd respected who told me I was justified because the people I took a swing at were the *real* bullies, or friends who told me it was cool, and offered to teach me how to fight for real (And not for self-defense alone - and there, the damage would not be in the teaching, but that one casual lash-out could have truly hurt someone, and created worlds more regret than the little scuffles.) If mom hadn't cared, or had made excuses so she could see me as her good girl. If the resource teacher had said nothing. If the Vice-Principal whose name I hold up as *the* person at exactly the right turning point had shrugged me off as incorrigibly violent and not worth trying to help - I might have been a much much worse person.
And yes, even at that, even had I gone that way, I would have found gang-rape appalling. But I see the bell curve. I see the gradients, the small steps.
I have my bitchy side. But I stopped swinging at people regularly by thirteen, got in trouble for it only a handful of times through the rest of school, and have swung at NOBODY since 1995 (And that one, in itself, was a serious outlier.) And I've had people since be impressed by how much I can hold in my temper and act patient in the face of provocation.
Ultimately, it's a cultural thing. It's an outgrowth of the larger culture, which is one in which violence is seen as being an acceptable (even laudable) solution to problems.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?d
In my years as a foster parent and all the training...I often heard the officers, caseworkers, and biological parents say just what you've said. The abuse of the parents toward the children didn't just start. It was often gradual. Sometimes it was one explosion, but they often didn't see themselves as someone who would do what they had done. They loved their kids. The people who were abusers were bad people, NOT THEM. They'd never drawn a line that they wouldn't cross as far as discipline. They just kept edging a little closer to abuse. Graying the line. Crossing it and not even seeing it until they were far beyond where they would have been had they drew a line and said "I will not ever..." It is a slippery slope when we aren't constantly evaluating. Seeing ourselves as too good and not vulnerable to feelings. We need to feel, but evaluate where we are at all times. Draw lines and never cross them. And if we do...draw them further back and see couselling if needed.
Bravo.
Sorry you had to ban someone for being an A-grade asshole, but I'm glad you threw the thoughts out there for consideration. Maybe most people won't change their opinions on human nature and whether that kind of evil (the objectification of a human being leading to their physical or emotional abuse that the abuser then mentally justifies as the abusee being 'lesser' and therefore not worthy of consideration as a person) exists in all of us, but the discussions are worth reading and worth thinking about.
TL;DR - thank you for posting about this stuff.
'Some of them just watched.'
A lot of us tell ourselves, 'Well.. /I/ would have called the police.' or '/I/ would have intervened'
Would you?
Really?
Because I'd like to think I would too. But you're never sure.
So make a deal with yourself, or someone else. You /will/ call the police. You will help.
You'll do /something/. Remind yourself of it.
My wife and I have a deal. It's never 'Not our problem'.
By all means make a deal with yourself. But be aware there's a cost.
mpe
But while it's important to know and accept that everyone is capable of this, I think that's also dangerous, because it makes it seem more normal somehow, and that's a slippery slope all on its own.
The article outraged me. We mentally distance Us from Them in defense. In the foreword to the Extremities script the playwright shares that defense attorneys in rape cases try to stack the jury with women. Men tend to 'White Knight' and want to convict. Women distance themselves from the victim, the victim must have done something wrong, because it is uncomfortable to face that it could happen to them, without anything to bring it on. That may sound inflammatory but I had a friend in college who told me that one of her guy friends had forced himself on a girl. When I told her to stay away from him she said, "Well he wouldn't do that to me!"
The law of diminishing returns pushes people right of bell curve. As discussed, what impacts us strongly the first time has less impact. A teen may thrill to a Victoria's Secret that his mom left lying around. But soon women in their underpants doesn't do it any more. Seeking that same level of arousal he will pursue more and more provocative and eventually deviant imagery to try to gain the same impact. All the women in the images seem to show him the love and respect he wants in real life and the rape myth takes form in his mind. Ted Bundy said that porn and alcohol were precursors to every one of his attacks. Nobody says, "I think I'll just start with child porn." That addiction is built, click by click, page by page as the person fails to say no to themselves in hundreds of small decisions. We as a culture are guilty of rape to the degree that we tolerate pornography.
Pr0n defenders will say, "No, most people can handle it. It's just the messed up people that go on to act out their fantasies." And then we are right back to Us vs Them. The Them is awake in each of Us and looking for opportunity to feed its Themness.