On the thoughts of rapists

[Note: In response to comments both online and in person, I have revised the latter portion of this entry to better reflect the point I was trying to make. My apologies-- I thought I'd revised this enough to be "publishable," but I clearly should have gotten a beta. I will be glad to provide the unrevised version if anyone should want it for any reason.]

This is in response to just one aspect of rax's extremely thought-provoking post "So How Do We Talk About Rape?"; it's also something I've been thinking about for some time.

In her post, rax raises the question of sharing personal experience of rape, including the question of whether or not to tell other people in the social circle that Person A, their friend, has raped you. Because, rax said, a friend said she wanted to "ostracize" that person.

I feel that this concern-- "I can't tell anyone what this person did because they'll ostracize him/her" ties into two expected fallacies on the parts of the people being told:

1) My friend is incapable of evil, because s/he is my friend.
2) All rapists are purely evil.

Fallacy #1 is, of course, a form of the Geek Social Fallacies"-- specifically, #2, "My friends accept me as I am," which precludes any criticism, no matter how deserved. I think this applies to many people other than geeks-- many, many people feel loyalty to their friends, and are reluctant to think badly of them. Especially in the context of fallacy #2.

I've been thinking about this for several years, because I've been on both sides of it. I saw a friend of mine get raped-- and all the rapist's friends circle the wagons around, declaring that he would "never do that," and accusing her of lying or worse. On the other side, I was told that a friend of mine (long ago, and not anyone I think anyone I currently know knows) had raped someone-- and our social circle exploded with people trying to make sense of it, and assuming that there must be something wrong with the report, because we couldn't imagine he would do something "like that." It made me wonder what exactly we meant by "like that," and I came to the following conclusion:

We have a mental image of a rapist. He is an unkempt, deranged man in a dark alley, slavering, holding a knife. He has no background. We know nothing about his past, his origins, his feelings about the stock market (although if we think hard, he probably holds political views opposite to ours). He has only one motivation: to slake his lust and violence on our bodies, or the bodies of people we love.

Of course, this person does not exist except in our imaginations. Intellectually, we're aware that people who do evil things have feelings, memories, jobs, pets, etc. But the image of the Rapist persists. And when we're called to believe that a friend might have raped someone, we look at our friend, and at the Rapist, and cannot reconcile the two. And so we either forcibly fit our friend into that mold-- or, if we can't manage to do that, we deny the charge. And then our friend-- our smart, funny, creative, slightly odd but "surely not evil" friend-- goes on being both dangerous and misunderstood.

No-one rapes in a vacuum. Sometimes people genuinely misunderstand a panicked freezing-up as consent.* Sometimes people are drunk or high, and their impulse control goes to hell. Sometimes people have bought into the macho-male culture that says women are made for men's pleasure, and so if you bought her an expensive dinner, you deserve sex. Sometimes people are enjoying someone else's pain. Sometimes people have been raped themselves, and believe that sex always involves a certain amount of fear and pain for someone-- and they'd rather it not be them, this time. Sometimes people have been raped themselves so often and so badly that they've cut off their memory of it-- and the only way they can possibly handle the unconsciously held shame/pain/fear/anger they feel is to make someone else feel it, more and worse-- to put their own feelings outside themselves into someone else, so that the feelings become bearable.

So reasons for raping go from "being stupid and entitled" to "being sadistic" and all the way to "being so badly traumatized you're borderline psychotic." But the point is-- all of these are understandable, human motivations, held by understandable humans.**

That doesn't mean rape is excusable. Rape is wrong, and I believe that people have the ability and the responsibility to choose their actions. Even someone borderline psychotic can come to understand what s/he is doing and stop-- it may require a lot of therapy to change, but it can be done. And I believe that person has a moral responsibility to do the work necessary to make that change.

But what it does mean is that we need to stop assuming we know what a rapist looks like. And we need to stop assuming it's an all-or-nothing, "you did this, so you're automatically purely evil!" thing. I see a parallel set of behaviors in discussions of race-- people assume that the phrase "your behavior shows that you have some underlying racist beliefs you might want to think about," is equivalent to, "you're a card-carrying member of the KKK who wants to bring back slavery and castrate everyone non-white!"

Your friend who raped someone is the same person s/he was before you knew about the rape. S/he still has the traits you liked. And s/he may feel guilty about the rape, or be carrying some old pain of his/her own-- or s/he might not have thought about it very much at all. And in any of these cases, s/he is both a) the cause of tremendous pain in someone else, and b) still the same person.

As his/her friend, you don't have to ostracize him/her or excuse him/her. Treat it like you would something else s/he did which deeply upset you-- yell at him/her, urge him/her to rethink the beliefs that led to the rape (with a therapist if that would be helpful). Break off the relationship if that feels to you like the right thing to do.

But if you value that person's friendship too much to let go of, fine, keep it-- with the awareness you now have of what your friend is capable of. Stay aware of all the complexity of the situation. Don't assume that you have to ignore everything you know and love about him/her because you now also know that s/he is dangerous. Don't ignore the fact that s/he is dangerous just because you love him/her. Take precautions when you're with him/her, and let others know when they might be in danger from him/her.***

It would be nice to believe that all evil is done by people we don't know. It's not. Reality is much more painful and complex than that, and we get in trouble when we demand it be simple.

--R




*VERY IMPORTANT PSA: Trauma theory says: our response to terror is not just fight-or-flight; it's fight-or-flight-or-freeze. When we're both terrified and trapped and out-matched, we tend to shut down, go limp, and "play possum," in the unconscious hope that this will get us hurt less.

In some cases, we're completely right.

In other cases, freezing means that a person is not able to say "no, stop" even when s/he wants nothing more than for what's going on to stop happening.

And to make it worse, a person who has already been raped or otherwise traumatized is likely to have triggers: stimuli of all kinds which forcibly remind him/her of the past trauma, and throw him/her back into the same panic s/he felt during the original assault. Triggers can be things both obviously connected to a trauma (being grabbed from behind) and less-obvious (the shade of yellow the attacker was wearing; the smell of lilacs that were in the air during the battle, etc).

Therefore, the fact that someone has gone perfectly still and is not resisting DOES NOT MEAN that s/he is okay with what's happening. If you are doing something even vaguely possibly boundary-crossing, and the other person isn't saying anything or moving, STOP. And don't continue until the person has given you an emphatic assent, using complete sentences and facial expressions and preferably humor or another indication of being really entirely present.

**I believe that this conflation of rapists with evil outsider also explains a lot about why people's attempts to prevent child molestation are so damn ineffective. People spend tremendous effort in keeping convicted sex offenders away from children, when a very high percentage of children are assaulted by someone they know (friend, family member, etc.) I think we'd be much more effective by teaching children that they have the right to control their bodies no matter who asks them to do something uncomfortable, and listening to them and taking them seriously when they tell us how they feel, than by any amount of "Stranger Danger!" lessons.

***If more people were willing to accept that "this person can be dangerous" is not exactly equivalent to "this person is ultimate evil and should be hung from a bridge," I would strongly advise publicly announcing the names of people who have raped. As it is... it remains one of those problematic questions with no clear right answer.