The Home Office's rape campaign

The Home Office's rape video
This advert had been bugging the devil out of me for a while, but I couldn’t quite figure why. Then I stumbled upon this.

Thomas's post on Lisak and McWhorter's rape studies
First watch the video, and then secondly read through the second link, which is fairly extensive. Then come back here.



Ok, all done?

When I first watched the campaign video, the initial question that jumped to mind was “although this is powerful, will its intended recipients actually listen? Is this a message they will hear?” This was not a question I had an answer to, and though I looked around a bit for data I figured that looking at studies based on surveys incarcerated rapists was a waste of my time, because incarcerated rapists, almost by definition, do not constitute a representative sample of rapists. They are far more likely to be less well educated, less well off, and far more violent than the majority of rapists, who, as I thought and the data I found soon confirmed, prefer to use alcohol or drugs rather than violence. Rapists in prison are also far more likely to have raped strangers, whereas the vast majority of women are raped by people they know. I do not know any of this for a fact, but given that it seems very rare for “acquaintance rape” to ever reach the ears of police - let alone be prosecuted - whereas stranger rape is much more likely to both be reported, be prosecuted, and make it on the news, my initial assumptions seemed reasonable.

Then, quite by accident (for Feministe is not on my regular reading list), I found Thomas’ post, and found the answers. This was what I had been looking for all along; a dialogue between researchers and rapists in the non-prison population, where rapists had no incentive to lie thanks to the data collected being anonymous and confidential. The main conclusions of the data are as follows.

1): a relatively small number of men are rapists. Lisak found 6 percent of the surveyed population had raped, while McWhorter found 13 percent had done so. This difference may be accounted for in the backgrounds of the interviewees, as Lisak surveyed college students while McWhorter surveyed men enlisted in the US Navy.

2) This relatively small number of rapists includes a very high number of repeat offenders, and within this sample a staggeringly high number of extreme recidivists. This finding was confirmed by both studies. Out of the total number of rapists Lisak surveyed, 63 percent were repeat offenders, and these repeat offenders were committing an average of 5.8 rapes each. The median rape figure for these recidivists was 3, so the average of 5.8 includes some men committing a very high number of rapes. Put baldly, 76 men committed between them a total of 439 rapes.

3): only 30 percent of Lisak’s rapists admitted to using force or threats. The remainder raped intoxicated women. Interestingly, the rapists who were prepared to use force seemed to be committing over double the quantity of rapes committed by those who did not use violence, but the sample size is small enough that this might just be a statistical fluke.

4): The recidivist rapists Lisak found were also responsible for a very high quantity of non-rape violence, including domestic abuse, sexual abuse of children, and sexual abuse that did not amount to rape. These 76 men, 4 percent of the sample, were responsible for 28 percent of the total violence reported in the survey.

Now I want to go back to the Home Office campaign video. It attempts to appeal to the young rapist. This is, if you are going to do such a thing, well judged, as McWhorter’s data shows that the majority of rapists commit their first rape sometime during their late teens or early twenties. I think it’s also well judged that the couple shown seem to know each, and possibly be in an existing relationship.

The video creates its message, however, by showing a rape, and then showing the rapist watching his own rape, angry on the girl’s behalf but powerless to intervene. The implication is that if only the rapist could see what he is doing, he would not only not do it, but be furious at the violation he himself is committing. This implies a number of things about this Stereotypical Rapist.

1): he would not usually rape, but is just carried away by the dynamic of the situation.

2): If I am correct in my analysis of point 1, this also implies that it is the sexual possibilities available that draw him on, rather than the possibility of establishing a new power dynamic between himself and the girl. Mainstream theory of rape, on the other hand, claims that rape is fundamentally to do with power, not sex.

3): he does not (in the moment, at least) recognise what he is doing as rape, or as ethically wrong (the rapist says “stop being difficult”, and the caption at the end uses the phrase “If you could see yourself, would you see rape?”).

Based on the data compiled by Lisak and McWhorter, all these characteristics of the Home Office’s Stereotypical Rapist are actually rare to nonexistent in real life. Given that such a high percentage of rapists are repeat offenders, committing a large number of rapes each, it is not possible for these rapists to be rather stupid but fundamentally decent young men, led astray by alcohol and a tempting circumstance, who would be outraged at their own crimes if they were better informed - as the video implies. The data implies that this is just not true. The Stereotypical Rapist is actually much more likely to be a sociopathic repeat offender who carefully selects, grooms, and isolates his victims. Lisak’s conclusions, based on his extensive experience of interviewing non-incarcerated rapists, echo my thoughts there. Such preparation also means it is really unlikely the rapist does not recognise what he is doing as unethical. He may console himself with such thoughts as “everyone else does it too”, but such cynical manipulation of his victims means that he must know they would not consent otherwise, and I do find it really unlikely that there are men out there who do not know, on an intellectual level, that nonconsensual sex is wrong, even if emotionally they can never accept this.

These conclusions bring us to a better model of how to do rape campaigns. Firstly, we need to accept that appealing to the better natures of rapists is just not going to work. These people are often, from an early age, repeat rapists. They are calculating offenders who are never going to care for their victims, even if they could see themselves. Their view of women is simply far too twisted, and, more importantly, their addiction to power too strong. A campaign directed at rapists is likely to have better results if it shows them the possible consequences of their actions; that is, a trial followed by a lengthy jail term. It might work brilliantly if the Home Office could portray a rapist getting raped himself in prison, but that would likely never make it on TV and would, on sober reflection, be immoral. Such a campaign could also highlight the procedures in place amongst the police and prosecutors for dealing with rape cases, because not enough women realize that these procedures exist and that the system is not necessarily as useless they think it is, and is capable of caring for them and getting results.

Secondly, we as a society need to address the problem of alcohol. Before I go any further I need to make a few points.

1): I realize that alcohol does not rape. People do.

2): getting drunk does not mean that somebody deserves to get raped, or is any less of a rape victim if that happens.

Nevertheless, it is unquestionably true that alcohol, and the culture that surrounds it in the UK, is the prime weapon of the rapist. The data shows, remember, that the majority of rapists do not use violence, which is partly why so few rapists wind up in prison (non-violent rape not leaving obvious marks that could be used at trial in the way that violent rape does). If we are serious about reducing the number of rapes committed, taking the rapist’s weapons away from them seems like an excellent idea. The alcohol problem in the UK, exemplified by binge drinking culture, also has a number of other significant costs, in terms of police time wasted on drunken violence and NHS money frittered away in A&E.

Separately from rape campaigns (for it must never be suggested that rape is any victim’s fault), we need a nationwide culture change to fix our alcohol problem. This will not only cut the number of rapes but make those rapes that are committed infinitely easier to prosecute. More prosecutions will lead to more convictions which will in turn cut the number of rapes committed again, for those men who would be repeat rapists will find a remarkably limited supply of available female victims in prison. Simultaneously but separately rapists need to be sent the message that they are responsible for their actions, and can and will be punished properly for then. Victims need to be sent the message that it is safe to come forward; that the justice system and mainstream culture will listen.

Crucially, we must all remember that a large quantity of rapes are committed by a small group of sociopathic repeat offenders, and the the task of dealing with this group is not beyond us as a society. The protection they currently enjoy from the justice system is built on multiple pillars:

1): a culture that still does not yet fully accept acquaintance rape as real rape, and engages in serious victim-blaming

2): an endemic culture of alcohol abuse providing them with a stream of victims whose testimony will be highly problematic in court.

3): a collective unwillingness to accept rapists as they really are. When confronted with a rapist, our group response seems to be to label them too as a victim in some way; either of circumstances, or of a wider culture that encourages rape, or of a lying victim. We, and this Home Office video, see them as fundamentally misguided rather than malicious. This is just not true, and needs to stop. It is time we made rapists take responsibility for their sociopathic qualities.

4): a collective unwillingness to identify rapists and stop them in their tracks. Most rapists, according to Lisak, have repeat MOs and exhibit the obvious woman-hating qualities you would expect them to. So perhaps it’s worth listening just a little harder to that guy who’s always cracking the unfunny misogynist jokes, or look twice at the fella who always winds up with the drunkest girl at the party.

But all this is nothing more than a house of cards. If one or more of these pillars are yanked away, all the rest will tumble.

Mental delusion

Delusion is a curious thing, and surprisingly common in the modern world. There's a big range: from the delusions of Guardian columnists currently writing their smug little columns on the value of a planned political economy to the delusions of the American right and their obsessions with God, guns, and gay sex; from the peculiar afflictions of irrational Hindutvas to the equally crazy New Age types in the West; and from the last remaining remnants of Western Marxism (Eric Hobsbawm, to name but one) to the neo-fascism on the rise in Putin's Russia - delusion, it seems is omnipresent. It certainly extends to the delusion of bloggers such as myself that anyone sane actually reads the tripe we post, much less cares.

At the root of delusion lies irrationality, and this, it seems, is something almost impossible to cure. Education will not solve the issue. True idiocy takes a lot of intelligence to really do well - one need merely look at the number of well-educated "ABCD" (American-Born Confused Desi) types, largely from a maths-related background, who fall for the lure of "absence makes the heart grow fonder" Indian nationalism, and Hindutva ideology in particular. Or at the open admiration for the Soviet Union displayed by many Western intellectuals during the 20s, 30s, and even during the Cold War. As late as the 1980s top CIA economists were accepting offical Soviet figures as the basis for their calculations relating to the performance of the Soviet economy, not realising (as George Orwell had done back in 40s!) that these figures were not distorted or exaggerated: they were invented. Or indeed at the large number of university-educated (mostly humanities-based), apparently sensible people, who will fork out huge sums of money for homeopathic remedies that will allegedly "cure" the common cold.

The purpose of this blog, therefore, is to bring the twin evils of delusion and irrationality out into the open, and expose them as the bogus nightmares they are. With luck, the culture of sanity on which Western civilization is based will aided and brought to a new peak of excellence.