Rape, Cross-Culturally Defined

Defining rape is a complicated exercise as different definitions abound in legal, media, academic, and political discourses. Feminists are not in agreement on whether rape should be considered a sex crime or a crime of violence. A rigid definition has normative significance, so the definition of rape requires a degree of flexibility and contestation. That said, rape can be defined as the assault by a person involving sexual contact with another person without that person's consent. This definition is not explicit about the range of sexual contact or abuse involved, nor is it explicit about the gender of the survivor/victim and perpetrator. This ambiguity lends itself to a number of factors. For instance, this definition of rape is cautious not to explicitly identify perpetrators of rape as “men” as a result of the debates concerning the multiple forms of rape, including male-to-male [Page 1200]rape. Additionally, the explicit identification of “men” as perpetrators bears the potential to individualize rape, rescinding responsibility for these acts of violence from the state or patriarchal cultural practices. On the other hand, some argue that gender neutrality regarding definitions of rape assumes that rape can be desexualized and that the social norms of heterosexist and patriarchal societies can automatically change. These assumptions are deeply flawed and potentially injurious to women.

Feminists have long labored for a legal definition of rape, and ongoing country-specific debates concerning the juridical definition of rape shed some insight into the complexity of a universally applicable definition of the term. The legal restrictions that regulate what does and does not constitute rape often depend on what does or does not appear to be an effect of violence. The term rape is implicitly linked with numerous and often-contested meanings and contestations about power, desire, morality, and justice and the legal laboring for a definition reflects the larger family, community, and generational debates concerning social norms and expectations. The multiplicity of definitions of rape reveal the differences between men's and women's understandings of what constitutes rape, and these understandings are influenced by other social factors, such as age, socioeconomic status, education, and the perceptions of a community's general vulnerability to crime. Legal definitions often differ across and within nations, particularly when nations have two or more legal frameworks. Legal definitions of rape are also often considered too narrow. Feminist interventions aim to highlight the socioeconomic, historic, political, and cultural contexts in which definitions of rape are produced.

Rape is a widespread international problem. Globally, acquaintance, date, and marital rape appear to be more common than stranger rape. Women and girls are at greater risk of being raped than boys and men. Rape statistics are heavily contested, due to underreporting and the crisis of defining rape in the first place. Rape is also a common feature of war violence, and evidence suggests that the rate of rape is higher in zones of armed conflict. Mass rape during wartime has been documented in Liberia, Uganda, Nicaragua, Japan, Peru, Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Mozambique, and many other countries, and some would argue that rape is a feature of all armed conflict. The social context in which rape is perpetrated impacts upon the forms that it takes and the manner by which it is perceived. Due to the public and concentrated violence of mass rape in war, greater moral outrage is expressed, as compared to rape during peacetime. This violence is relegated to the private domain, discursively constructed as a symptom of dysfunctional relationships between individual men and women, and this privatization ultimately masks the social relations of power that create the conditions for violence against women.

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