Rape Trauma Syndrome

Rape Crisis Movement

In the 1970s and 1980s, a rape crisis movement brought RTS to public awareness through education and advocacy aimed at increased reporting and countering public stereotypes and self-recriminations associated with rape. Community centers with trained volunteers helped victims cope with the criminal justice system and work toward reorganization of their lives. Public education placed blame for rape on the perpetrator and on a society that engenders a rape culture. Lectures, magazine articles, films, and public service announcements were aimed at building public support and understanding among family and intimates who often wanted nothing more than for the victim to put the rape behind her and move on with her life.

[Page 1214]The media disseminated information and publicity surged as researchers, clinicians, and criminal justice practitioners studied rapists, rape victims, and the social, psychological, and legalistic aspects of rape. As the rape crisis movement achieved a degree of success and feminists took up other causes, both publicity and interest in rape waned by the early 1990s, leading some to conclude prematurely that the problem was solved.

The concept of a rape trauma syndrome has its roots in crisis theory, defining a crisis as: (1) a hazardous, threatening event; (2) an inability to respond with adequate coping mechanisms; and (3) temporary disruption of one's typical pattern of functioning. Implicit in the definition is the notion that the trauma resulting from rape will be time limited because crises are time limited. Individuals recover, reorganize, and are able to resume some semblance of their life prior to the crisis. This explanation of the problem was preferable to the previously popular psychoanalytic theory of women's subconscious “rape wish” but had its drawbacks, most notably that victims were expected to recover from the crisis and get on with their lives.

Feminists embraced the rape-as-crisis explanation while simultaneously engaging in public education that placed responsibility on men as perpetrators and on a society where men were socialized to be aggressive and to exercise control while women were socialized to be “feminine,” sometimes to the point of accepting themselves as sex objects and thus accepting the blame for rape.

Revisions in the Rape-as-Crisis Model

Research subsequent to Burgess and Holmstrom's work has led to revisions and reconceptualization of rape trauma syndrome as comprised of at least three stages and as more than a temporary crisis. While most survivors effect a reorganization of their lives, this often entails acceptance of an altered post-rape life. One of the earliest empirical works to document the fact that rape is a “prolonged crisis” was that of Joyce Williams and Karen Holmes, who found that survivors, whether by a few months or years, still manifested symptoms of rape trauma. They suffered from health issues, their functionality (work, school, travel) was impacted, and they experienced feelings of generalized discomfort toward men. Those who achieve some resolution of the rape and the accompanying sense of disempowerment do so by incorporating the experience into their lives and moving ahead as survivors, not as victims.

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