Dear reader,
May 19 was a slow and lazy Sunday.
You and I were home; too lackadaisical to cook, we took to reminiscing about all of the different types of Sunday-lunch we could have made had we been just a little less dilatory.
Then the call came in.
The bog-standard ringtone of the emergency phone sweeping away any fantasies we may have harboured of roasts and gravy.
A rape in Tasbet Park.
The woman had been abducted, sexually assaulted and then – to add insult to injury – dumped like an afterthought in the veldt.
‘Great,’ I thought to myself, ‘a 20 minute drive from Reyno Ridge. Exactly the way any girl dreams of concluding the week.’
But I didn’t drag my feet for long.
I arrived at the scene of the crime at about 14:25.
The sun took large bites out of the receding shade as it dawdled towards the horizon, casting ever-longer shadows across the dusty carapace of the earth – stretched out blotches of obsidian somewhat resembling the sooty fingers of a beggar.
I had just missed the ambulance.
As I stood, a stone throw away from the nearest house; I imagined what this Sunday would be like for the woman who had been raped.
While the rest of us congregated around hotplates like vultures swarm to a carcass, surrounded by the babbling of our closest and dearest, this woman would be laid on her back in a hospital room somewhere.
As a reward for enduring the vilest experience any woman can be asked to endure, she’d spend the rest of the day being swabbed, poked, prodded and giving statements.
Asked to revisit all of the humiliation. Her clothing taken – ‘evidence,’ they’ll mumble, as if an explanation would make any of it better.
I looked down at the mucky-toe of my rose-gold sneakers, half hidden in the dust like pirate’s treasure, and I thought of the rapist.
What would his Sunday look like?
More than likely he has returned home to his mother or wife; some kind woman, who has undoubtedly prepared him some form of Sunday-lunch.
She may even have left it in the oven, so that it wouldn’t get cold whilst he was out sexually assaulting an innocent woman.
All rapists have mothers, many of them have sisters and wives too – how is it that we as women, are allowing these types of men to live among us?
How have we gotten to the point that we are raising rapists?
In 1976, a Ph.D. candidate at Claremont Graduate University placed an advert in his local newspaper that read:
“Rapist wanted!
Researcher interviewing anonymously by phone to protect your identity.
Call between 9am and 9pm.”
The Ph.D. candidate hoped he would receive a few phone calls, and settled down next to the landline – waiting for it to ring.
It wasn’t long before it did ring. Not long before it had rung a total of nearly 200 times.
The voices on the other end weren’t a certain “type”; one the high-pitched drawl of a computer programmer who had raped his ‘sort of girlfriend,’ next the husky growl of a painter who had raped his acquaintance’s wife, or the incessant nagging of a school custodian who described 10 to 15 rapes as a means of getting even with the “rich bastards” in Beverly Hills.
The researcher, Samuel David Smithyman, compiled all of his findings into his book ‘The Undetected Rapist,’ – hoping to find commonalities, or perhaps ‘indicators,’ amongst these men.
Dr Smithyman found that the men he interviewed did share some traits; he found that your average ‘undetected rapist’ often has a more active sex life (both consensual and non-consensual) than your average man, ‘undetected rapists’ were found to often hold stereotypical beliefs pertaining to the “proper” roles for men and women in society (beliefs such as that women belong in the kitchen, whilst men should lord over the corporate world), ‘undetected rapists’ were found to harbour chronic, underlying feelings of anger and hostility towards women, they were also men who have a strong need to dominate and be in control of women (and were found to be fearful of being controlled by women), ‘undetected rapists’ were found to be more emotionally constricted than normal men (meaning that they often had difficulty expressing their emotions to an outside party), and finally they were found to often see themselves as hyper-masculine and foster a strong “macho man”-type of identity (shunning any traits that might be seen as ‘feminine’).
Researchers noted one last trait shared by men who have raped: They do not believe they are the problem.
You read that right.
These men, when asked whether they had; “sexually penetrated a woman against her will,” said; “yes” without a second thought, but when asked; “have you raped a woman?” the answer suddenly became; “no.”
Perhaps what we need is to start raising boys who understand that ‘forced penetration’ is rape.
Perhaps we need to start by abolishing the psycho-social circumstances that lead men to believe that women are nothing more than objects, homemakers at best (sex slaves at worst).
Perhaps we need to start by teaching our sons how to recognise others’ emotions, as well as how to express their own without feeling humiliated by the experience.
Perhaps we need to teach our boys that there is nothing inherently wrong with being “feminine” – whether you’re male or female.
Perhaps we need to start weeding out these kinds of men from our societies. Perhaps it’s time for a change.
