Violence and ‘Consent'

All of these difficulties in ‘hearing the voices' of victims of sexual violence are entangled in definitions of what is ‘sexual' and what constitutes ‘violence'. The ‘sexual' components of ‘sexual violence' were often disparaged; the ‘violent' components diminished.

Women have often been viewed as culpable for attacks made upon them. Even the mass rapes carried out by the Red Army as they made their way through eastern Europe near the end of the Second World War were presented in this way. In Budapest, around 50,000 women were raped; during the Red Army's march into Germany, an estimated 1.9 million women were sexually violated.^[207] In Berlin, approximately one in every three women was raped and over 10,000 died as a result of sexual assault. Thousands committed suicide.1^[208] Boris Slutsky was a poet who served as a politruk of a Red Army infantry platoon between 1941 and 1945. In his memoir, he dismissed any suggestion of suffering, claiming that

In Europe the women surrendered themselves and were unfaithful sooner than anyone else... The Hungarian women loved the Russians in their turn, and... along with the dark fear that parted the knees of matrons and mothers of families, there was also the affectionate nature of young women and the desperate tenderness of the women soldiers, who gave themselves to the men who had killed their husbands.^[209]

Aggressors routinely stated that their victims were seductive, and therefore at fault for the cruelty inflicted upon them.

Another version of this myth claims that husbands, boyfriends and close acquaintances might get ‘carried away', but women wanted ‘it' anyway. In early and mid-twentieth-century texts, American and European psychiatrists routinely christened rape a ‘victim-precipitated' crime.

The notion that ‘honour is greater than death' has been disastrous for victims of sexual assault. In many jurisdictions (including Puerto Rico), there is some evidence that, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there has been increased emphasis placed on the need for victims to provide evidence proving vigorous resistance to the attack, rather than sexual coercion by itself. 1⁷ In nineteenth-century European and American jurisprudence textbooks, women were expected to fight off attackers - even to the point of being severely wounded or killed. The claim that it is ‘impossible to sheath a sword into a vibrating scabbard' (a phrase used in nineteenth-century jurisprudential textbooks in the UK and USA) is used to suggest that ‘true' resistance is always effective. The penis is coded as a weapon; the vagina is its passive receptacle, which merely by ‘vibrating' could ward off attack. There is another way of saying this: any women who failed to fight off an attack on her virtue could be assumed to have acquiesced or even consented. Concessions were made when the victim was a delicate, middle- or upper-class woman. Sturdy, working-class women and ‘primitive' women had no excuses: they were effectively unrapable.

The damage done by arguments that rape could not occur if a woman resisted or if she subsequently became pregnant are augmented by more general problems with arguments based on ‘consent'. In certain contexts, ‘consent' is seen as redundant. Extreme examples include slave-master encounters. What was the meaning of ‘consent' for slaves? As a female slave explained, ‘we do anything to get our poor flesh some rest from de whip’.^[213]

War and times of atrocity also undercut the salience of ‘consent’. Indeed, ‘volunteering’ for sex work could be a survival strategy. In the words of a woman speaking of her experiences during the Holocaust,

Well, I refused to be consumed and vanish like a cloud. I wanted to return to my house. I’m eighteen years old -1 don’t want to die... Everyone in the lager goes around picking up leftovers from the garbage. They suck bones other people spit out - and I’m supposed to refuse life because it’s offered on a dirty plate?^[214]

In other words, when food, shelter and life itself depend upon sexual relations, the liberal emphasis on free and informed consent in deciding issues of rape is a charade.