Conclusion
The fact that acts of forcible sexual aggression take place in our society with regularity and increasing frequency is to a certain extent an indication that there are serious difficulties in the development of emotionally healthy adult personalities within our present system.
The necessary hostility and disrespect for others which make forcible rape possible could not develop in so many individuals if there were not severe irregularities in the socialization of young people and the moral and ethical character of adults.
The necessity for some kind of recognition of this problem and some attempt to deal with it is clearly stated by Leon J. Saul in The Hostile Mind:
The population is a reservoir of hostility, conscious or unconscious. Morality and ethics are not goody-goody, but are the expressions of the nature forces of cooperation upon which society is based, society with all it provides in protection for it's members in a hazardous, inexorable universe.
These forces of cooperation are nonexistent in situations where an individual seeks to enforce his will on an unwilling subject. They are the very forces of cooperation that promise the only hope of human growth and realization of human potential, and they are seriously undermined in situations where an unwilling victim is raped. The same factors that create the possibility of forcible sexual aggression are at work in the development of political demagogues and political tyrants, and in addition there are many other situations in which citizens are raped in various ways in the sense that the will of contemptuous and hostile others is enforced upon them without their consent.
Because of the larger implications of the concept of rape, it is important to understand why it is that we have failed to successfully countermand this impulse, even in the microcosm of the ugly, terrifying sexual rape. One of the reasons we have failed to counteract this impulse is our organized legal system has failed to clearly understand the nature of rape. Evidence of this is found in the fact very few reported rape cases are ultimately prosecuted, and even fewer convicted.
Linda Buisson, in "Nice Girls Do Get Raped," from the Los Angeles Free Press, has provided some illuminating statistics on this phenomenon:
The reported number of rape cases has steadily increased in Los Angeles over the past four years. Legislators have been constantly pressured by attorneys, community organizations, and women to revise archaic evidence codes and statutes... Eve Norman, State Coordinator for the National Organization of Women and member of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, charged that out of the 7,838 complaints filed in 1972, only 3,500 arrests were made. She also noted that of the 850 convictions for rape and lesser offenses, only 124 were actually tried. In reality, only 12 per cent of all the persons arrested for forcible rape are actually convicted in Superior Court.
This failure of the legal system to provide a means for identifying the rapist and taking some measure to prevent the recurrence of his destructive behavior has resulted in a situation where although women are victimized in increasing numbers by rapists and gang rapists, they have less and less realistic recourse open to them in seeking any kind of justice against these aggressors.
Although it is true that a great many situations have been defined as rape incorrectly, still there are many more instances of forcible rape which not only go unpunished, but also go unreported and undetected because of the fact that women are intimidated by legal failure and harassment when they try to seek justice.
The fact is that a tremendous number of injustices occur in this area, both for victimized women whose assailants are still at large, and for falsely accused men who suffer equally. Truly, it seems that a system in which there can be the possibility of so much misunderstanding and unjust treatment for both men and women should be open to serious question and re-examination.
This kind of examination is taking place, and some reforms are being made which promise a hope of more justice in the future. However, at the present time a woman who is a victim of a rapist has little hope of cooperation from law enforcement officers. By the same token, and most tragically of all, the man who rapes as the result of emotional turmoil has almost no hope of understanding and constructive help. Theon Wright, in "Rape in Paradise" sums up the true significance of this confusing situation:
Both crime and justice are parts of civilized society. Crime is inevitable; it is a breakdown or fault in the orderly processes of society and will exist as long as societies are made up of human beings. Justice is the effort of society to repair the fault. Crime is to be expected, since humans are never perfect; but the failure of justice may be more damaging than crime itself. It may indicate a fundamental breakdown in the society that permitted the crime.
This is, of course, the most frightening aspect of the fact that rape is committed in the first place and then becomes the subject of so much legal confusion. It is difficult to accept that anything short of total revision of the criminal code would alleviate the legal problems connected with rape. In addition it seems apparent that the socialization of our young people is ineffective if it can produce so many who are so hostile and contemptuous of women that they resort to forcible rape as a behavior mode.
An examination of some of the ramifications of the act of sexual aggression and some of it's consequences for both it's assailant and victim reveal serious problems both in individual personality development in our society and in the legal code that theoretically protects us from socialization failures.
For many victims of these failures, the larger implications are lost in the moment of violation. However, it is no less terrifying to consider some of these larger implications in terms of their meaning and commentary on our society as a whole.