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Changing Political Opportunity: The Anti-Rape Movement and Public Policy

Part of: JPH 30th Anniversary Most Cited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Janet C. Gornick  and
David S. Meyer
Janet C. Gornick
Affiliation:
City University of New York/Baruch College and City University of New York/City College
David S. Meyer
Affiliation:
City University of New York/Baruch College and City University of New York/City College
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Both the legal definition of rape and the social responses to it have changed dramatically over the last twenty-five years. The sorts of assaults classified as criminal, the willingness of women who have been raped to turn to the criminal justice system, the rules of prosecution, and the penalties imposed on those found guilty have all been the explicit subjects of public debates initiated in the early 1970s by activists who broke the silence of earlier decades. Activists' engagement with the policy process throughout the 1970s altered institutions and policy at the local, state, and federal levels, and also affected the development and claims of the broader women's movement.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , October 1998 , pp. 367 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1998

References

Notes

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48. New York Times, 21 February 1974.

49. Blair, Ian, Investigating Rape: A New Approach for Police (Dover, N.H., 1985)Google Scholar; Brodyaga et al., Rape and Its Victims; Carrow, Rape: Guidelines, 1–2; Largen, “Grassroots Centers,” 46–51; Marsh, Geist, and Caplan, Rape and the Limits of Law Reform; Spohn and Horney, Rape Law Reform.

50. There is a broad consensus that the reforms initiated in localities across the country—in hospitals, police departments, and prosecutors' offices—were brought about largely by the efforts of anti-rape activists. For example, two national studies commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice reached this conclusion. In a study of local responses to rape, completed for the LEAA, Brodyaga et al., Rape and Its Victims, xi, found that:

Much of the recent attention has been stimulated by citizens concerned with equalizing the status of women. The women's movement has often focused on the inequities inflicted upon victims of rape.… Citizens' activities to increase public awareness of these problems have brought about efforts to … improve medical treatment for rape victims, and to encourage police departments and prosecutors' offices to examine their procedures in the investigation and prosecution of rape cases.

Similarly, at the end of the decade, Carrow (Rape: Guidelines, 1–2) reported to the National Institute of Justice that:

The early 1970s marked the beginning of a change in the treatment of rape incidents. … At the forefront of this changing perspective was the rape crisis center. As the offspring of the feminist movement, these centers hellip; have provided the impetus for improved hospital procedures. … Police and prosecutors … have instituted procedural and policy reforms reflecting this emphasis.

51. Matthews, Confronting Rape.

52. Largen, “Grassroots Centers,” 47–48.

53. Csida and Csida, Rape: How to Avoid It; Largen, “Anti-Rape Movement,” 1–13; Scott, Ellen Kaye, “How to Stop the Rapists? A Question of Strategy in Two Rape Crisis Centers,” Social Problems 40 (August 1993): 343–61.Google Scholar

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55. Brodyaga et al., Rape and Its Victims, 55.

56. Carrow, Rape: Guidelines.

57. Brodyaga et al., Rape and Its Victims; Law, Battelle and Justice Study Center, Forcible Rape: A National Survey of the Response by Police, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1977)Google Scholar; idem, Forcible Rape: A National Survey of the Response by Prosecutors, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1977); Carrow, Rape: Guidelines; Fairstein, Sexual Violence.

58. Battelle Law and Justice Study Center, Police, 46.

59. Battelle Law and Justice Study Center, Prosecutors, 30.

60. Fairstein, Sexual Violence.

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63. Bienen, Leigh, “Rape III: National Developments in Rape Reform Legislation,” Women's Rights Law Reporter 6 (1980): 171–212Google Scholar. We coded a state as having reformed its law in a given year if its legislature passed one or more changes to the state's rape law during that year.

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66. Horney and Spohn, “Reform,” 117–18.

67. Estrich, Real Rape; Marsh, Geist, and Caplan, Rape and the Limits of Law Reform.

68. Largen, “History of Women's Movement,” 69–73.

69. Lystad, Mary Hanemann, “The National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape,” in Burgess, Ann Wolbert, ed., Rape and Sexual Assault (New York, 1985), 14.Google Scholar

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73. Myhre and Capps, “Conferences,” 35.

74. MacMillan, Jackie, “LEAA Research—East,” Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women (Summer 1981): 39–41.Google Scholar

75. Carrow, Rape: Guidelines; Gornick, Burt, and Pittman, “Structure and Activities of Rape Crisis Centers,” 247–68; Largen, “Grassroots Centers,” 46–51.

76. Steven Rathgeb Smith and Michael Lipsky, Non-Profits for Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), in a careful study of nonprofit organizations, document the transforming effects that public monies have on the organizational structure, and ultimately missions, of nonprofits.

77. Brodyaga et al., Rape and Its Victims; Gornick, Burt, and Pittman, “Structure and Activities of Rape Crisis Centers.”

78. Matthews, Confronting Rape.

79. Largen, “Anti-Rape Movement.”

80. Burt, Martha, Gornick, Janet, and Pittman, Karen, “Feminism and Rape Crisis Centers,” Sexual Coercion and Assault 2 (1984): 8–13.Google Scholar

81. Carrow, Rape: Guidelines, 7.

82. Gornick, Burt, and Pittman, “Structure and Activities of Rape Crisis Centers,” 250.

83. Largen, “Grassroots Centers,” 50.

84. Ibid.

85. Brodyaga et al., Rape and Its Victims, 137.

86. Matthews, Confronting Rape.

87. New York Times, 5 August 1976.

88. New York Times, 22 August 1976.

89. Matthews, Confronting Rape.

90. Largen, “Grassroots Centers,” 46–51; Matthews, Confronting Rape.

91. Gornick, Burt, and Pittman, “Structure and Activities of Rape Crisis Centers.”

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94. Notable in Figure 2 is a second peak near the end of the 1970s, reflecting the emergence of a new issue in the “sex crimes” category, marital rape. The 1978 Rideout case marked the emergence of marital rape in the public debate on rape; see also Cuklanz, Lisa M., Rape on Trial: How the Mass Media Construct Legal Reform and Social Change (Philadelphia, 1995)Google Scholar. More important, the emergence of marital rape as a public issue signaled a shift in public attention toward domestic violence, and away from violence against women occurring outside the home, including rape. Activists reframed their claims about rape in response to these changes.

95. Matthews, Confronting Rape.

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