When considering the scope of rape law reform over the last 40 years, including the changes in how rape is defined, rules of evidence, and availability of services for victims, it would be easy to draw the conclusion that anti-rape activism has been relatively successful. Requirements as to witnesses and visible harm as grounds for prosecution have been changed. Marital rape statutes have been reformed. Hospitals and clinics provide rape exams to victims. Rape crisis centers exist in almost every jurisdiction in the United States, and victim advocates are alerted as first responders when a rape is reported. However, in Up Against the Wall: Rape Reform and the Failure of Success, Rose Corrigan shows that these reforms have not significantly changed the way rape is adjudicated or the manner in which legal and medical professionals treat victims. According to her extensive interviews with Rape Crisis advocates, in spite of statutory reform and social service resources being made available, sexual assault is still unlikely to be taken seriously and victims are still unlikely to be treated fairly or with respect. To explain why this is the case, Corrigan shows how the history of the anti-rape movement differs from other transformative social justice movements. She also considers the place and value of feminist perspectives and advocacy given the contemporary legal terrain with respect to sexual violence. In general, Corrigan's work lays out the contemporary terrain that anti-rape activists must negotiate.
Corrigan uses Michael McCann's model of legal mobilization to elucidate the differences between the rape reform movement and other social movements. She offers insight into the historical emergence of the movement and how that history shaped the trajectory of policy and practices addressing sexual violence. Modern rape reform advocacy originated as a feminist grassroots mobilization linked to a radical critique of gender and sexual inequalities as enacted in law and policy. It was not initially inspired by feminist lawyers or motivated by claims about rights. Further, when changing the law did come into focus, it was criminal law that required attention. Corrigan identifies these features of the anti-rape movement as important to understanding its current stasis. As statutory laws changed in the 1970s and early 1980s and as rape crisis centers came into being and partnered with medical and law enforcement institutions to implement those changes, radical critiques were marginalized and advocacy efforts became focused on maintaining some modicum of care and respect for individual victims. Corrigan concludes that the anti-rape movement is failing in spite of extensive reform because there is not a sustained political, much less feminist, sensibility as to the limits of law among advocates involved with the implementation of policy. Advocates do not have the political and legal support necessary to make sustained progress in the area of rape reform.
Corrigan argues that there never has been a good “fit” between the means and ends of the criminal justice system and feminist ideology that would prioritize the well-being and capacitation of victims (p. 22). This becomes clear, for example, as she discusses the unavailability of emergency contraception (EC) in the emergency room (ER) when women report rape. In spite of statutory reform, EC in the ER is not understood as a right. It is often made contingent upon a woman's agreement to undergo a rape exam or to further participate in prosecution. Given that Corrigan suggests that sexual harassment and domestic violence remedies have been more successful than rape reform because of specifically feminist litigation strategies, she does imply that there were opportunities that were missed. Corrigan posits the relative success of other feminist legal reform movements as self-evident. However, her argument about legal strategy and rape reform would be clearer with more discussion of the evidence of this difference.
Corrigan presents her work as a comparative study (p. 59) that investigates various dimensions/sites of rape reporting and prosecution from the perspective of rape crisis advocates. These include: sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) programs, emergency conception in the emergency room (EC in the ER), and sex offender registry and notification statutes (SORN). We learn about these issues through interviews with 167 rape care advocates across 112 rape crisis centers in six different states. These interviews are presented as a pathway to understanding the dilemmas faced on the ground by advocates within the complex systems set up in various jurisdictions for helping victims and holding perpetrators accountable. There are many insights drawn from the discussions with advocates. For example, if SANE programs are independent of hospitals, they tend to serve victims' interests more consistently. We learn that prosecutors are typically enthusiastic about enforcing SORN statutes but not so invested in investigating rape charges. SORN statutes contribute to the ongoing cultural misrecognition of sexual assault as committed by sex addicted deviants when, in fact, it is typically committed by otherwise perfectly “normal” people that the victim often knows.
Corrigan's study lays out key issues that those who care about stopping rape must contend with. It travels across the terrain of specific post-rape management policies and regressive legislation, using interviews with advocates as a means of reflecting on these issues. It shows that the anti-rape movement has been effectively demobilized and become more like a reluctant auxiliary to the state apparatus than a force for critical resistance to gender and sexual injustice.
Up Against the Wall is informative and often insightful. But it is also a frustrating read, not only because it shows how little has been accomplished in confronting rape, much less preventing it, but also because Corrigan offers no analysis of the interviews themselves. She lets them stand as evidence for conclusions about policy and relationships between rape crisis centers and medical and legal institutions. There is no comparative or interpretive work performed to develop insights about differences across jurisdictions or how variances in legal/feminist consciousness among rape care workers can inform further critical insight as to how and why they do their work in ways that are more or less effective. The raw data excerpted in the book are not systematically analyzed in a way that follows-up on the claims and promises made in the first chapters about what is to be gained conceptually or practically from interviewing this constituency in particular. I have no objection to listening to rape care advocates, but the interviews are not systematically analyzed here to show how their perspective informs different theory or practices. For example, given that most of the transcribed comments that refer to feminism articulate a tension around whether it would be helpful or not to be more or less “feminist” in one's approach as an advocate, I would be interested in an analysis of how feminism became the “problem” that it is from many advocates' perspective. It is clear from Corrigan's discussion early in the book that she thinks there is too little feminist involvement with the issue of rape and sexual assault. I do not disagree with that, but I would like to know more about how she interprets the advocates' claims about feminism and what it is or what it should be doing. Content analysis of the interviews themselves might show new perspectives that contribute to the feminist critiques of rape reform that Corrigan identifies early in the book about professionalization, funding issues, and neoliberal ideology.
The unavoidable conclusion of Up Against the Wall is that the emphasis on criminal prosecutions of rape has short-circuited the movement against sexual violence. The question begged by the accumulation of evidence of failure in Corrigan's work is how to conceptualize “success” in light of this quandary. While feminists may not have specifically “theorized” sexual violence adequately in recent decades, feminist critique and socio-legal methods do offer rich resources to argue the limits of the mainstream approaches described in the book and move beyond them. Taken as a whole, the study confirms the need to reinvigorate feminist identified coalitions to mobilize resistance and alternatives to conservative reactions and strategies currently deployed in response to sexual violence.
