Rape: A History From 1860 To The Present - Joanna Bourke
Rape: A History From 1860 To The Present - Joanna Bourke
Non-Fiction
Pages: 576
"In the UK today only 5% of rapes reported to the police ever end in conviction."
If ever there was a statement to prove how important and utterly necessary a book like this is, there it is. Nineteen out of twenty rapists will never spend a day in jail, will never be caught or convicted. Nineteen out of twenty. It's shocking.
This book isn't about the victims. It isn't about the women and children and men who are brutally sexually assaulted every year - as Bourke says in her introduction, to focus entirely on the victims and their experiences would be letting the perpetrators off the hook. In this book Bourke explores the crime of rape in all its heinous detail, from what has been described as 'real' rape, 'rape' rape, to prison rape, sexual psychopaths, marital rape, military rape, paedophilia. She explores the psychology of the perpetrators, dismantling some of the arguments that claim that rape is part of the natural biology of male aggression, and investigating the ways rape has been investigated and prosecuted, and the way rapists have been treated and prosecuted over the years in the UK, USA and Australia.
I found myself clenching my jaw and grinding my teeth a lot reading this book. The scale, ingenuity and sheer mental contortions over the years designed to absolve rapists of their responsibility and shift it onto the victims, especially women, is staggering. A major part of Bourke's argument is that rapists are not born, they are made, largely through what we today call a 'rape culture', and it is only by addressing that culture, the 'she asked for it', victim-blaming, victim-precipitating, slut-shaming, patriarchal culture that we live in, that we can ever hope to eradicate this crime from our homes and streets.
Non-Fiction
Pages: 576
"In the UK today only 5% of rapes reported to the police ever end in conviction."
If ever there was a statement to prove how important and utterly necessary a book like this is, there it is. Nineteen out of twenty rapists will never spend a day in jail, will never be caught or convicted. Nineteen out of twenty. It's shocking.
This book isn't about the victims. It isn't about the women and children and men who are brutally sexually assaulted every year - as Bourke says in her introduction, to focus entirely on the victims and their experiences would be letting the perpetrators off the hook. In this book Bourke explores the crime of rape in all its heinous detail, from what has been described as 'real' rape, 'rape' rape, to prison rape, sexual psychopaths, marital rape, military rape, paedophilia. She explores the psychology of the perpetrators, dismantling some of the arguments that claim that rape is part of the natural biology of male aggression, and investigating the ways rape has been investigated and prosecuted, and the way rapists have been treated and prosecuted over the years in the UK, USA and Australia.
I found myself clenching my jaw and grinding my teeth a lot reading this book. The scale, ingenuity and sheer mental contortions over the years designed to absolve rapists of their responsibility and shift it onto the victims, especially women, is staggering. A major part of Bourke's argument is that rapists are not born, they are made, largely through what we today call a 'rape culture', and it is only by addressing that culture, the 'she asked for it', victim-blaming, victim-precipitating, slut-shaming, patriarchal culture that we live in, that we can ever hope to eradicate this crime from our homes and streets.