Story Of Rape Research Articles

Breeders for Satan: Toward a Sociology of Sexual Trauma Tales

What we are going to talk about today will sound unbelievable, unbelievable, to most of you. It will sound like the plot of an incredible horror story. 1) During her years of imprisonment in a downtown Los Angeles breeder warehouse, Lauren Stratford said she was forcibly impregnated so that the satanic cult that was holding her captive could ritually sacrifice the baby she bore. This was the same satanic cult, of which her own parents were devotees, that she also insisted had sexually abused and tortured her since she was a young child; the same satanic cult she had to escape from so that she could tell her tale of being a breeder for Satan. In the few years immediately following the 1988 publication of her autobiography, Satan's Underground: The Extraordinary Story of One Woman's Escape, the pseudonymous Stratford took advantage of both a growing cultural concern about a satanic menace to children' and a deeply rooted cultural fascination with tales of sexual trauma, and guested on television talk shows and religious radio programs, addressed child abuse conferences, and was featured prominently on the Geraldo Rivera special, Devil Worship, one of the most widely watched prime time specials in the history of television. The details of her story varied remarkably from one public appearance to the next,2 but in each of its iterations she encouraged other women who shared her secret of being a breeder for Satan to come forward and tell their tales. And for a few years after her own was completely discredited (Satanism Book Withdrawn 81), come forward exactly what they did. That some of these women told their tales on television talk shows should be of no surprise. These shows have replaced the confessional of old as places where tales of sexual suffering, secrecy, shame and surviving are told. But as Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray point out, bringing sexual trauma tales into the realm of discourse, whether within the privacy of the confessional or upon a public stage, is not always or even generally a progressive or liberatory strategy; indeed, it can contribute to... subordination (260). That assertion holds a contradiction. On the one hand, it suggests that sexual trauma tales can challenge the dominant cultural discourse about sex and gender, and the power relations that support it, and thus can prefigure significant social change. Rape tales are prototypic. Until recently, the story of rape was told by men through the psychological and medical theories they developed, the laws and policies they put into place, and the literature, art and film they produced. When the feminist movement encouraged survivors of rape to speak out, bear witness, and break their silence, a women's tale of rape finally entered public discourse. Its emplotment was, and is, profoundly political. It describes rape as an act of violence so common to the everyday lives of women that the pervasive fear it creates affirms those cultural ideologies that historically have functioned to keep women in their place (Plummer 63-78). In making manifest the relationship between biography and history, the personal and the political, this women's rape tale set the agenda for a whole generation of sexual politics. It was, and though now oft-told, continues to be, remarkably subversive. On the other hand, sexual trauma tales can sustain the status quo by simply reiterating, without critique, the dominant cultural discourse about sex and gender. In her engrossing book, Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics, Louise Armstrong holds up incest tales as an exemplar. When first publicly told, they were even more political, more strikingly subversive, than rape tales. They not only upended conventional speaking arrangements by giving women and children an authoritative voice, but in doing so attacked the most idealized of cultural institutions, the patriarchal family, and the most reified of cultural ideologies, the incest taboo. …

The Impact of Acquaintance Rape Stories and Case-Specific Pretrial Publicity on Juror Decision Making

In the first of two experimental trial simulations, the authors manipulated exposure to publicity about the defendant and exposure to general stories about acquaintance rape that portrayed men as sexual predators. Participants then viewed an enacted acquaintance rape trial. Across many dependent measures, men exposed to the predatory rape publicity exhibited a pronounced pro-defendant tendency, whereas women were unaffected. Case-specific pretrial publicity had a relatively small impact. In a follow-up experiment, participants were exposed to the predatory acquaintance rape scenario or to a scenario emphasizing male-female miscommunication. Again, men exposed to the predatory publicity became more pro-defendant; men receiving the miscommunication scenario did not exhibit such an effect. The tendency of male jurors to react against information that reflects negatively on them is discussed in the context of psychological reactance and social judgement theory.

Not the Story of a Rape

Not the Story of a Rape

Empathy for the Victim and Sexual Arousal Among Rapists and Nonrapists

One explanation of the finding that rapists and nonrapists differ in their sexual arousal patterns is that when listening to rape stories, nonrapists, but not rapists, empathize with the rape victim and their sexual arousal is inhibited by her suffering. Fourteen heterosexual rapists and 14 men who were not sex offenders were presented with audiotaped narrations while their penile tumescence was measured. All stories described a male-female interaction and the categories included rape with victim enjoyment, rape with victim suffering, nonsexual assault by the man, and consenting sexual and nonsexual heterosocial interactions. In each category, stories were told from either the woman's or man's point of view. Overall, subjects showed higher arousal to stories described from a female perspective. Consistent with the lack of empathy account of rape, rapists were less empathic than nonrapists and deviant arousal was inversely related to self-reported empathy. The best discrimination between groups was obtained for rape stories told from the point of view of a suffering victim. However, the finding that all rapists, but no nonrapists, preferred rape stories over consenting sex stories suggested that the lack of empathy account of rape was incomplete. The present data suggest that cues of violence and victim distress contribute to sexual arousal among rapists.

The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar: An African Tale (review)

REVIEWS 193 creativity. By responding to the challenge of the work, the reader "will develop capacities of understanding by which, thereafter, to light his way through the actual twilit, probationary state of which the novel is only a vast image" (p. 244). But Richardson's readers like Milton's are free to fall, and his obstinate absenting of himself makes the task even harder. When he let evil speak for itself, for instance when Lovelace rewrites Clarissa's story of oppression and rape as an amoral, rakish annal of erotic quest, Keymer argues that he had allowed perilous intimacy, even complicity with the libertine point of view, to subvert his own stabilizing and reforming design (p. 157). The general clamour for a happy ending especially "marked a Lovelacean response to the text, a nave acquiescence in the logic and standards of Lovelace's position that far exceeded Richardson's own readiness to tolerate (and at times embrace) interpretative variation" (p. 204). It was Richardson's readers who attempted to wrench the book towards determinate meaning and banal harmony; he himself asserted the destructiveness of evil, the absence of providential care, the skull beneath the skin, the coffin in the bedchamber (p. 210). This older, bleaker vision, which reminds one of Job and the Jacobeans, is at odds with notions of Richardson the sentimentalist, but here after all was a man strong enough to prefer Shakespeare's Lear to Tate's, a man who stared unblinking into the abyss. It is perfectly understandable that he should reply to inadequate readings as best he could in later instalments, in footnotes, and in other material added to new editions. But having denied clarity and coherence within his text, he could hardly impose meaning on it now. Tom Keymer's knowledge of the archives and contexts of Richardsonian scholarship is impeccable, and he moves easily among modern critical ideas. His book is subtle, precise, well written, and wry, revealing a Richardson who is not just a formal realist, but realistic about the sombre world he knew. Keymer proves that the author is not dead, and that in the shifting relationship between author and reader plays the marvellous experience of reading Clarissa. Jocelyn Harris University of Otago George Cumberland. The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar: An African Tale. Ed. G.E. Bentley, Jr. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991. liii + 361pp. $55.00. ISBN 0-7735-0742-6. Part 1 of The Captive ofthe Castle ofSennaar was printed in 1798 but not published; a revised version appeared in 1810. Part 2 is printed in this edition for the first time: G.E. Bentley, Jr, a professor at University College, Toronto, has the good fortune to own the manuscript. The Captive ofthe Castle ofSennaar is a moderately interesting late-eighteenth-century Utopian novel. Bentley devotes nine pages of his Introduction to an account of Simon Berington's Adventures ofSignor Gaudentio di Lucca and a discussion of its parallels with Cumberland's novel, but does not seem to give sufficient emphasis to Berington's predecessors and successors in the tradition of Utopian fiction. It may be that he also overlooks the extent to which Cumberland's and Berington's shared interest in the marriage customs and sexual morality of imaginary societies belongs to a common eighteenth-century preoccupation with the humane regulation of sexuality in society. 194 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:2 On this subject Cumberland may have been as confused as the best of them. His Sophian spokesman complains of European brides appearing tiie day after their wedding night, "without blushes, though ruffled with tiie inordinate first rites of impetuous love: and, still more strangely indelicate, instead of fanning the mysterious flame, by soft denials, and secret conjunctions, they occupy the same pallet openly, and nightly" (p. 68). The narrator finds it quite otherwise with his Sophian lover: "The transporting hours we enjoyed were greatly enhanced by the imagined secrecy of our appointments; and, although there is no doubt that the good family in which we resided, saw, and rejoiced at our union, they had the generosity to conceal from us the discovery" (p. 72). One suspects that Cumberland's preference for...

The mental state of detained asylum seekers

The persecution of civilians by the Iraqi forces in Kuwait and subsequent acts of revenge on the Palestinian population have caused widespread revulsion throughout the world. Stories of torture and rape have been described in the Western media and issues of human rights have gained considerable prominence of late. Perhaps now is a good time to examine how Britain responds to the needs of survivors of torture who seek asylum here.

Velazquez' "Las Hilanderas"

Velazquez' Las Hilanderas, examined in the light of Ripa's entry in his Iconologia for Mutability and with supporting material from Cartari's Le imagini de i dei, proves to be a meditation on the mutability of the life and the permanence of art. The theme is enriched through allusions to Ovid's story of Arachne and Titian's Rape of Europa confined to the background and standing for the triumph of art, and the Three Fates and the Goddess Fortune, depicted in the foreground and standing for the mutable world of human beings. Finally, a personal note can be discerned in a veiled reference to the emblem of the Knights of Santiago, reminding us of Velazquez' tenacious quest for a knighthood during the last decade of his life.

Prolog and Epilog: Mythical History in Herodotus

The debate about how unified and consistent are the epic-like Histories of Herodotus is reminiscent of the form and redaction criticism developed around the Bible. The evangelical author, whose purpose is not to address posterity for a statement purely of the historical record, but rather to solicit his contemporaries in a catechetical fashion, shapes the historical deeds of the life and times of the Hebrews to suit a purpose, which includes history but is finally beyond mere history. The prophets, and their sources, are didactic; similarly Herodotus arranged his material for the purpose of highlighting the conflict of tyranny and freedom, of despotic empire and more democratic coalition. Books VII, VIII, and IX are the most elaborate and tight-woven of all the Herodotean logoi, just as the passion narratives that conclude the Gospels are the most factual and sustained narrative. The episodes prior to the climax life-death events in both the Histories and the Gospels compose a melange of fact and story, anecdote and reminiscence, pithy statement and imagined speeches, and colourful, fabulous deeds and wonders. Characters are introduced and biographies sketched: mini-dramas and conflicts among various interest groups build — all contributing to the climax and the great passion struggle. By way of introduction to these awesome events yet in the remembrances of living men, Matthew and Luke give the marvellous infancy narratives, and Herodotus presents the mythological rape stories of his prolog. And, just as the whole Bible begins with a marvellous blend of myth and history that is Genesis and ends with the epilog that is Apocalypse, so the Histories begin with the almost-out-of-memory stories of the kings’ daughters kidnapped, and end with the epilog where the ‘ghost’ of Cyrus appears and there discloses the final revelation of the inner impoverished core of Xerxes’ imperial court government.

Victim's provocativeness and victim's attractiveness as determinants of blame in rape.

Recent studies of rape have emphasized the attractiveness of the victim as a determinant in people's judgments of the victim's blameworthiness. The present study provided 120 undergraduates with four hypothetical rape stories in which the victim's pre-rape behavior and attractiveness were independently varied. The results indicate that the victim's attractiveness is not a determining factor of the victim's blameworthiness when subjects are given descriptions of victim's pre-rape behavior. The results were discussed in the context of a “just world” hypothesis.

Participation mystique as precipitating factor in social and environmental adaptation

Abstract A considerable portion of the daily press as well as a plethora of weekly magazines are devoted to stories of homicide, rape, robbery and felonious assault. Yet, despite the public interest as evidenced by this stream of narration having to do with crimes of violence, there has been little discussion of the criminogenics involved.

Reporting on Rape

The last twelve months have seen an unprecedented surge in press coverage of rape - be it opinion articles, columns or front page stories. Normally, rape stories appear regularly on the crime pages of both government-controlled and opposition newspapers, be they leftist or Tslamist oriented. But two events brought rape to the forefront this year - a fatwa or religious opinion on the rights of rape victims made last November and the revision of the penal code dealing with rape in April 1998.