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1 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION The Failure of Success You go in and even mention the word “sex” anything—whether it’s child sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual violence—you can couch it any way you want—you say those words and people tune out. . . . They can accept domestic violence, they can accept child abuse. They can accept all of those things. [Those things] are evil. They are awful, they don’t want them in their community, but that draws [people] to a place of wanting to help. . . . Corporations don’t want their names on our events. . . . The intimacy of . . . forced sexual contact completely freaks people out. They can’t even engage in conversation about it. It impacts our funding. It impacts our support. It impacts our volunteerism. . . . It impacts our ability to get staff. It impacts every level of the work that we do. (Washington, urban) [Y]ou can have something on a piece of paper, but if you don’t have the entities enforcing what’s on that piece of paper, you know, it’s worth nothing, absolutely nothing. (South Carolina, urban) The anti-rape movement has long been described as one of the most successful projects of second wave feminism. The story goes something like this: Beginning in the early 1970s, feminist activists—outraged by grossly inadequate medical and legal responses to women who had been raped— created local rape crisis centers (RCCs), organizations which modeled non-oppressive practices, provided supportive services to victims, recruited new activists into the movement, and provided feminist analysis of and challenges to rape culture in all its forms. A core component of the antirape movement was an ambitious and ultimately successful campaign to reform rape laws around the country. In their efforts to re-shape law and culture simultaneously—pushing and pulling from law, politics, and women’s lives—the anti-rape movement of the 1970s was a textbook case of what scholars today call legal mobilization: the use of legal concepts and language to articulate grievances , translate individual experiences into social problems, and create or transform legal mechanisms for redress of those problems. In their canny approach to law reform, feminists eschewed a litigation-based 2 Introduction strategy dependent upon the assertion and recognition of formal legal rights. Instead, feminists opted to pursue statutory protections enacted by elected legislators in statehouses across the nation. Rape law reforms, which broadened definitions of sexual assault, strengthened criminal due process protections for victims, improved the medical response to rape, and raised the public profile of sexual violence, thus stand as a successful monument to the prospects for achieving social change through legal strategies. Through their law reform and community organizing efforts, RCCs became well-funded, politically savvy, highly visible, respected local organizations that advocate for the needs and rights of victims. When systems stumble in individual cases, RCCs act swiftly to remedy problems. As a result, contemporary legal and medical responses to rape work well, treating rape victims with the care and competence necessary to serve the interests of both justice and compassion. In one of the few book-length studies of the movement, Maria Bevacqua describes “reforms in criminal law, gains in funding for rape research and service providers, institutional reform on the local level, [and] passage of the comprehensive Violence Against Women Act” as “major political and policy outcomes” of the anti-rape movement, and asserts that the movement “has virtually transformed public perceptions of rape and its victims,” demonstrating that “the way we, as a culture, understand rape today marks a radical break from the public consciousness of the late 1960s.” Though she acknowledges that there is still unfinished business on the anti-rape agenda, she concludes that “[b]y any measure the effectiveness of the anti-rape campaign cannot be denied” (Bevacqua 2000, 195–6). Victoria Nourse points out that “[t]here is not a criminal law casebook in America today, nor a state statute book, that does not tell this story” of feminist-inspired rape law reform (2000a, 951). A report sponsored by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center in 2010 begins with the recognition of “the incredible strides that advocates who have been working on the issue of sexual violence have made in the last 30 years regarding public perceptions of sexual violence” (O’Neil and Morgan 2010, 4). Patricia Rozee and Mary Koss (2001, 297) laud RCCs as “[a] major contribution of feminist activists in the latter part of the 20th century” which “has been a tremendous...

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