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..·S· Rape: The All-American Crime SUSAN GRIFFIN I HAVE NEVER been free of the fear of rape. From a very early age I, like most women, have thought ofrape as part of my natural environment-something to be feared and prayed against like fire or lightning. I never asked why men raped; I simply thought it one of the many mysteries of human nature. . . . I was never certain why the victims were always women ... but I did guess that the world was not a safe place for women. I observed that my grandmother was meticulous about locks, and quick to draw the shades before anyone removed so much as a shoe. I sensed that danger lurked outside. At the age ofeight, my suspicions were confirmed. My grandmother took me to the back of the house where the men wouldn't hear, and told me that strange men wanted to do harm to little girls. I learned not to walk on dark streets, not to talk to strangers, or get into strange cars, to lock doors, and to be modest. She never explained why a man would want to harm a little girl, and I never asked. If I thought for a while that my grandmother's fears were imaginary, the illusion was brief. That year, on the way home from school, a schoolmate a few years older than I tried to rape me. Later, in an obscure aisle of the local library (while I was reading Freddy the Pig) I turned to discover a man exposing himself. Then, the friendly man around the corner was arrested for child molesting.... But though rape and the fear of rape are a daily part of every woman's consciousness , the subject is so rarely discussed by that unofficial staffof male intellectuals (who write the books which study seemingly every other form of male activity) that one begins to suspect a conspiracy of silence. And indeed, the obscurity of rape in print exists in marked contrast to the frequency of rape in reality, for forcible rape is the most frequently committed violent crime in America today.... When I asked Berkeley, California's Police Inspector in charge of rape investigation if he knew why men rape women, he replied that he had not spoken with "these people and delved into what really makes them tick, because that really isn't myjob...." However, when I asked him how a woman might prevent being raped, he was not so© 1971 by Susan Griffin. First published in Ramparts Magazine, Vol. 10 (Sept. 1971), pp. 26-35. 422 Copyrighted Material Rape: The All-American Crime I 423 reticent, "I wouldn't advise any female to go walking around alone at night ... and she should lock her car at all times." The Inspector illustrated his warning with a grisly story about a man who lay in wait for women in the back seats of their cars, while they were shopping in a local supermarket. This man eventually murdered one of his rape victims . "Always lock your car," the Inspector repeated, and then added, without a hint of irony, "Of course, you don't have to be paranoid about this type of thing." The Inspector wondered why I wanted to write about rape. Like most men he didn't understand the urgency of the topic, for, after all, men are not raped. But like most women I had spent considerable time speculating on the true nature of the rapist. When I was very young, my image of the sexual offender was a nightmarish amalgamation of the boogie-man and Captain Hook: he wore a black cape, and he cackled. As I matured, so did my image of the rapist. Born into the psychoanalytic age, I tried to understand the rapist. Rape, I came to believe, was only one of many unfortunate evils produced by sexual repression. Reasoning by tautology, I concluded that any man who would rape a woman must be out of his mind. Yet, though the theory that rapists are insane is a popular one, this belief has no basis in fact. According to Professor Menachem Amir's study of646 rape cases in Philadelphia , Patterns in Forcible Rape, men who rape are not abnormal. ... Alan Taylor, a parole officer who has worked with rapists in the prison facilities at San Luis Obispo, California, stated the question in plainer language, 'Those men were the most normal men there. They had a lot of hang-ups, but they were the...

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