Rape: A History From 1860 To The Present

by Joanna Bourke

Joanna Bourke, author of the critically-acclaimed Fear, unflinchingly and controversially moves away from looking at victims to look at the rapists. She examines the nature of rape, drawing together the work of criminologists, sociologists and psychiatrists to analyse what drives the perpetrators of sexual violence. Rape - A History looks at the perception of rape, both in the mass media and the wider public, and considers the crucial questions of treatment and punishment. Should sexual offenders be castrated? Will Freud's couch or the behaviourists' laboratory work most effectively? Particular groups of offenders such as female abusers, psychopaths and exhibitionists are given special attention here, as are potentially dangerous environments, including the home, prison, and the military. By demystifying the category of the rapist and revealing the specificities of the past, Joanna Bourke dares to consider a future in which sexual violence has been placed outside the human experience.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Feminism, Sexuality, Sociology, Gender, Womens

576 pages, Hardcover

First published October 4, 2007

About the author

Joanna Bourke (born 1963 in New Zealand) is an historian and professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book on a disturbing but important topic. The author focuses on rapists more so than the victims. She discusses all different forms of rape such as prison rape (both male on male and female on female), marital rape, female-on-male rape, and so on. She also even mentions voyeurs and exhibitionists.

The author recites previous research done on the topic from the 1700s to the present and what other historians and psychiatrists think about why rapists do what they do. She does come to her own conclusions on what can be done to end or minimize rape, if anything. Ms. Bourke also focuses on the various treatments rapists can receive from just prison sentences to castration to even lobotomies.

This is a long book, a little over 500 pages, but it is an important read for both males and females. Again, this focuses mainly on the various rapists instead of the victim which is an interesting and important viewpoint. The author has done a great deal of research which can be seen in the 100+ pages of notes at the end of the book (which provides the reader a good base on other books to read on the subject).

I think this is an important topic to discuss and therefore an important book to read. Definitely pick it up.

[Renee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, how do you open a review on a book about rape?
I imagine many people for perfectly understandable reasons would not choose to pick up this book due to its subject matter. Rape is a sensitive, sometimes political topic and for some is personally traumatic. The most reliable survey on rape conducted in New Zealand estimated that around a quarter of women experience an assault that meets the legal definition of rape within their lifetimes. Rape is also an extremely pressing justice issue; less than 5% of rapes reported (and most are not reported) result in conviction for the rapist in the UK.

Bourke gives us an extremely comprehensive survey of how western society (particularly the UK, US and Australia) has viewed rape from the mid 19th century to the present. The focus of Bourke's work is not the victim, but the rapists, - how the public and experts have attempted to define rape and who commits rape.

In 400 odd pages, Bourke paints a disturbing picture of how patriarchal and rape-condoning attitudes have and continue to encourage society to dismiss the victim and defend the rapist. The first section, appropriately entitled 'Lies' explores popular rape myths, such as 'women secretly want to be raped', 'a healthy woman can always successfully resist rape' and of course 'no means yes'. Section two examines 'Identities', the stereotypes about rapists developed by society over time, such as the African-American rapist with his wild out-of-control sex drive. In section three Bourke collects 'Case studies', rapists, victims or other sex offenders who fail to fit into the 'typical' definition of a rapist. Here she discusses female rapists, male victims, exhibitionists (or flashers) and psychopaths. In section four Bourke examines 'Violent Institutions', places prone to rape such as the Home, Prison and the Military. Finally in 'Law' and 'Resistance' Bourke discusses how the vast majority of rapists still 'get away' with the second most serious crime, and how we can stop it. Bourke notes that in court the victim's not the rapists conduct is questioned and physical resistance, not crying and pleading, is the most effective way for a victim to prevent rape.

Although I like the thoroughness of Bourke's book - I wouldn't have thought to include exhibitionists - I often found her analysis too abstract and scholarly. Bourke has massive potential as a writer to reach out to her reader. She draws you in with anecdotes of real rape cases, yet I find myself becoming less and less engaged as her chapters wear on, as she moves from personal stories to dry academic examinations of 'self' 'sexed bodies' and such. Rape is a subject that desperately needs to be re-examined by the public at large. If her book were more accessible for laypeople it may help change erroneous rape attitudes today. What we need is a book that provokes mass awareness, outrage and soul-searching, not another dusty academic tome for the elite.

[Damaskcat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating study of a crime which has always created controversy throughout history. Statistically the majority of victims are female and the majority of perpetrators are male even when the victims are male but the book does not ignore female rapists and nor does it ignore rape within prisons or the military. The book concentrates on rapists rather than their victims and the ways in which society has tried to treat them and/or punish them with varying degrees of success. It also demonstrates how rapists have sought to justify and explain their actions.

The book examines the attitudes to rape victims and perpetrators both within the legal professions and the judiciary and from society and the media. The consistent attitude throughout the period covered by the book has been to blame and disbelieve the victim, whether male or female, and to treat the aggressor as though he simply used a bit more force than necessary but was actually just behaving in a way all men behave. I was trying to think of any other crime where the victim is automatically held responsible to a certain extent for the crime whatever the circumstances and I could not think of one.

I was surprised that until relatively recently judges in rape trials could warn juries that it could be dangerous to rely on the uncorroborated testimony of the victim in the UK. Again rape is the only crime where the victim is unlikely to be believed. If someone walks down a dark alley and is mugged no one tells them they are partly responsible for what happened to them because they walked down that dark alley, so why are rape victims blamed?

I was especially interested in what the book has to say about false rape allegations. It appears that false rape allegations are no more common than false allegations of any other crime though of course prosecutions in false rape cases make headline news. Any false allegation of any crime is likely to have a devastating effect on the person falsely accused but the fact that a case never makes it to court does not mean the allegation was false in the first place.

This book can be read by anyone who is studying in any field such as criminology, psychology or sociology and by the general reader. It has copious notes on the text and a comprehensive bibliography as well as an index. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in this hugely controversial subject.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not an easy book to read, but it is an important book to read. If Brownmiller’s book about rape raised awareness, this book raises awareness in terms of legality and history. Apparently, at the time of this book’s writing, marital rape really wasn’t on the books.

Burke looks at how people saw rape in the late 1800s until the present day. There are stories that will make you angry and laws that will piss you off.




But this book should be read, in particular when one looks at the popularity of books and series like Fifty Shades or Anita Blake, where the relationship it could be argued is not, well, kosher.

If you look at the descriptions of Twilight and the like, it is all about possession, which in many ways ties into how we see rape, something that Bourke points out. A woman, some believed, gave consent when she married. After the ring went on, so went the ability to say no. Sounds like quite like some of these book that are currently out.

Men fear not. Bourke looks also at men as victims of rape, and not just in prison. She bring awareness not only to the fact that male rape is unreported even more than female but of the stigma that attaches to it – the belief that all men want it and that real men don’t get raped. Considering how facile some authors (hello LKH) are about such abuse it is provoking in a good way to see someone do an analysis of it.

This book is a good continuation of Bronwmiller’s work and should be read in conjunction with that book.


Crossposted at Booklikes

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bourke's study of rape looks at the crime as an historical construct by analyzing how it has changed over time. Her book is a sophisticated and historically nuanced study that shows how sexual violence and rape is defined by both cultural, historical and legal discourses. While a hotly contested subject and category of analysis because it involves bodies in trauma, Bourke shows how it remains an important lever of power in our society.

"Rape is a form of social performance. It is highly ritualized. It varies between countries; it changes over time. There is nothing timeless or random about it...For perpetrator of sexual violence, it is never enough to merely inflict suffering: those causing injury insist that even victims give meaning to their anguish." 6

"In particular, my definition can encompass a dramatic historical shift in the understanding of sexual violence: what was initially seen as an act involving sexual violation became eventually conceived as part of an identity. The designation 'rapist' is modern, first used as late as 1883. There are parallels here with philosopher Michel Foucault's discussion of gays. In the course of the nineteenth century the homosexual and (I argue) the rapist 'became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology...Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality." 11

"The memory-recovery movement arose in a period when the myth that women were inherently untrustworthy was particularly trenchant. As a result, many therapists felt impelled to go to the opposite extreme, accepting each and every account of abuse as historically true and encouraging women to read their symptoms according to the abuse paradigm." 41

"As Alan Hyde put it in Bodies of Law, an assumption exists that the penis is able to communicate 'a kind of truth of which the man is unaware or wishes to keep secret." 245

"It was no coincidence that anxieties about psychopaths concentrated as much on the sexual as on the violent aspects of their crimes. The psychopath was not simply a murderer; it was significant that his pathology was sexual. It was precisely his uncontrollable sexual urges that constituted the main definition of the psychopath form the 1930s onwards." 282

"Philosopher Michel Foucault persuasively made the case for radical change. He proposed that seeing rape as a sexual attack, as opposed to a form of assault, was to "shore up the apparatus of repression, infusing sex with repressive power."...Foucault contended that 'sexuality can in no circumstances be the object of punishment.'" 405

"The Foucauldian project of unpicking sex from regimes of institutional power is also highly attractive for another reason. There is a point in the argument that classifying rape as a sexual offence rather than assault creates women as less than a full person. Her vagina is separated from her Self; she becomes a 'wounded space', as opposed to a full human subject." 406

"As I have discussed earlier, rape is discursively produced. What constitutes the 'sex' part of the definition has dramatically changed over time. Distinguishing between sex and power simple fails to acknowledge that both concepts have a history. Indeed, because the intimate relationship between notions of the self and sexuality simply did not exist until the eighteenth century (and then were not fully integrated into everyday concepts until well into the nineteenth century), and definition that posits rape as equivalent to assault makes a great deal more sense in that earlier period than it does today. In other words, an argument can be made that rape has increasingly become a sexual attack...For the purposes of the present argument, it is sufficient to observe that the sexualization of rape is a modern phenomenon - and has entered fully into rape narratives produced by rapists." 407

"Indeed, at precisely that historical moment when feminist were insisting that 'rape is about power not sex,' rapists became most vocal in arguing that rape was about sex. It is the modern-day rapist who is much more likely to search for evidence of 'involuntary pleasure' in the female body. Lacking the visual evidence of pleasure (indeed, being confronted with visual evidence of pain) the rapist often either eroticizes that pain or gives primacy to the spoken word, savagely compelling a bogus recital of 'wanting it too'. In both, the rapist insists on the power of the word in evoking the 'little death'." 408

"Rape is a central way in which power operates within our society. The problem of rape rests at every level of society and law." 410

"In the words of George Vigarello's perceptive analysis of rape in France. Rape had become an attack upon a woman's sexual identity, creating a 'psychic wound', a 'violation of the self', since a person's identity was much more likely to be defined in terms of sexuality. This intense focus on the body as a marker of identity and as a locus of truth is a profoundly modern conception." 425

"Others (including myself) propose tackling the 'problem of men' in more positive ways. A politics of masculinity that focuses upon a man's body as a site of pleasure (for him and others), as opposed to an instrument of oppression and pain, demands a renewed focus on male deportment, imaginary and agency. For the commentators the male body serves as the locus for the social construction of masculinity. People discover sex: they learn its performance. They are taught to be aroused, or not. They are told in words, deeds and gestures what is forbidden. John Stoltenberg makes a similar observation when he insists that people born with pensises are not born male, they become men." 437-438

"Of course, as a I have repeated time and again in this book, although discourse is always artificial, mutable and performative, it takes place within historical time and geographical place. It is easy to overestimate the subversive nature of texts. Subversion, the philosopher Susan Bordo writes, is 'contextual, historical, and above all, social. No matter how exacting the destabilizing potential of the text, bodily or otherwise, whether those texts are subversive or recuperative or both or neither cannot be determined in abstraction from actual social practice. Social practice occurs through choices made by subjects within time and place." 440

[Roberto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Johanna Bourke è riuscita a scrivere un libro rigoroso e molto interessante sulla storia della violenza sessuale.
Attingendo a vari studi di criminologi, giuristi, psicologi e sociologi, servendosi delle narrazioni di violenza rilasciate da vittime e aggressori inglesi e americani dalla metà dell'Ottocento a oggi e di come quei racconti sono cambiati nel tempo, combattendo con la definizione di stupro e stupratore, di consenso e coercizione, l'autrice scava nelle "motivazioni" che portano un individuo a scegliere la violenza: "Al centro di questo libro c'è lo stupratore e non la vittima. Se la categoria dello stupratore viene demistificata, la violenza sessuale non sembrerà più inevitabile. Stupratori non si nasce, si diventa.”
Tutto lo sforzo analitico del libro serve a sostenere la soluzione auspicata dalla Bourke: quella di una “politica della virilità che si concentri sul corpo dell’uomo come luogo di piacere per sé e per gli altri e non come uno strumento di oppressione e di dolore”, una politica che richiede una attenzione al comportamento, all’immaginario e all’attivismo maschile.

[Joey Comeau · Rating 3 out of 5]

A frustrating read, though more because this is a frustrating subject than any quality in the writing. Reading to try and understand what goes on in the head of rapists, what self-justifications they use to continue viewing themselves as good people and not rapists at all. Too often our popular culture creates the image of rapist as monster, which is satisfying in a visceral way, but which will not help to actually change the way people (men) think. It is difficult to maintain any empathy or understanding for the perpetrators of sexual violence (and the book itself, despite its stated purpose, uses language that helps distance) but I do think that understanding and re-humanizing is the only way we're going to be able to undermine certain parts of rape culture.

[Sylvie Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well. I have spent a long, long time with this book. It has been draining, and at times the motivation to continue has been near-impossible to drum up. If it was this difficult to read, I can only imagine what it was like to write such a thorough, meticulously researched work.

The quality isn't in question. It's incredibly rich and varied in approach, while keeping a laser focus on perpetrators of rape (which the author has broadened beyond a single legal definition, not least because this has been redefined many times over) rather than victims. Bourke tracks changing attitudes and how seriously the crime is taken at various points in history - for example, the move (mid-20th century onwards) from focussing on the act of rape (criminalisation) to the identity of the rapist (pathology) - and that shifts such as these are driven by contemporary politics. (The spectre of the black rapist targeting white women was an especially powerful image in the US in particular and especially inflammatory when anti-racist developments were taking shape, but has been resurrected today in the shape of non-white immigrants arriving in Western nations.) It's no surprise that the question of who receives treatment and who is jailed depended* on race, class and perceived intelligence. An example of this is where Bourke shows that, while white perpetrators were diagnosed with exhibitionism, perpetrators of colour were charged with indecent exposure.

Given Bourke also looks at rape in many different contexts (the military, prison, female rapists and male victims, to name but a few areas), it's impossible to cover all of it here. This is an eye-opening, devastating book. I really appreciated Bourke's continual attention to questions around race, gender, class and sexuality. This was first published in 2007, and, given the changes in attitudes we're seeing in relation to all four of these areas at the moment, a new edition would be fascinating. The book as is is brilliant, and should be required reading for every single person. I can't recommend it highly enough.

* I feel bound to put this sentence in past tense as ostensibly all should be equal in the eyes of the law today, but we all know that's not how it works in practice. There needs to be a new tense - definitely in the past and unfortunately still in the present even if theoretically obsolete. The “ostensible past tense”?

[Ilaria Fluido · Rating 3 out of 5]

Questa lettura è stata più challenging di quanto mi aspettassi. Sebbene non si tratti di un testo eccessivamente accademico, per così dire, è di fatto un saggio storico che tradisce le sue premesse, ovvero quelle di trattare la questione dello stupro dal 1860 ai giorni nostri, in quanto si concentra, salvo rari casi, in uno spazio di tempo che dalla fine dell'Ottocento agli anni Sessanta/Settanta, lasciando ben poco spazio alla contemporaneità. Detto ciò la considero comunque una lettura interessantissima che mi ha arricchito molto. In termini storici l'analisi della Bourke fa riferimento ad un passato relativamente recente e, per molti versi, spaventosamente familiare. Molte delle discriminazioni legate alla cultura dello stupro contro le quali il femminismo moderno ancora si batte non sono che un eco di ciò che pochi decenni fa era ancora considerata verità inalienabile sancita anche a livello amministrativo, come l'impunità dello stupro coniugale e il silenzio sullo stupro maschile. Temi che la Bourke tratta da una prospettiva per certi versi inedita, ovvero quella dello stupratore, del carnefice, di colui che compie materialmente violenza sessuale o per contro dell'immagine che se ne da la società. Troppo spesso la stessa letteratura femminista è colpevole di portare il focus solo sulle vittime, involontariamente implicando che stia al genere femminile (nella stragrande maggioranza dei casi vittima di violenza) risolvere un problema che, a monte, è perlopiù maschile.

[The moon song · Rating 2 out of 5]

El mundo da asco, es lo único que puedo pensar al finalizar el libro. Existe todo un engranaje detrás de la sociedad que culpa siempre a la víctima, y disculpa al violador; este engranaje ha estado sustentado por journals científicos, ha sido ratíficado por jueces y continua siendo perpetuado por el común de la sociedad.

"La defensa pregunta por qué la presunta víctima actuó de determinada manera. ¿Por qué aceptó la copa? ¿Por qué bailó de determinada forma? ¿Por qué no gritó? Se considera que cualquier acción que la acusadora no emprendiera otorga responsabilidad. En contraste con ello, el acusado queda como pasivo, como un mero accesorio en la narración de la violación... A diferencia de lo que ocurre en otros juicios por delitos graves, la víctima de la violación se convierte en el centro de atención. Su vida se analiza minuciosamente...No es fácil realizar una acusación de violación. El estigma que se adscribe a cualquier persona que afirma haber sida violada es importante, y en el (improbable) caso de que haya juicio, la víctima se enfrenta a una terrible experiencia que a menudo se describe como algo próximo a una segunda agresión. Como mínimo, los juicios por violación se parecen a ceremonias de degradación para la víctima, en la que ésta es denunciada y sus motivaciones puestas en tela de juicio delante de muchos testigos."

[Heather Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, what a fascinating book. I appreciated the historical context and it helped me come to terms with my own conflict around what to do with people who rape. I’m often caught between acab and abolitionist views, but torn because of my own experiences of rape and sexual abuse over most of my life. I was particularly struck by the points of history when men have been given multiple chances, talked with, and see more as a victim than the survivor of rape! Mostly because in the more radical left, there’s a push the humanize rapists and abusers. But it’s sooooo much more complicated. As an anarchist, I really loved the book! And I’m not totally sure how to handle rape still, but feel some things have come together more.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a topic of everyone's taste - a thought provoking read that is written with sensitivity, honesty and candour by Joanna Bourke.

[Lectoralila · Rating 5 out of 5]

EL LIBRO

[Andrea Ramploud · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saggio interessantissimo e ancora molto attuale sullo stupro e sugli stupratori.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard to get through but important that she wrote it. Just wish it was more about the survivors.

[Leo W · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone needs to read this book, it’s so important. It’s not easy & is quite triggering but Joanna Bourke holds your hand through the history & shows how we got to where we are. 10/10

[jose · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult book to rate. The disturbing topic made the reading process difficult but overall the book is a great piece of work on an important theme.

[S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brilliant historical content - not an easy read emotionally.

[Vishal Misra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a stunningly well researched text which should be a must read for anyone interested in socio-legal studies. It's obviously disturbing, given its subject matter, and it's not necessarily a book I'd recommend reading on the train on your morning commute, it'll attract a lot of strange looks. However, strange looks aside, this is a deeply illuminating tome.

Bourke focusses her research on Common Law countries, with especial focus on the UK, US and Australia. What follows is a very dense book on this history of rape from 1860 onwards. Bourke States that she was inspired by rage to write this book, rage that the rape conviction percentage remains stubbornly low. She structures her book supremely well, and turns inquiry on its head here. The primary subject of the book is "the rapist". Adopting a Foucauldian approach familiar to readers of "A History of Sexuality", Bourke explores how the rapist is structured.

Rape is a crime that traditionally affects women and children more than men, and yet has been defined and structured by men. So Bourke explores it all. She looks at female perpetrators (can lesbians rape their partners? Can women rape men?), she looks at legal constructions and tropes. She destroys rape myths, analyses the construction of masculinities and dives deep in to the world of prison rape.

For those interested in how the intersections of power, race, privilege and gender play out in the world of sexual aggression and how history has framed this evolution, this is a great place to start. Please note, this book is not for everyone and contains a lot of triggers for those struggling with emotional trauma. Either way, this book filled me with rage too - but this book also calmed me with its mature and intelligently critical approach to sexual violence.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe that anyone who is engaged in the study of rape, sexual assault, gender or violence, or any activist engaged in combating sexual crimes will benefit from reading this book. Bourke lays out a persuasive genealogy of our current notions about rape, sex, masculinity and femininity and historicizes our current discourse in a multitude of ways that--while frequently enraging--illuminate the fact that sexual violence is a contingent feature or our culture(s) and society.

In the final chapter, "Violence, Politics, Erotics," Bourke says, "In this book, I have emphasized the power of narrative, rhetoric and habit in fashioning gender norms. Gendered stereotypes repeately performed invest sex with it dominant meanings. But these iterative performances can be subverted. Performances of gender don't simply constrain; they provide subjects with ways to 'tinker' with culture, subverting norms redefining identities and exploiting pleasures. Sexuality and identities become malleable things indeed."

These are very large claims. The highest praise I can offer for this book is that Bourke earns the right to make these claims through patient scholarship, wide reading and clear, precise writing.

[Mark Desrosiers · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author begins, tantalizingly, with the proposition "rape" is sometimes more complex than the world would have us believe. Maybe rapists could use some understanding, if not sympathy, exactly.

But no, this is another standard retro-feminist text. Her view still pokes its head out of the nunnery, always with a jaundiced Manichean eye directed at us boys and our man-dangles. On page 212 she says this: "If all sexually aggressive individuals were gathered together in a great Dantean circle of hell, the vast majority would be men." Anyone who's actually been in a sexual situation -- and that means most of us -- knows that "sexually aggressive" is apportioned equally between the sexes, and that hell is the last place we should end up. The dependent variable is consent, and I don't think Bourke ever fully addresses the potent ambiguity of that concept. If her analytical apparatus blossomed from an obviously hot sacktime power dynamic, I bet she'd approach this strange, sad, confusing topic from a more insightful angle.

Bad sex, decent history, vanilla ideology. Take it one chapter at a time.

[Rory · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Rape: Sex, Violence, History' is a good exploration of the subject in its modern sense, but it isn't definitive. The alternative title 'Rape: A History From 1860 To The Present' gives a better idea of the subject matter. Bourke does a good job of exploring rape as an academic concept and from a number of practical perspectives.

The chapters detailing the psychological and criminological histories of rape felt bibliographical and dense (possibly due to me not having much experience in either fields). I found her historical and political insights more interesting and illuminating.

The racial dimensions of rape was extremely well researched and very well communicated, as was the feminist explorations of "gendered spaces." The chapters on rape in "War" and "Prison" were also well done.

If I had one criticism it would be that not enough weight was given to case studies from the perspective of rape survivors. Early on Bourke explains that she wants to focus on the perpetrator, but the lack of in-depth analysis of rape survivors does mean that the book feels slightly lacking.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't exactly go into this book with an entirely open mind, having in my head a hypothesis I was particularly interested in confirming. (As for whether or not it did that, it's not an easy answer, but that's not really the point of the book, is it?) Invaluable as raw data, and mind-blowing as to the sheer heft of the scholarship involved--this is a book that, in a pinch, would serve as a suitable weapon for home defense--it's hard to imagine it wouldn't be useful for anyone interested in this uniquely squicky topic.

I might quibble with the language in parts, specifically the seemingly utopian tone of the introduction, and the historical inquiry tends to focus almost entirely on the last couple hundred years (not a surprise, as records aren't easy to come by before that, and records of rape are uniquely problematic), but...yeah. Damn fine book, and highly recommended for anyone interested in investigating the gaping blind spot in much canonical moral philosopy.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't want to give it the five stars it deserved academically, bc books about rape just shouldn't get any stars in general. Rape is nasty.

That, and I broke the laws of reading by not reading the end. It was only bc the book was due, and there were no renewals available. So I'm a bit peeved about that. I still consider it read, though. (Take that, OCD!!!)

That being said, I feel like it explained a lot behind the mindset of rapists. They're extremely self-centered, and while masculinity in and of itself cannot be the excuse (nor the sex drive), it can still pay a large role if/when it's unhealthy. That, and there are just bad people in the world.

Not a read for those with a queasy stomach. It can get pretty disgusting, and a little depressing. One can risk becoming desensitized to the graphic imagery. Hoping to read the end at some point in the near future.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will was one of the most powerful books I ever read, one of those marvellous books that opens up a new way of thinking about things, that expands the world. This book picks up the story from Brownmiller. Bourke's focus on rapists rather than on victims is useful and the book is full of useful information, but it's not as compelling or as world-altering as its predecessor. But I would hardly expect it to be. Still worth reading, though.

[ael · Rating 2 out of 5]

i didn't really learn anything, and i was disturbed by her seemingly essentialist and pro-incarceration views, but what do you expect from a mainstream book on assault? decent historical overview. reading about people's fucked-up notions about rape was even more depressing than reading actual accounts of it.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a history of rape and rapists - focusing on the perpetrators and their role in history, not the victims. It's a thick book on a hard topic, but Bourke handles it well, making it interesting and accessible all the way through.

I like this book so much I got my dog-eared, highlighted copy autographed by Joanna Bourke herself!

[Madden · Rating 4 out of 5]

wrote about pg. 150: so far I like the historiography going on here, but I do think it suffers from a narrow, prescriptive, and overly-normative scope. I understand why that was necessary in 2007 and still is today, but would still have liked a more global/holistic view of the terminology, practice, and ethics/social views/etc. surrounding rape, if even in British culture.