Stealing Sex

Between Julian Lasange and the battle for the Republican candidacy in the upcoming U.S. elections, there has been plenty of discussion in the media lately about consent and the definition of “legitimate rape”.

On the whole, I tend to feel that political debate and activism are better left to people who are more knowledgeable and less flaky than I am. But the language of rape is something I do know a thing or two about, and as I have clicked my way from one depressing online article to the next I couldn’t help thinking how familiar it all seemed – from the tired old arguments about verbal consent to how often people (usually men) were comparing the crimes of rape and theft.

Once upon a time I volunteered with my local Rape Crisis Centre, before it was ─ surprise! ─ forced to close due to lack of government funding. I was at university at the time and was researching an essay about rape as a narrative trope in middle English romance (fun, right?). This basically involved combing through books about medieval rape law and growing increasingly agitated over the distinct lack of progress our society seemed to have made since the likes of Chaucer were reducing rape to a plot device.

Back in the days of jousting, the legal term for rape was raptus, which comes from the Latin rapere, meaning ‘to seize’. Rape was therefore the crime of being ‘seized’.

Makes sense, right?

The problem is that the legal definition of raptus was kind of hazy. In order to commit the crime all you really had to do was to get your hands on someone else’s private property. Stealing some livestock? That’s raptus. Eloping with someone’s bride? Raptus.

Hmm…making a little bit less sense, now.

What with dowries and bloodlines and inheritances at stake, women’s bodies were pretty valuable. Rape held the threat of both financial loss and loss of reputation…for the man. The act of causing physical and psychological damage to a woman was, in the eyes of the law at least, generally of less significance than the inconvenience inflicted upon the man to whom she belonged. Rape was viewed in terms of theft: “the theft of the woman as property either of her husband or her father,” as Corinne Saunders neatly puts it.

I’d like to think that we have moved on somewhat from this particular definition. Nevertheless, when the need arises to align rape to a more universal crime, theft often seems to be the go-to point of comparison. I just can’t help feeling bothered by this.

To be a victim of theft means to have something stolen from you. It might be something irreplaceable, or it might be something you can pick up at the nearest Apple store, but either way, theft implies the loss of some physical thing which you possess before the crime and are missing afterwards.

I suppose it makes me uncomfortable to view rape in terms of theft, because this assumes that victims of rape are lacking something. It plays into existing ideas about sexual purity being a tangible thing which can be lost. Sex isn’t about having something taken away from you, though that concept still seems to be alarmingly prevalent…another way our attitudes haven’t advanced much since the middle ages.

While we’re drawing comparisons, it’s worth pointing out that the debate about what does or does not count as punishable rape is nothing new either.

In a romance by 12^th century poet Chrétien de Troyes, The Knight of the Cart, the action takes place in a fictional kingdom called Logres, which has specific laws about that whole ‘legitimate’ rape issue. They state that: “if a knight encountered a damsel or girl alone…should he assault her he would be forever disgraced at every court…but if she were being escorted by another, and the knight chose to do battle with her defender and defeated him at arms, then he might do with her as he pleased.”

So, in Logres it counts as ‘real’ rape only if the woman is alone and helpless (and also, presumably, not wearing a mini skirt or acting too provocatively).

These laws need to exist because, as we all know, women like to lie about rape. In the same story, our hero, Lancelot, is fooled by a woman who has set up an elaborate fake rape scenario. The damsel enlists the help of her servants, who pretend to rape her while she screams to Lancelot to see whether or not he will save her. Lancelot does the right thing and intervenes (receiving a few knocks for his trouble), but we are left with a lingering suspicion that when it comes to rape accusations, women aren’t always to be trusted – another dangerous idea to encourage.

Rape is not a simple crime. I’d even go so far as to say that it is perhaps unique in the sheer amount of grey in between the black and the white. While not exclusively a crime against women, it is predominantly so, and too often this results in an issue not being acknowledged enough. It is therefore important that we have these discussions and I am glad that we are now having them on such a large scale.

But let’s make sure that it is more than just rhetoric. Let’s make sure that we are attempting to really address the complicated issues surrounding rape and our attitudes to sex crimes, rather than simply pointing them out and then shrugging our shoulders because they are just too hard to deal with.

After all, these are questions that our society has been discussing since the middle ages. Isn’t it time we started to come up with some proper answers?