The Changing Rhetoric of Rape

News coverage of the pending abortion rights bill in Congress was heavy last week. Watching TV the other night, I was struck by a phrase used in a network report: "forcible rape." The report stated that Democrats were pushing hard for a bill guaranteeing Medicaid funding for abortions for victims of rape and incest, while Republicans were seeking a compromise to which the Democrats would not concede--abortions only for "forcible rape."

"Forcible rape." It takes a while to get used to that phrase. What's rape when it isn't forcible? There's statutory rape, there's acquaintance rape, there's male rape, but rape is always "forcible."

"Forcible rape" is a scary term. It says that rape doesn't inevtibly mean forcible; it says that rape is something that just happens, with or without force, or maybe with or without consent, to be more Orwellian about it. "Forcible rape" implies that rape is nobody's fault, except maybe that of the raped woman.

Or the raped child. Why are "incest" and "sexual abuse" always in categories separate from "rape"? "Incest" is a noun, not a verb; there's no such thing as "to incest," and the victim and agent of incest are indistinguishable "committers of incest." "Committing incest" in our language is conceived as merely a violation of the accepted law and morality, not of the privacy of a woman's or child's body.

Why don't we call attention to the violence and force of incest by calling it something like "incestuous rape"? Of course, now that the news media and Congress insist on separating our rape categories for us, "incestuous rape" might still not connote "forcible" to some. "Forcible incestuous rape?"

CONGRESS isn't the only arm of government making these odd linguistic judgments on rape. In its human rights reports on the U.S.-backed government in El Salvador, the State Department has taken to calling rape--standard punishment for women political prisoners--a form of "psychological torture," as distinct from beatings and burnings, which are placed in a category of physical torture. How, exactly, can a man "psychologically", and not physically, rape a woman?

Who's going to decide what's "psychological" or "forcible" and what's not? The Secretary of State? Congress? The news media? The courts? Are women going to have to go to court to "prove" they've been victims of "psychological torture" or "forcible rape" in order to get Medicaid funding for abortions, or in the worst scenario, in order to get abortions at all?

As it is, the court system is already heavily stacked against the possibility of women and children receiving any kind of fair treatment in cases of rape and incest. Witness the much-publicized situation of Elizabeth Morgan, whose ex-husband, Eric Foretich, allegedly raped their infant daughter Hilary.

Medical testimony-of Foretich's abuse of a young daughter by another marriage was deemed not admissible as evidence. The judge thought there was "a fifty-fifty chance" that Foretich was guilty, and gave him unsupervised visitation rights. Defying a court order, Morgan hid her daughter away rather than return her to her father. Somehow Morgan, not her ex-husband, ended up in jail, without a trial, for more than two years.

In a less famous recent case, a Boston judge took complete custody rights away from Virginia LaLonde, whose only crime seems to be the failure to convince the courts that her ex-husband raped their daughter. The judge found the LaLonde child, a 12-year-old, to be too much under the influence of her mother. Her mother can no longer see her, and her father, the same man the girl called a rapist a few years ago, is now her sole guardian.

"INNOCENT until proven guilty" is a dictum that increasingly applies only to accused rapists. Those who bring charges against their attackers, on the other hand, seem to be easily and legally punished, without trials and juries.

The language of rape--language that we all use and influence--can be amended for and against the protection of women's rights. Women's rights are currently losing, with the help of network correspondents, State Department personnel, custody judges' clerks, and ordinary viewers and readers like you and me.

Against these powers, it seems impossible for ordinary people to tip the scales toward a view of rape that condemns rapists, not victims, just by protesting terms like "forcible rape." But ordinary people can count for a lot; after all, what influences our cultural views of rape if not everyday conversation?

Our political leaders can count for a lot, too. That's why we need politicians who advocate abortion rights and public funding of abortions for all women, not just rape victims. No woman should be forced to have a child because she could not prove she was the victim of rape. No woman should be punished for the simple wish to protect the privacy of her own body--a privacy violated by rape, incestuous rape, and the restriction of abortion.