Fear of Rape But Not Its Prevention

Picture yourself walking alone, down a deserted street, late at night. You hear a strange noise behind you. Your heart starts to beat faster, you walk more quickly and you start to imagine yourself being attacked. An unlikely scenario? Unfortunately not, particularly for women in urban areas.

This anxiety is the subject of The Female Fear. The Social Cost of Rape, by Margaret Gordon and Stephanie Riger. Gordon and Riger analyze the sources and the consequences of the fear of rape. The resulting book combines statistics and specific case studies in a fascinating manner.

Gordon and Riger researched the topic of rape extensively. The authors studied interviews with over 300 women and men from different areas of Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco. The participants were asked 51 pages of questions about their experiences with rape, about their fears of being raped, and about the precautions they took to prevent being raped.

Not surprisingly, Gordon and Riger found that the women who were most afraid of being raped were those who lived in lower-income neighborhoods. However, the areas that were cited as most dangerous were not always the areas with the highest incidences of rape.

The authors feel that fear of rape is imposed upon women by a male-dominated society. They attribute much of women's fear to media sensationalism and limited knowledge about the realities of rape. As support for their theory, Gordon and Riger point to the media's tendency to "blame the victim" and to the widespread belief that provocatively-dressed women are some-how "asking" to be raped.

While this argument is convincing, at times the authors seem to imply that society is intentionally perpetuating female terror. They fail to show how the fear of rape could benefit society in a way that would justify its perpetuation.

Gordon and Riger criticize the media on seemingly contradictory grounds. The authors claim that "the media exaggerate both the prevalence and the seriousness" of crime, leading women to believe that rape is more common and violent than is actually true. But they later point to the lack of coverage of what are deemed "typical" rapes, giving the impression that more coverage would heighten women's knowledge of rape.

The authors acknowledge that rape is difficult to define. Each respondent was asked whether they defined various activities, ranging from forced sexual intercourse to verbal harassment, as rape. Gordon and Riger keep these broad definitions throughout the book and are careful not to generalize.

This approach has both advantages and disadvantages. Because the authors maintain a flexible definition of what constitutes a rape, they allow each respondent to personalize the fear that they feel.

Unfortunately, because Gordon and Riger never describe a typical rape, the reader is confused as to the feasability of the solutions the authors propose. Gordon and Riger advocate a nine-point plan that includes a revision of existing rape laws, a reform of media coverage and increased rape education in schools. Although hypothetically desirable, this plan lacks concrete applications. The authors often remain content with generalities rather than pragmatic solutions.

The numerous charts and tables in the book occasionally become overwhelming, but many of them help illustrate the points made. Gordon and Riger effectively balance statistics and case studies, using the evidence culled from the interviews to back up their arguments.

The Female Fear shows that the fear of rape "is not an idiosyncratic, private emotion, but a social fact with considerable impact on our society and on the quality of life in our cities." Any woman who reads this book will be comforted by the knowledge that she is not alone in her anxiety. Unfortunately, Gordon and Riger do not propose effective societal solutions for the problem their book so powerfully describes