Good, Evil, and Sexual Assault

I think we need to stop demonizing rapists.

I feel a little strange saying this, especially when violence against women is an under-addressed issue, and most rapists go free because no one will believe that they could have committed sexual assault. Women are typically blamed while men escape any consequences for their actions.

But I think a big part of that problem is that we demonize rapists too much.

Everyone pictures rapists as psychopaths, hiding in the bushes with knives. As feminists we’ve worked really hard to dispel that myth, explaining over and over that most rapists assault someone they know – friends, acquaintances, dates, and partners.

A big part of the reason that people aren’t catching on to what that really means is that they are still picturing men who commit sexual assault as evil or morally corrupt. If their friend isn’t evil or morally corrupt, he couldn’t possibly commit sexual assault.

Some rapists are just master manipulators, and hide the fact that they are vicious predators, as evil as any real human could be. I don’t really believe in evil, and I’ve known men personally who were certainly not anywhere near it, yet still committed the horrible crime of rape. A lot of guys who commit sexual assault actually do have a conscience, and actually don’t want to be sexually assaulting women.

We need to become more effective at separating the act from a good vs. evil judgment of a person. We can’t be naive and think that having a polite chat with a rapist will necessarily stop him, but we have to acknowledge the complexities of individuals. There are a lot of men who need a lot of education, but we need to find a way to talk about rape that places the responsibility for rape squarely on the perpetrator’s shoulders without *necessarily* condemning him forever.

We need to show people that they can reconcile their belief that their friend has a good heart with the reality that he has committed rape. Rape is a terrible crime with terrible consequences, I know this personally. But when so many men think that the whole sexual assault discussion doesn’t apply to them or their friends because they aren’t knowingly, intentionally, maliciously committing sex crimes, we’re losing an audience that might actually want to change.

Just as we need a performance model of sex (as articulated brilliantly by Thomas Macaulay Millar in Yes Means Yes), we need a performance model of sexual assault. The crime is about the actions of an individual, not the goodness or evil in his or her heart.