Sociology of rape and the study of rape or sexual assault has grown greatly since the late 1960s due to feminist activists and authors. Rape is a social harm directly touching a number of women and in many ways, and impacts nearly all women. In Mill's terms, Rape is a social problem, or issue, that affects all of society. In sociology of rape we will challenge traditional patriarchy and patriarchal beliefs, and question current feminist thinking to try and find the most complete understanding of sexual assault. Sociology of rape will explore the causes of rape, theories trying to explain rape, and the fear of rape which leads to social control.
In sociology of rape, rape culture as a concept is used to describe a setting in which rape is normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality. Victim blaming, slut-shaming and trivializing of rape have also been critically analysed in the study of sociology of rape.
Sociology of rape will delve into what research statistics can and cannot tell us, look at rape law reform as well as legal processing of rape cases, peek at the presentation of rape in different forms of media, and tiptoe through various contentious issues surrounding rape, including the debate over date rape and the uproar over evolution theory. - Professor: John Hamlin.
Among the women surviving in relief camps are many who have suffered the most bestial forms of sexual violence, including rape, gang rape, mass rape, stripping, insertion of objects into their body, and molestations. A majority of rape victims have been burnt alive. - Citizens' Initiative, "The Survivors Speak,'' April 16, 2002. From the report of the Citizen's Initiative fact-finding team of women.
This report is a useful contribution to sociology of rape. Makes it clear that young Muslim girls, pregnant women, women with new-born babies were chased, caught, raped, cut, pierced, stabbed, and burnt. How did this come to pass? How did groups of men come to believe that such deeds could and should be done? It is the belief that women are not only inferior but also woman's sexuality has to be patrolled so that it is legitimately accessible to some men and inaccessible to others. Witness the spate of murders of women who dare marry outside their community.
As Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin have shown, the Us and Them feelings of communities during Partition created protected and protectable women on one side and unprotected and rapable women on the other side. For communal rapes on a mass scale we need still other conditions, the most important of which is a complicit state. This means we must have police who laugh or join in, leaders who blatantly discriminate and lie, and courts, which do not prosecute.
It has been noted that behavior resembling rape in humans is observed in the animal kingdom also, including ducks and geese, bottlenose dolphins, and chimpanzees. Indeed, in orangutans, close human relatives, copulations of this nature may account for up to half of all observed matings. Such behaviors, referred to as 'forced copulations', involve an animal being approached and sexually penetrated as it struggles or attempts to escape.
Ritualistic Rape in Sociological Perspective
- Joseph H. Michalski.
Abstract: The current article examines rape as a
form of sexual violence, drawing upon comparative research to describe and then
proffer a tentative explanation of one specific type, referred to as ritualistic
rape. Several cross-cultural examples and selected national data are referenced
to examine three different forms of ritualistic rape: forced marriages or
abductions, ritual defloration, and wife-lending. The evidence indicates that
such “normative” or socially condoned rapes appear quite commonly in one form or
another in nearly every society. The last section offers a general theory of
ritualistic rape rooted in D. Black’s pure sociology perspective by identifying
the confluence of several underlying structural features that purport to explain
the conditions under which ritualistic rapes tend to thrive.