Feminists have been central to virtually every era of activism around child sexual abuse, from moral reformers in the 1800s and early 1900s, to the 1980s survivors’ movement (Breines and Gordon 1983; Freedman 2013; Sacco 2009; Whittier 2009). Most recently, feminist analysis of child sexual abuse grew in the 1970s alongside that of rape, as participants in consciousness- raising groups disco…
As in many parts of the world, rape in India is rarely criminalized in practice. While Indian law houses an ever-expanding set of provisions against sexual violence (with notable exceptions for marital and same-sex rape), rape charges are frequently suppressed by the criminal justice system, processed with excruciating slowness, or can lead to out-of-court settlements. What is remarkabl…
In an influential article, Carine Mondorossian (2002, 753) lamented that a “lopsided focus” on victims in public discussions of rape tended to support a belief that victims of sexual assault suffered from a “self-defeating personality disorder.” This lopsided focus also left questions related to perpetrators—and by extension, actions aimed at preventing future assaults—out of focus. Res…
Throughout the history of warfare, rape and other forms of sexual violence against children, women, and men have been extremely widespread and prolific.1 Despite long-standing legal and political silences, rape in war has endured as a “lasting legacy” of violent conflict in artistic, documentary, and cinematic representations throughout history, albeit almost exclusively when perpetrate…
About two decades ago, feminist sociologists stopped focusing on rape and sexual assault even though rapes and their destructive toll on girls and women did not end. Rape did not diminish appreciably and neither did the legal justice system dramatically improve its treatment of victims. Perhaps this is why 80 percent of women college students and 67 percent of non-college women fail to …
When Susan Brownmiller published Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape in 1975, few anticipated that it would become a feminist classic published in more than a dozen languages. Even fewer imagined that it would foreshadow a proliferation of public discourse on sexual assault in an array of institutions, including the family, the workplace, higher education, sports, the Church, and the…