Unchanged since 1927
The DoJ changed the definition.
January 6, 2012
The following post appears courtesy of Susan B. Carbon, Director of the Office on Violence Against Women. In a victory for survivors of rape and their advocates, the Attorney General announced a newly revised definition of rape for nationwide data collection, ensuring that rape will be more accurately reported nationwide. The change sends an important message to all victims that what happens to them matters, and to perpetrators that they will be held accountable. It was because of the voices of survivors, advocates, law enforcement personnel and many others that FBI Director Robert Mueller was able to make this important change within the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) Summary Reporting System (SRS). “Forcible rape” had been defined by the UCR SRS as “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” That definition, unchanged since 1927, was outdated and narrow. It only included forcible male penile penetration of a female vagina. The new definition is:
“The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”
I’m not seeing how that’s an improvement. I’m not seeing why “sexual assault” couldn’t be the crime when women do it while “rape” goes on meaning specifically what men do to women. Changing it to mean anyone poking anything into any orifice without invitation depoliticizes it, and I don’t think we should be depoliticizing rape. I think rape is political, and that we should go on being able to talk about it that way.
I’m trying to figure out what penetrative sex organs there are other than a penis.
Girl Dick? A really big clitoris? Maybe Congress are just too demure to use the word penis? Maybe they just have very limited understanding of the relative penetrative powers of a penis vs a vulva?
Ah, so they take seriously the possibility of rapists’ mastering clitoris-embiggening ninjutsu? How multicultural of them.
It’s possible they think of women as hyenas…
Yes. The idea that “women can rape too” is an obvious argument all things being equal, which is presumably why it’s superficially so attractive. The fact that things are very obviously just about as far from being equal as it’s possible to get makes using that argument an exercise in post-doc level wilful ignorance.
And yet, plenty persist. Twitter has been full of it over the last few days, put there for the most part by the ‘progressive’.
Two points:
1. That change was made nine years ago. I’m not saying it doesn’t merit discussion, but it does make me wonder what the practical effects have been over the past nine years.
2. As I’m reading it, the original definition didn’t allow for the possibility of man-on-man rape, or rape with, say, a broom handle. So there’s that.
Those acts were already crimes, I’m pretty sure. I think they all came under the term “sodomy”. I am not at all clear on why they need to be called “rape”, nor on the problems of doing so (other than mucking up the records).
There are a lot of, well, strange arguments that X is not called Y, and should be called Y, because Y is a crime and we want to be sure to prosecute X and not let those people get away with it, but neglecting that X is already a crime. I wonder if the impetus to expand the definition of rape was one such argument.
I’m agnostic about whether they “need” to be called rape, as long as they’re treated as heinous crimes. Thinking about the political question, it seems that there are actually two issues: (1) Can women rape? and (2) Can men be raped? It’s not clear to me that the answer to one entails the answer to the other.
I was more struck by the date of the post referenced in the OP, but now I see that this dovetails with the discussion in the “Pronouns in court” post.