The Rehabilitation of Rape Culture
Can rapists be rehabilitated? Perhaps this question originally arose out of genuine sympathy, but the problems with this question lie within the question itself and the act of asking. The question discreetly acknowledges - yet ignores why - rape is fundamentally different than any other crime, neglects the fact that rapists are rarely held accountable, and continues to prioritize abusers at the expense of their victims who have yet to receive support and justice; at it’s core is an obfuscation of the pervasive rape culture that connects all of these issues.
The topic of rehabilitation must begin with a critique of the social forces that cause the crime, yet the “cause” of rape - male sexual entitlement sustained by a male hegemonic society - is often obscured or ignored. There is an objective power imbalance within heterosexual relations - rape being the most obvious - and it’s paramount to understand the ways in which men are empowered to enact sexual violence.
As rape is a crime primarily perpetrated by men against women, and the majority of rape is committed by someone known to the victim, part of the issue lies in the fight over the concept of consent. This excerpt from The Social Institution of Heterosexuality says it best: “For men, the concept of consent matters to the extent that they don’t expose themselves to allegations of abuse. For women, it’s about avoiding pain, trauma, and violence. Men continuing to speak over women and double down on their simplistic view of consent is a large part of the issue and exposes their devotion to their sexual interests; they’re unwilling to listen, to consider women’s POV, because it’s easier to continue exploiting the gray areas of consent while pretending to not know any better.”
Most importantly, we can’t fully understand the contradictory approaches to consent without exploring industries like porn, which create a “feedback loop where men’s entitlement to access women’s bodies and rudimentary ideas about how consent should operate in their personal relationships is confirmed and perpetuated by the illusion of access and consent within these massive industries.” Consent in porn is perpetual: because the woman is believed to have "consented" once to being filmed (although often not the case), it translates to her "consenting" to any man viewing her at any time. Consent in porn cannot effectively ever be revoked, thus consent in porn does not effectively exist. Principally, the outright violation of consent is often the allure of porn. The widespread issue of revenge porn, leaked nudes, spy cam porn, and deepfake porn all point to this truth. Men, and even boys, are consistently watching porn that reinforces the idea that sexual thrill lies in the violation of consent.
Simultaneously, many men feel empowered to violate consent for sexual thrill because the state purposefully turns a blind eye to that behavior. The question on the rehabilitation of rapists labors under the impression that rape is a crime that’s taken seriously and perpetrators held accountable by the justice system. From the “national backlog of hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits” to the nearly non-existent possibility of conviction - “according to RAINN, only 5 out of every 1,000 rapes committed—that’s 0.5 percent—ends in a felony conviction … the Washington Post puts the figure at 7 out of 1,000, but pretty much everyone agrees it’s under 1 percent” - to a litany of other institutional failings that show a “documented disinclination to investigate sexual assault,” rape becomes institutionally trivialized, normalized, and essentially decriminalized.
Moving away from the justice system towards community-centered justice is an integral aspect of abolitionism. Every community has to be devoted to ending sexual violence for this goal to work, yet most communities have consistently refused to do the necessary work. Women need to see that their communities are capable of holding men accountable for enacting violence against them before they move the little trust they have from the only thing they’ve known - the unreliable, dangerous, woman-hating carceral system - to the community who has so far neglected them.
This refusal to take sexual violence seriously - especially in leftist spaces - has always been an issue. Andrea Dworkin brought attention to this misogynistic hypocrisy decades ago when she said of the anti-war movement: “They didn't really believe in rape, I think. I couldn't ask anyone or tell anyone because they would just say how I was bourgeois, which was this word they used all the time. Women were it more than anybody. … Men were supposed to go crazy and kill someone if he was a rapist but they wouldn't hurt him for raping me because they didn't believe in hurting anyone and because I was bourgeois and anything that brought me down lower to the people was okay and if it hurt me I deserved it because if you were bourgeois female you were spoiled and had everything and needed to be fucked more or to begin with.”
Sometimes, more insidiously, lofty theory is used to individualize rape, to obscure the systemic role rape plays in structural power imbalances and keep women from forming class consciousness around our shared experiences of male sexual violence. Those who fall back on theory to bolster their focus on the humanity of rapists are doing so because they prioritize the rapist over their victim(s) and potential future victim(s). If the goal of ending the patriarchy and male violence is inspired by the rehabilitation of rapists, the issue is ultimately being approached from a patriarchal viewpoint; men are still being prioritized, violent men at that.
Theorizing on the rehabilitation of rapists ultimately requires speculating on a society that doesn’t yet exist; a society that prioritizes women and abhors sexual violence. That is an admirable and necessary goal, but often it can obscure the clarity of the work that needs to be done today to make women's lives better - even if only marginally - tomorrow. Curbing systemic sexual violence right now should be the priority - we must begin to take sexual violence serious in any capacity, hold men who perpetrate sexual violence accountable, and reckon with the conditions encouraging men to engage in sexual violence; we must begin to build the society we speculate on.
What we’re really experiencing when confronted with this question - can rapists be rehabilitated? - is the attempt to rehabilitate the image of the rapist, and consequently rape culture, from the past few decades of intensifying scrutiny. The questions implicitly being asked are, "Can we continue centering the humanity of the rapist while ignoring the justice his victim is long over-due for?"; "Is there an easier route we can take when struggling with the structural complexity of male violence?”; "Can we find an acceptable way to continue living with male violence?"