UBC professor working on redefining sexual assault
Carolynne Burkholder
The Ubyssey (University of British Columbia)
VANCOUVER (CUP) — The numbers are shocking. Over 50 per cent of Canadian women have been sexually or physically assaulted, according to a survey by Statistics Canada. And only six per cent of the cases were reported to the police, according to the same study.
But UBC philosophy professor Scott Anderson hopes that, through his research on coercion, rape will be easier to understand and better defined in law, allowing authorities to respond more accurately to the crime.
Because Canadian laws changed 21 years ago to include a broader definition of sexual assault, Anderson’s theory is more applicable in the U.S.. But both countries are facing the same challenges when prosecuting sexual crimes.
Although the majority of sexual assaults are not by strangers — some estimate that acquaintance rape constitutes 85 per cent of all cases — most legal attention is given to stranger rape.
According to Anderson, “getting the proper understanding of how to define rape would help make acquaintance rape more easily prosecutable.”
Through his definition of sexual assault, Anderson aims to provide a better model to include all forms of rape by putting it in a gendered context — most perpetrators being male and most victims being female or children. In contrast to the common “consent theories” of rape, which focuses on the acts or desires of the victim, Anderson focuses primarily on the rapist, the coercing agent, and his actions and intentions.
Anderson also distinguishes between unwanted sex and rape. “There is a difference between unwanted sex and sex that is forced upon somebody through . . . use of power or use of threats,” he said. Unwanted sex, according to Anderson, is akin to cancer surgery that you don’t want to have, but consent to nonetheless.
“You can’t say that a woman who is raped is just a woman who doesn’t want to have sex,” he continued. “In lots of cases a woman might not want to have sex with someone, yet has sex with him anyway, without there being any crime committed, or even a harm done.”
“What’s the different thing about rape is the way certain uses of power are involved,” said Anderson. And, he said, this power is based in societal factors.
According to Anderson, “this is what connects rape to the general conditions of gender oppression in society: rape manifests and capitalises on the general ability of men to impose their sexual wills on women by means of violence, a form of domination to which society is itself often blind.” By viewing rape according to this theory of coercion, Anderson argues that the practical and legal problems of identifying and prosecuting accused rapists are more solvable.
A problem with the current legal status of rape is that it is difficult to prove lack of consent, but by applying Anderson’s theory, “it changes our presumption about a woman’s consent to sex from yes to no, since we may assume that a man’s aggressive pursuit of sex with a woman is backed by a willingness to use force, unless that assumption is otherwise defeated.” Rather than the victim having to prove she didn’t consent, the perpetrator would have to prove that she did.
So far Anderson has received mixed responses to his theory. “It hasn’t won wide acclaim and converts yet, but my goal is to convince a lot of people to rethink the subject,” he said.
