rape

More about Rape and Sexual Assault: Treatment What To Do If You Are Raped Forensic medical examination Prevention Common Misconceptions Of Males Perpetrating Date Rape Resources

Definition

The various definitions of rape range from the broad (coercing an individual to engage in any sexual act) to the specific (forcing a woman to submit to sexual intercourse). The United States Code includes the crime of rape under the more comprehensive term "sexual abuse." Two types of sexual assault are defined in the code: sexual abuse and aggravated sexual abuse. Sexual abuse includes acts in which an individual is forced to engage in sexual activity by use of threats or other fear tactics, or instances in which an individual is physically unable to decline. Aggravated sexual abuse occurs when an individual is forced to submit to sexual acts by use of physical force; threats of death, injury, or kidnapping; or substances that render that individual unconscious or impaired.

Description

Many misconceptions exist about rape and sexual assault. It is often assumed that rape victims are all women who have been attacked by a total stranger and forced into having sexual intercourse. In reality, sexual assault can take many forms—it may be violent or nonviolent; the victim may be male or female, child or adult; the offender may be a stranger, relative, friend, authority figure, or spouse.

The number of sexual assaults reported depends on how those abuses are defined. The United States Code uses two terms to distinguish between different sexual activities:

• Sexual act: contact between penis and vagina or penis and anus that involves penetration; contact between the mouth and genitals or anus; penetration of the vagina or anus with an object; or direct touching (not through clothing) of the genitals of an individual under the age of 16.
• Sexual contact: intentional touching of the genitals, breasts, buttocks, anus, inner thigh, or groin with no sexual penetration.

National statistics

There were 89,167 forcible rapes reported to U.S. law enforcement agencies in 1999. Sixty-four out of every 100,000 women were reported to be victims of rape that year, down 5% from 1998 and 11% from 1995. The actual number of rapes and sexual assaults, however, is in reality much larger. The National Violence Against Women Survey, jointly sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and conducted in the mid-1900s, found that one in six women (18%) and one in 33 men (3%) has experienced an attempted or completed rape. The survey estimated that approximately 17,722,672 women and 2,782,440 men in the United States have been raped or have had rape attempted as a child or adult, and that 302,091 women and 92,748 men were raped in the 12 months prior to the study.

There are numerous reasons why the majority of sexual assaults are never reported. Often the victim fears retaliation from the offender. He or she may be afraid of family, friends, the community, or the media learning about the offense. There may be a concern about being judged or blamed by others. The victim may think that no one will believe the assault occurred.

THE VICTIMS. The 2000 "Victim, Incident, and Offender Characteristics," published by the National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ), analyzed sexual assault data collected by law enforcement agencies over a five-year span. The following characteristics were found to be significant among victims of sexual assault:

• Age: Over two-thirds of reported victims of sexual assault were juveniles under the age of 18. Twelve to 18 year olds represented the largest group of victims at 33%; 20% were between the ages of six and 11; children less than five years old and adults between 18 and 24 years of age each constituted 14% of victims; 12% were between the ages of 25 and 34; and 7% were over the age of 34. Persons over the age of 54 represented 1% of all victims. One out of every seven victims surveyed in the study were under the age of six.
• Gender: Females were more than six times more likely to be a victim of sexual assault then males; more than 86% of victims were females. The great majority (99%) of the victims of forcible rapes were women, while men constituted the majority (54%) of the victims of forcible sodomy (oral or anal intercourse). Females are most likely to be the victim of sexual assault at age 14, while males are at most risk at age four.
• Location: The residence of the victim was the most commonly noted location of sexual assault (70%). Other common locations included schools, hotels/motels, fields, woods, parking lots, roadways, and commercial/office buildings.
• Weapons: A personal weapon (hands, feet, or fists) was used in 77% of cases. No weapon was noted in 14% of assaults; other weapons (knifes, clubs, etc.) were used in 6% of cases. Firearms were involved in only 2% of assaults.

THE OFFENDERS. Similar statistics were gathered by the NCJJ regarding the perpetrators of rape and sexual assault. These characteristics included:

• Age: Over 23% of offenders were under the age of 18; juveniles were more likely to be perpetrators of forcible sodomy and fondling. The remaining 77% of offenders were adults and were responsible for 67% of juvenile victims. For younger juvenile victims (under the age of 12), juvenile offenders were responsible for approximately 40% of assaults.
• Gender: The great majority of all reported offenders were male (96%). The number of female offenders rose for victims under the age of six (12%), in contrast to 6% for victims aged six through 12, 3% for victims aged 12 through 17, and 1% for adult victims.
• Relationship with offender: Approximately 59% of offenders were acquaintances of their victims, compared to family members (27%) or strangers (14%). Family members were more likely to be perpetrators against juveniles (34%) than against adults (12%). In contrast, strangers accounted for 27% of adult victims and 7% of juveniles.
• Past offenses: In 19% of juvenile cases, the victim was not the only individual to be assaulted by the offender, compared to only 4% of adult cases.

Consequences

Victims of sexual assault may sustain a range of injuries. The National Women's Study, funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, found that more than 70% of rape victims report no physical injuries as a result of their assault; only 4% sustain serious injuries that require hospitalization. At least 49% of victims, however, state that they feared severe injuries or death during their assault. Fatalities occur in approximately0.1% of rape cases.

Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are a source of concern for many victims of sexual assault. The most commonly transmitted diseases are gonorrhea (caused by Neisseria gonorrhoeae), chlamydia (caused by Chlamydia trachomatis), trichomoniasis (caused by Trichomonas vaginalis), and genital warts (caused by human papillomavirus). Syphilis (caused by Treponema pallidum) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) are also noted among some sexual assault victims. The transmission rate of STDs is estimated to be between3.6% and 30% of rapes.

According to the National Women's Study, approximately 5% of adult female rape victims become pregnant as a result of their assault, leading to 32,100 pregnancies a year among women 18 years of age or older. Approximately 50% of pregnant rape victims had an abortion, 6% put the child up for adoption, and 33% kept the child (the remaining pregnancies resulted in miscarriage).

MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS. Also known as rape trauma syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health disorder that describes a range of symptoms often experienced by someone who has undergone a severely traumatic event. Approximately 31% of rape victims develop PTSD as a result of their assault; victims are more than six times more likely to develop PTSD than women who have not been victimized.

The symptoms of PTSD include:

• recurrent memories or flashbacks of the incident
• nightmares
• insomnia
• mood swings
• difficulty concentrating
• panic attacks
• emotional numbness
• depression
• anxiety

Individuals who have been sexually assaulted have also been noted to have increased risk for developing other mental health problems. Over those who have not been victimized, rape victims are:

• three times more likely to have a major depressive episode
• four times more likely to have contemplated suicide
• thirteen times more likely to develop alcohol dependency problems
• twenty-six times more likely to develop drug abuse problems

— Stéphanie Islane Dionne

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n.

1. The crime of forcing another person to submit to sex acts, especially sexual intercourse.
2. The act of seizing and carrying off by force; abduction.
3. Abusive or improper treatment; violation: a rape of justice.

tr.v., raped, rap·ing, rapes.

1. To force (another person) to submit to sex acts, especially sexual intercourse; commit rape on.
2. To seize and carry off by force.
3. To plunder or pillage.

[Middle English, from rapen, to rape, from Old French raper, to abduct, from Latin rapere, to seize.]

raper rap'er n.

For more information on rape, visit Britannica.com.

Rape has always been deemed a terrible crime. What has changed over time is the perception of what constitutes rape. Since the 1960s, rape is increasingly considered as sexual intercourse without consent. Not very long ago physical violence was taken to be intrinsic to the notion of rape; this is no longer so. It was also assumed that rape occurred predominantly between strangers. Now the idea of rape within marriage is no longer thought a contradiction in terms.

Defined as the unlawful carnal knowledge of a woman by force and against her will, rape was a capital crime already in early Anglo-Saxon times. It was deemed a crime even where legal codes said nothing of it. Thus the Chevalier de Jaucourt (1704-80 cited the argument which Cicero (106-43 bc) had made around 46 bc:

[e]ven if there was no written law against rape at Rome in the reign of Lucius Tarquinius, we cannot say on that account that Sextus Tarquinius did not break that eternal Law by violating Lucretia, the daughter of Tricipitinus! For reason did exist, derived from the Nature of the universe, urging men to right conduct and diverting them from wrong-doing, and this reason did not first become Law when it was written down, but when it first came into existence; and it came into existence simultaneously with the divine mind.

Throughout the ages, political theorists warned princes of the consequences of rape. Machiavelli (1469-1527), for one, stressed the political danger it presented. ‘Among the primary causes of the downfall of tyrants’, he argued, ‘Aristotle puts the injuries they do on account of women, whether by rape, violation or the breaking up of marriages … absolute princes and rulers of republics should not treat such matters as of small moment, but should bear in mind the disorders such events may occasion and look to the matter in good time, so that the remedy applied may not be accompanied by damage done to, or revolts against, their state or their republic.’

Amongst those who wrote about rape, some, like St Augustine (ad 354-430), stressed that the victim of rape was untainted by it. ‘There will be no pollution, if the lust is another's; if there is pollution, the lust is not another's, ’ he contended, adding; ‘While the mind's resolve endures, which gives the body its claim to chastity, the violence of another's lust cannot take away the chastity which is preserved by unwavering self-control.’ Critical of Roman culture and the importance it gave to honour, St Augustine criticized Lucretia for taking her life following her rape by Tarquin. Christian women, St Augustine argued, ‘did not take vengeance on themselves for another's crime.’ The public gaze did not unduly concern them, for they knew themselves to be chaste in the sight of God. In the seventeenth century, the jurist, Samuel Pufendorf (1632-94), was one of the many authors who reiterated St Augustine's point, although he stressed that this did not impinge on the right of women to kill their aggressors in self defence. Jean Barbeyrac (1674-1744) drew attention to the fact that, under several ancient legal systems, seducers were actually thought worse than rapists, because they violated not only the body of their victims, but effectively their mind as well, and hence exercised power over their whole person and over their family.

To recognize that we are by no means the first to attend to the issue of rape, is not to presume, however, that rape is a timeless or universal feature of social existence. Women have not always lived in fear of rape, at least not to the extent to which they now do in some parts of the Western world. Anthropological and historical studies reveal some societies and ages to be far more ‘rape-prone’ than others. In 1887 Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: ‘No act of violence, rape, exploitation, destruction, is intrinsically ‘unjust’, since life itself is violent, rapacious, exploitative, and destructive and cannot be conceived otherwise. Even more disturbingly, we have to admit that from the biological point of view legal conditions are necessarily exceptional conditions, since they limit the radical life-will bent on power and must subserve, as means, life's collective purpose, which is to create greater power constellations. To accept any legal system as sovereign and universal — to accept it, not merely as an instrument in the struggle of power complexes, but as a weapon against struggle (in the sense of Dühring's communist cliché that every will must regard every other will as its equal) — is an anti-vital principle which can only bring about man's utter demoralization and, indirectly, a reign of nothingness.’

Those who, like Cicero, endorse a natural rights theory, and who believe that natural law is the expression of God's will, have no difficulty in arguing what is wrong about rape. Nor should they face too much difficulty in making a case for a moral community which enforces certain ideals of conduct with respect to others and themselves. Those who don't ground their moral theories in a theocentric framework will have to come to terms with the fact that liberty is not an empty ideal, a licence for anything, and that the liberty of women is conditional on the struggle against their being considered in any way men please. Or as Nietzsche contended, that wills cannot be regarded as equal. The law is indeed an instrument of struggle; it is one of the means by which society struggles against barbarism. Other means must be deployed to make for a culture in which sex is conceived not as something individuals have a right to, nor independent of personal relationships and the duties and responsibilities they entail. This will not be the reign of nothingness, it will be the assertion of the will of civilized women, and men.

— Sylvana Tomaselli

Bibliography

• Tomaselli, S. and Porter, R. (ed.) (1989). Rape: an historical and social enquiry. Blackwell, Oxford

verb

1. To compel (another) to participate in or submit to a sexual act: assault, force, ravish, violate. See sex/asexual.
2. To rob of goods by force, especially in time of war: depredate, despoil, havoc, loot, pillage, plunder, ransack, ravage, sack², spoliate, strip¹. Archaic harrow, spoil. See crimes, give/take/reciprocity.

Rape is a crime of sexual coercion, most commonly committed by men and against women. While we have limited information about the incidence of rape in early America, there is strong evidence to suggest that many more rapes occur today, when rates are adjusted for population, than occurred in the colonial period. Estimates are that in the early twenty-first century at least one in eight women in America has been a victim of forcible rape, a crime that can cause acute and long-term trauma of both physical and psychological dimensions.

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, American rape law changed surprisingly little. Since the mid-1970s, however, the law has been modified considerably, largely due to the persuasive efforts of reformers who claimed that traditional rape law manifested biases and inadequacies.

Definition and Punishment

Throughout England and colonial America, rape was defined as the carnal knowledge of a woman obtained forcibly and against her will. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, rape was treated primarily as a crime committed by a male stranger against another man, an outsider's trespass against the property of the husband or father of the woman who was raped. Even in the twentieth century, after America had abandoned the formal notion of married women as property, its influence remained for many years in the form of the marital exemption from rape laws that irrefutably presumed a woman's consent even to forced intercourse with her husband. Because female slaves were the exclusive property of their owners, they too fell outside the reach of rape law.

In early English common law, rape was a misdemeanor punishable by fine or imprisonment. A statute enacted in England in 1285 made rape a capital felony. Likewise, in the American colonies, rape was exclusively a capital felony through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A rape conviction obtained in the past century, however, was more frequently punished by imprisonment.

Seventeenth Century

The law of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century England treated woman's accusations of rape with considerable skepticism. This attitude is captured in the oft-quoted language of the seventeenth-century English jurist Sir Matthew Hale in his History of the Pleas of the Crown: "It must be remembered, that [rape] is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, the never so innocent."

Although the skeptical approach to rape complaints characterized American law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it did not take hold instantly in the American colonies. Prior to 1700, when almost all sexual assault cases in colonial American courts involved attempted rape of white women by assailants they knew, conviction rates were quite high and magistrates articulated a philosophy of deterrence, often imposing severe corporal punishments on men convicted of attempted rape. In this Puritan regime, women who came to court alleging sexual violence that they had resisted were generally believed to be telling the truth. In the mid-1600s, Governor Theophilus Eaton of New Haven Colony explained that "a young girle [would not] bee so impudent as to charge such a carriage upon a young man when it was not so," especially when she would be subjected to intensive judicial questioning (Dayton, p. 239).

Although her account of sexual violation was generally deemed truthful, a woman who failed to report a sexual assault promptly might also receive corporal punishment, at a level less than her assailant, for concealing the offense for an unreasonable period. A woman pregnant out of wedlock who claimed to have been raped would not benefit from the presumption of truthfulness, as it was thought in that era that a woman could not conceive a child during a rape. These women, like those who were found to have encouraged or submitted to a man's sexual advances, were punished for fornication.

Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries

After 1700, colonial judges began consulting English legal sources more frequently and importing into American legal procedures the suspicion toward rape complaints that prevailed in England. In the 1700s, unlike the previous century, the noncapital crime of attempted rape by acquaintances was rarely prosecuted, and both rape indictments and conviction rates were low, especially if the complainant was an unmarried woman who had charged an acquaintance. As Zephaniah Swift, author of an eighteenth century treatise on Connecticut's laws warned, "the vindictive spirit of lewd women" has frequently caused charges of rape to be made from "motives of malice and revenge" (Dayton, p. 265).

When defendants were non-whites, the reluctance to sentence them to death for the crime of rape was [somewhat]diminished. In the eighteenth century, most of the men indicted for rape and virtually all who were convicted and executed were blacks, Indians, foreigners, or transients. Rape evolved into a crime committed primarily by strangers against white women. After 1700, father-daughter incest, no longer a capital felony, was the only crime of sexual violence for which local white men might expect harsh corporal punishment.

Racialized enforcement of rape law continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Forbidden sexual access to white women and stereotyped as sexual predators, African American men alleged to have raped white women were often vigorously prosecuted, even in cases where there was reason to doubt the allegation's veracity. This is the scenario that underlies the infamous Scottsboro Case in which nine young African American men were falsely accused of gang rape in 1931 in a small town in Alabama, tried without some of the most minimal protections of fair process, convicted, and in eight of the cases, sentenced to death. Ultimately the Supreme Court reversed all the convictions, but not before the Scottsboro defendants had served many years of imprisonment. Statistics show that African Americans constituted approximately 90 percent of the men executed for rape in the United States in the twentieth century. The Supreme Court highlighted this racialized pattern of punishment when it declared the death penalty for rape unconstitutional in the case of Coker v. Georgia (1977).

By contrast, when complainants were African American women, rape laws were notoriously underenforced. The institutionalized rape of black females by white slave owners as part of the system of slavery is well documented. Since a slave woman was considered "unrapeable" by law, she could not control her sexual accessibility and had no lawful options to resist being raped. Hence in 1855, when a young slave named Celia repeatedly resisted forcible sexual advances by Robert Newsom, her sixty-five-year-old Missouri slave master, finally striking him with a large stick that caused his death, she was tried for capital murder, convicted, and executed by hanging.

Reform Efforts

Model Penal Code. While late-nineteenth-century women's groups succeeded in their lobbying to raise the age limit for statutory rape, the first twentieth-century effort to modernize rape law came with the revision of the Model Penal Code (MPC) in the 1950s. The MPC is an influential model statute drafted by a group of learned legal experts. In the MPC revision, the rape victim no longer had to resist "to the utmost," as many states had required, to prove her nonconsent. Following this lead, states began to abolish resistance requirements. The MPC also established three grades of sexual assaults. Felony rape in the first degree was violent stranger rape. Violent acquaintance rape was a second-degree felony, and other kinds of sexual coercion constituted the third-degree felony of "gross sexual imposition." Adapting this model, many states have graded rape offenses by degree of severity in their statutory schemes.

Feminist Critiques. Subsequent reforms of traditional rape law came largely as a response to the critiques that began to emerge from the woman's movement in the 1970s. Feminist reformers [first] raised awareness of the extent of rape and the degree of harm it inflicts, then analyzed how, despite harsh penalties for rape, the law had failed to hold accountable most perpetrators. These reformers suggested that misunderstandings about the crime of rape were operating within traditional rape law and impeding its effectiveness.

Feminist writings portrayed the evidentiary and procedural rules unique to rape law as reflections of patriarchal skepticism about rape victims' claims. This led to such virulent attacks on victims' character and behavior in rape cases that the rate at which victims reported rape was reduced, as were the rates at which police arrested, prosecutors charged, and judges and juries convicted and sentenced. Feminists observed that a direct consequence of this preoccupation with false accusations was dramatic underprotection of victims of sexual assault.

In her book, Real Rape: How the Legal System Victimizes Women Who Say No (1987), the law professor Susan Estrich asserts that only violent stranger rapes, which constitute a minority of rapes committed, are treated as serious crimes in the legal system. Estrich and others argue that disparate treatment of some rapes such as stranger rapes, and other rapes, such as acquaintance rapes, belies the fact that all of these actions violate the victim's bodily integrity and sexual autonomy.

Rape Law in the Early Twenty-First Century

Some rape law reforms have achieved broad acceptance. For example, state statutes tend to denominate rape by more descriptive terms such as "criminal sexual conduct" or "sexual assault," to define it in gender-neutral terms, and to encompass a broader array of conduct including oral and anal penetration. The age limit for statutory rape is typically the mid-teens, and the marital exemption from rape laws survives in a limited form only in a small number of states. Requirements that the victim's testimony be corroborated and that jurors be cautioned to give this testimony special scrutiny have largely disappeared. Rape shield laws that, with some exceptions, restrict admission of the victim's prior sexual conduct, have been widely adopted. Rarely is physical resistance formally required any longer to show nonconsent.

Other proposed reforms have received less widespread acceptance. For example, only a few states prohibit sexual coercion by certain types of fraud or by extortionate threats. A few states will not exonerate rape defendants who claim to have reasonably mistaken nonconsent for consent, while many others will. Whether and under what circumstances to permit mistakes about consent to provide a valid defense is an area of continuing controversy in rape law.

The impact of these reforms is unclear, as studies have detected only limited measurable effects from various reforms on victim behavior and case outcomes. This may reflect the fact that popular attitudes can be harder to change than written laws. Perhaps for similar reasons, the problem of rape in American penal institutions persists at high levels, with estimates that 350,000 sexual assaults are committed each year on male prisoners, typically by other prisoners. High levels of rape of female prisoners by male prison staff have also been reported.

Despite the fact that rape is largely an intraracial crime, studies suggest that cases involving black male suspects and white female victims still attract greatest attention from the courts and the press and are accorded the harshest punishment. This discriminatory treatment poses grave harm to African American men and contributes as well to cultural denial of the frequency and seriousness of other forms of rape. Studies also suggest that African American women remain least able of all rape complainants to obtain redress through legal process. Unfortunately, efforts to combat race bias in rape law enforcement are difficult to achieve through statutory reform. As with many of the other aspects of the problem of rape, they require deeper cultural change.

Two of the most famous rape trials of the late twentieth century, those of William Kennedy Smith in 1991 and heavyweight champion Mike Tyson in 1992, were based on allegations of date rape. In each trial, the victim testified that she was raped and the defendant testified that sex was consensual. In the Smith trial, the jury resolved credibility questions in favor of the defendant, finding Smith not guilty. In the Tyson trial, the jury resolved credibility questions in favor of the victim. As a result, Tyson was convicted and sentenced to a term of imprisonment. As American culture continues to struggle with issues of date rape and acquaintance rape, reform affecting cases such as these will likely continue.

Bibliography

Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Estrich, Susan. Real Rape: How the Legal System Victimizes Women Who Say No. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

LaFree, Gary D. Rape and Criminal Justice: The Social Construction of Sexual Assault. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1989.

MacKinnon, Catharine A. Sex Equality: Rape Law. New York: Foundation Press, 2001.

Schulhofer, Stephen J. Unwanted Sex: The Culture of Intimidation and the Failure of Law. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Spohn, Cassia, and Julie Horney. Rape Law Reform: A Grassroots Revolution and Its Impact. New York: Plenum, 1992.

This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

A criminal offense defined in most states as forcible sexual relations with a person against that person's will.

Rape is the commission of unlawful sexual intercourse or unlawful sexual intrusion. Rape laws in the United States have been revised over the years, and they vary from state to state.

Historically, rape was defined as unlawful sexual intercourse with a woman against her will. The essential elements of the crime were sexual penetration, force, and lack of consent. Women who were raped were expected to have physically resisted to the utmost of their powers or the man would not be convicted of rape. Additionally, a husband could have sex with his wife against her will without being charged with rape. Beginning in the 1970s, state legislatures and courts expanded and redefined the crime of rape to reflect modern notions of equality and legal propriety.

All states now define rape without reference to the sex of the victim and the perpetrator. However, the overwhelming majority of rape victims are women. A woman may be convicted of raping a man, a man may be convicted of raping a man, and a woman may be convicted of raping another woman. Furthermore, a spouse may be convicted of rape if he forces the other spouse to have nonconsensual sex. Many states do not punish the rape of a spouse as severely as the rape of a non-spouse.

Many states also have redefined lack of consent. Before the 1970s many courts viewed the element of force from the standpoint of the victim. A man would not be convicted of rape of a competent woman unless she had demonstrated some physical resistance. In the absence of physical resistance, courts usually held that the sex was consensual. Today, in many states, the prosecution can prove lack of consent by presenting evidence that the victim objected verbally to the sexual penetration or sexual intrusion.

Lack of consent is a necessary element in every rape. This does not mean that a person may make sexual contact with a minor or incapacitated person who actually consented. Lack of consent results from either forcible compulsion by the perpetrator or an incapacity to consent on the part of the victim. Persons who are physically or mentally helpless or who are under a certain age in relation to the perpetrator are deemed legally incapable of consenting to sex.

Most states choose to label the crime of rape as sexual assault. Sexual assault is divided into degrees, such as first-, second-, third-, and fourth-degree sexual assault. West Virginia provides a good illustration of how rape laws are written. In West Virginia a person is guilty of sexual assault in the first degree when that person engages in sexual intercourse or sexual intrusion with another person and either inflicts serious bodily injury upon anyone or employs a deadly weapon in the commission of the act (W. Va. Code § 61-8B-3 [1996]). Additionally, a person age fourteen years or older who engages in sexual intercourse or sexual intrusion with another person who is eleven years old or less is guilty of first-degree sexual assault. A person convicted of the crime of first-degree sexual assault in West Virginia faces imprisonment for at least fifteen years and not more than thirty-five years and may be fined from $1,000 to $10,000.

In West Virginia a person commits sexual assault in the second degree by engaging in sexual intercourse or sexual intrusion with another person without that person's consent and the lack of consent results from forcible compulsion. Forcible compulsion is (1) physical force that overcomes such earnest resistance as might reasonably be expected under the circumstances; (2) threat or intimidation, either express or implied, placing the victim or another person in fear of death, bodily injury, or kidnapping; or (3) fear by a person under sixteen years of age caused by intimidation by another person who is at least four years older than the victim.

Another way to commit second-degree sexual assault in West Virginia is to engage in sexual intercourse or sexual intrusion with someone who is physically helpless. The punishment for second-degree sexual assault is imprisonment for at least ten years but not more than twenty-five years and may include a fine of from $1,000 to $10,000.

Third-degree sexual assault is committed when a person engages in sexual intercourse or sexual intrusion with another person who is mentally defective or mentally incapacitated, or when a person age sixteen years or older has sex with a person who is less than sixteen years old and is at least four years younger than the defendant. Third-degree sexual assault is punishable in West Virginia by at least one, but no more than five, years in prison and may include a fine of not more than $10,000.

The provisions that refer to the age of the victim and the perpetrator are called statutory rape provisions. Statutory rape sections punish the perpetrator without regard to the consent of the victim. Such laws are in place in all states to enforce the generally accepted notions that children are incapable of consenting to sex because of their youth and innocence, and that sexual intercourse or intrusion of a child by an older person is socially unacceptable and harmful to the child. The term statutory rape also refers to the sections that punish sex with physically and mentally incapacitated persons, who are similarly unable to consent to sex.

Rape or sexual assault statutes carefully define the type of contact that constitutes rape. In Hawaii, for example, the term sexual penetration is defined as "vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, fellatio, cunnilingus, analingus, deviate sexual intercourse, or any intrusion of any part of a person's body or of any object into the genital or anal opening of another person's body … however slight." Sexual contact is "any touching of the sexual or other intimate parts of a person … or of the sexual or other intimate parts of the actor by the person, whether directly or through the clothing or other material intended to cover the sexual or other intimate parts" (Haw. Rev. Stat. § 707-700 [1996]).

Most states punish lesser sexual intrusions with statutes on sexual abuse. Like sexual assault statutes, sexual abuse statutes are divided into degrees based on the nature of the contact. Sexual abuse consists of nonconsensual sexual contact with another person. Lack of consent is present if the victim is a minor or physically helpless, or if the victim was forcibly compelled to consent to the contact. A person convicted of sexual abuse may be fined and sentenced to a term in jail or prison. Because the crime does not involve penetration, the punishment for sexual abuse is less than that authorized for persons convicted of sexual assault.

A few states have eliminated the requirement that a competent adult rape victim physically resist the attacker. Physical resistance in some rape situations presents a greater danger to the victim. The states that have eliminated the physical requirement have found it to be unfair to require physical resistance on the part of the victim if such resistance risks greater injury. In Michigan, for example, force or coercion "includes but is not limited to" several situations, including where the actor coerces the victim through threats of force or violence and the victim believes that the actor can carry out the threats, and where the actor physically overcomes the victim through the actual application of physical force (Mich. Comp. Laws Ann. § 750.520a [West 1996]). Nowhere in Michigan's rape statutes is consent based on an analysis of the victim's physical resistance.

The states that have not eliminated physical resistance as a test for lack of consent have declined to do so for fear of convicting an adult who has sex with another adult without the knowledge that he or she is not consenting. Nevertheless, even in a state that has not eliminated the physical resistance requirement for competent adults, if the victim says "No" or otherwise verbally indicates lack of consent, the perpetrator still may be convicted of rape. This is because prosecutors have argued, and appeals courts have agreed, that some amount of force, no matter how slight, should be sufficient to fulfill the forcible compulsion element. The sexual penetration of a competent adult, for example, may be enough force to meet a forcible compulsion requirement, if the victim indicated a lack of consent.

Most states have so-called rape shield laws. These laws restrict or prohibit the use of evidence respecting the sexual history of rape victims and the victims of other sexual offenses. Before the enactment of rape shield laws in the 1970s and 1980s, rape trials often focused on the chastity of the victim to determine whether the victim was actually raped. Rape shield laws keep the focus of a rape prosecution on the actions of the defendant rather than the prior actions of the alleged victim.

See: Child Abuse; Domestic Violence; Feminist Jurisprudence; Husband and Wife; Pornography; Statutory Rape.

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Dansk (Danish)
1.
n. - voldtægt, overfald
v. tr. - begå voldtægt mod, overfalde

2.
n. - [bot.] raps

3.
n. - rape (en af seks oprindelige administrative enheder i Sussex)

4.
n. - druepresserester (til fremstilling af vineddike)

Nederlands (Dutch)
verkrachten, verkrachting, aanranding, koolzaad, een van vroegere onderdelen van Sussex

Français (French)
1.
n. - (Jur, fig) viol
v. tr. - violer

idioms:

• rape crisis centre    centre d'assistance au victimes d'un viol

2.
n. - (Agric, Bot) colza

3.
n. - (GB, Admin) ancienne division de la région du Sussex

4.
n. - lie-de vin

Deutsch (German)
1.
n. - Vergewaltigung, Notzucht, (bot.) Raps
v. - vergewaltigen, notzüchtigen

idioms:

• rape crisis centre    Beratungszentrum für Frauen, die Opfer einer Vergewaltigung geworden sind

2.
n. - Vergewaltigung, Notzucht, (bot.) Raps

3.
n. - Vergewaltigung, Notzucht, (bot.) Raps

4.
n. - Vergewaltigung, Notzucht, (bot.) Raps

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - βιασμός, βίαιη απαγωγή, λεηλασία
v. - βιάζω, απάγω, διαρπάζω, διαγουμίζω

Italiano (Italian)
stuprare, violentare, stupro, violenza carnale, ratto, rapimento, offesa, colza, (pl.) vinaccia, recipiente per l'aceto

Português (Portuguese)
n. - estupro (m), violação (f), bagaço (m)
v. - estuprar

Русский (Russian)
изнасиловать, изнасилование, полевая капуста

Español (Spanish)
1.
n. - violación, asolamiento, saqueo
v. tr. - violar, saquear, asolar

idioms:

• rape crisis centre    centro para víctimas de violación

2.
n. - colza, tipo de repollo

3.
n. - cualquiera de las seis antiguas divisiones de Sussex

4.
n. - orujos

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - våldtäkt, skövling
v. - våldta, röva bort

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
1. 强奸, 洗劫, 强夺

2. 油菜

3. 葡萄渣

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
1.
n. - 葡萄渣

2.
n. - 強姦, 洗劫, 強奪
v. tr. - 強姦, 洗劫, 強奪

3.
n. - 油菜

한국어 (Korean)
1.
n. - 강간, 강탈
v. tr. - 강탈하다, 강간하다

2.
n. - 평지(양상추과의 식물)

3.
n. - 영국 서섹스주의 6개 행정구역 중 하나

4.
n. - 포도 찌꺼기

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 婦女暴行, 強姦, セイヨウアブラナ
v. - 暴行する, 強姦する

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) اغتصاب, سلب (فعل) يغتصب, يسلب‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮אונס, תקיפה, חטיפה, שוד‬
v. tr. - ‮אנס, תקף, הרס, שדד, חטף‬
n. - ‮צמח ממשפחת הכרוביים‬
n. - ‮כל אחד משש נפות העתיקות של מחוז סאסקס (דרום אנגליה)‬
n. - ‮פסולת ענבים המשמשת להכנת חומץ, כלי להכנת חומץ, לפתית, גפת‬

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