Female-Perpetrated Sex Abuse

Knowledge, Power, and the Cultural Conditions of Victimhood

Sherianne Kramer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315453590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Female-Perpetrated Sex Abuse is a groundbreaking study into gender, sexuality and victimhood. It examines the cultural conditions of possibility for FSA victimhood as a means to advance contemporary critical understandings of the role of gender and sexuality as instruments of modern power. As the first direct exploration of FSA victimhood, this book analyses:

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• why victims of FSA remain so underexplored and invisible as objects of human science knowledge;

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• the limited and overly rigid discourses in local and global psychological theory and practice that continues to treat particular subjects as 'victim worthy' through paradigms that construct victimhood as gendered; and

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• the possibility of new discourses that could disrupt normative understandings of gender, sexuality, and power in sex abuse, and as constitutive to the beginnings of a counter-knowledge on transgressive sexualities.

By tracing the historical and cultural conditions of the emergence of FSA broadly and FSA victimhood specifically, Kramer illustrates how deeply engrained constructions of gender and sexuality both produce and constrain the possibilities for reporting, disclosing and self-identifying victimhood.

Female-Perpetrated Sex Abuse is essential reading for academics, researchers and students alike, in the areas of psychology, sociology, gender studies, criminology, counselling and social work.

Part I

Surfacing (im)possible victims

1

Female-perpetrated sex abuse

An object of power/knowledge

Female-perpetrated sex abuse has recently emerged as an object of scientific inquiry and is gradually gaining momentum and visibility in various fields of study. This chapter traces this emergence by first thinking through definitional and construct-related issues in relation to sexual abuse generally, and then by identifying previous studies and their theoretical and practical implications in the FSA area more specifically. In so doing, an overview of current typological and aetiological FSA formulations is provided. Through the identification of the function of gender and sexuality in underwriting these formulations, the chapter outlines reasons for the continued conceptualisation of FSA as both rare and innocuous. It furthermore emphasises how engrained and widely circulated discourses on men, women, and children continue to delimit the sexual and gender lines in which FSA is thinkable. The chapter concludes with a proposal for how these theoretical formulations, embedded in gender and sexual discourses, give shape to South African specific aetiologies and typologies in the disciplines of psychology and the social sciences more broadly.

Sex abuse: vague constructs and varied meanings

Sex abuse has been variously defined. These definitions are malleable enough to include a number of apparently different types of abuse such as sexual coercion, sexual victimisation, rape (attempted and completed, marital, date, acquaintance, punitive), assault, molestation, forced intercourse, sexual harassment, trafficking, verbal sexual threats, stalking, forced fondling, overt and threatening sexual advances, extrafamilial, intrafamilial and mixed sexual abuse, pornographic use of sexual material, exhibitionism, and voyeurism (Barth, Bermetz, Heim, Trelle, & Tonia, 2013; Finkelhor, 1979, 1984; Fisher & Cullen, 2000; Koss, Heise, & Russo, 1994; Russell, 1983; Wyatt & Peters, 1986). Furthermore, these definitions are contested according to their ‘fit’ to a particular academic, scientific, legal, or political agenda. Thus, in some cases sex abuse is defined broadly to include non-contact and contact abuse (which may or may not include penetration and forced intercourse), whereas in other cases the definition is narrowed to exclude non-contact (Barth et al., 2013; Wyatt & Peters, 1986). Additionally, different forms of sexual violence have been studied and theorised in isolation from one another, resulting in divergent definitions that lack integration (Gidycz, 2011). Sex abuse is also differentiated from other forms of sex crimes if it occurs with a child. Thus, child sex abuse (CSA) would involve abusive sexual activities with a child whereby the child’s perpetrator has maturational, age, or authoritative advantage. However, again there are multiple definitions for CSA with little agreement across disciplines, theories, and the broader field of sex abuse. Arguments concerning the age of both perpetrator and victim, peers as perpetrators, the child’s ability to consent, and whether exposure to sexual images can be considered abusive, are some of the key controversies that have continued to make securing a global CSA definition impossible (Finkelhor, 1994; Wyatt & Peters, 1986).

The lack of clear and distinct sex abuse definitions and their endless mutations and reproductions according to different temporal and cultural contexts is testament to the fluidity of the sex abuse construct. In fact, across the course of history, sex abuse definitions have had a mutually constitutive relationship with prevalence rates whereby an apparent increase in sex abuse victims has led to the adaptation of sex abuse definitions. This has consequently widened the scope of sex abuse and therefore allowed for a further increase in prevalence rates. The abundance of different definitions across the area of sex abuse thus directly impacts on the statistical representation of sex abuse prevalence (Wyatt & Peters, 1986). This pattern is evident in FSA whereby the current academic focus on the phenomenon has resulted in a seemingly increased FSA prevalence rate and, in turn, a production of discourses concerning FSA. A key example would be the recent adaptation of the South African Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Amendment Act (Minister for Justice and Constitutional Development, 2007), which was rewritten to include women as potential sexual perpetrators and men as potential victims. As indicated by the Institute for Security Studies (2015), in effect, this Amended Act constructed a range of ‘new’ sex offences, rendering any comparison of prevalence rates before and after the Act’s adaptations futile. In addition, the use of a broad category termed ‘sexual offences’ cannot account for the multifarious, blurred, and often contradictory sub-categories that this overall classification is supposed to represent, and thus trends reported based on this category are meaningless.

Finkelhor (1994) suggests that increased sex abuse prevalence rates are merely due to an increase in public awareness. However, public consciousness is dependent on circulated popular, scientific, or political discourse, which suggests that awareness-raising is directly impacted by any discursive framework applied to sex abuse definitions. This is reflected in Finkelhor’s (1994, p. 49) claim concerning CSA in the early 1990s:

The past 20 years have seen a revolution in public and professional knowledge about child sexual abuse. Most of the prevailing beliefs of a generation ago concerning its nature and prevalence have turned out, in the light of subsequent research, to be wrong or greatly oversimplified. But the knowledge is neither complete nor fully disseminated. In the context of such a rapid revolution, new myths or oversimplifications have undoubtedly been adopted in place of the old.

CSA is often only reported during late adolescence or adulthood, despite the average age of its occurrence being earlier. This demonstrates how, with increased access to circulated discourse, children (or rather now adults) are able to construct their experiences as abusive retrospectively. This is evidenced by the tendency of adults reportedly abused as children to justify their late reporting with claims that they only started to understand the seriousness or abusive nature of the situation when they became older, and often only as a result of media exposure or a conversation with someone older (Schaeffer, Leventhal, & Asnes, 2011). Given that sex abuse is replete with ‘discourses of damage’ (Levett, 1990), the identification of a particular experience as sexually abusive simultaneously results in the occupation of a victim subject position. This echoes Furedi’s (1998) claims that victimhood is dangerous not so much in that victimisation results in emotional or physical suffering, but rather in its capacity to be identity-defining. This victim identity is then further reinforced by social codes that insinuate that an experience of victimisation should be invested with special (non-normative) meanings. CSA is thus a powerful example of the way that historical and social conditions and discourses align to produce sexual violence as an intractable experience for the subject and, in turn, an object of psychological and scientific study.

In a similar fashion, the term rape has been subject to a number of revisions. In its early conception, rape simply referred to the act of a man (usually a stranger) forcibly penetrating a woman without her consent and was thus viewed as a crime of masculine power (Fisher & Cullen, 2000; Koss, 1992). This view was most likely an outcome of Koss and colleagues’ (1987) early study on sexual victimisation, which resulted in the widely circulated hypothesis that sexual aggression is the result of masculine hostility (Gidycz, 2011). Consequent definitions of rape therefore bound femaleness to victimhood (see Koss et al., 1994) and emphasised early feminist sociocultural theories of rape. Rape was understood as an outcome of patriarchy, the social control of women and masculine expressions of dominance through female-targeted violence (Muehlenhard & Kimes, 1999; Murnen, Wright, & Kaluzny, 2002). In fact, the women’s liberation movement ironically created the conditions of possibility for the construction of rape as an effect of patriarchal power and female vulnerability. This was particularly with regards to the transformation of rape from a personal and private incident to a public and political one. The creation of a public forum and agenda for rape prevention by second-wave feminists resulted in scientific inquiry and historical analyses into the area, thus allowing for the conceptualisation of rape as a key concern for women, who were now constructed as an increasingly vulnerable population. Given that many of these historians and scholars formed part of the feminist movement, rape was produced as an inevitability in women’s and girls’ lives (Rutherford, 2011). This has resulted in three decades of rape research being devoted to women’s safety and thus primarily focusing on female victimisation and male perpetration. In turn, rape definitions have generated a range of well-established biological and social theories relating to the aetiology of masculine sexual aggression (Weiss, 2010). Significantly, these feminist theories, amongst others, were also key to the surfacing of girls and women as objects of knowledge to be scientifically analysed and documented. This shift resulted in endless ‘revisions’ of established ‘truths’ about women and contributed to female-focused psychological questions and theories that, in effect, meant women became increasingly surveilled sexual subjects (Worrell & Etaugh, 1994).

Later, as a result of increased feminist scholarship and legal reforms in the area, the definition of rape was broken down into typologies (marital rape, date rape) so that it was no longer confined to strangers, and it was expanded to include forms of penetration other than the penile-vaginal penetration type so that both heterosexual and homosexual rape, and all of their oral and anal variants, were made possible. Variations on the ability to consent were also included in the broadened definition so that contingencies were made for unconscious, mentally disabled, mentally ill, or intoxicated victims, as well as other elements of force such as psychological and physical coercion (Fisher & Cullen, 2000; Koss et al., 1994). However, these extensions and variations have resulted in the use of a range of words associated with sexual victimisation to describe the experience of rape (sexual assault, sexual battery, criminal sexual conduct) (Koss, 1992), thus blurring the concept further. More significantly, the term ‘rape’, with all of its ‘new’ and various meanings, gave rise to counterclaims from critics who argue that the term is now too broad and has thus produced a phantom epidemic of rape incidents (Koss, 2011). These critics argue that if rape were determined by victims’ perceptions as opposed to laws and statutes that are over-inclusive, the rape prevalence rates would be massively reduced. Consequently, seminal researchers such as Koss (1985, 2011) have been severely criticised for conducting research that demonstrates that, despite the broad definition of rape, self-reports continue to show that rape is under-reported.

It is only very recently that the term has been re-defined to include males as potential victims and females as potential perpetrators. In South Africa, this reconceptualisation has been implemented at the level of the legal system, although this has not yet permeated entirely into public consciousness (Minister for Justice and Constitutional Development, 2007). The same cannot be said for international standards – in the United States of America, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continues to define rape as the non-consensual penile penetration of a woman (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2004). Even so, its reconceptualisation in South Africa, coupled with the constant (and dramatic) adaptations to the term ‘rape’, is a prime example of how both sexuality and violence are dynamic and socially produced, serve a particular function in history, and are given particular weight because they are mobilised as an outcome of new research. Additionally, with each reconceptualisation, the criteria for both perpetration and victimisation shift (Muehlenhard & Kimes, 1999), thus ensuring that more and more social bodies become subject to regulatory surveillance mechanisms. This unfolding of definitions and increase in scope of the possibilities of sex abuse is evident in the ebb and flow of crime reporting.

More recently, postmodern feminists such as Ann Cahill (2001) have criticised the second-wave feminist construction of rape as a metaphor for male dominance in patriarchal cultures. She further dismisses more liberal feminist understandings of rape as gender-neutral and argues that gender and sexual constructions cannot be ignored in the way that rape has been produced and reproduced. Cahill (2001) thus calls for an understanding of rape as an ‘embodied’ experience whereby sexuality and gender are central to its possibility. Further, rape, sexual violence, and sex abuse are political and powerful because they shape social productions of both the female and male body (Martin, 2002) and, in turn, demarcate well-defined and constrained possibilities for victimhood and perpetration. Whilst we may no longer view women solely as passive and inescapable recipents of sexual violence and men as merely active and aggressive instruments of their inevitable sex drives, sex abuse and violence are still embedded in strong heterosexually driven discourses that imply that rape is something that happens to women, and often a particular type of woman (chaste, vulnerable, and usually white). Whilst sex abuse is now open to multiple contestations and academic and political debates, the continued discursive framing of sexual violence in heteronormative terms means that certain kinds of sex abuse will fall outside of these parameters (Gavey, 2013) and will thus remain unlikely, unfathomable, and sometimes completely invisible.

The emergence of female-perpetrated sex abuse

Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editor’s foreword
• List of figures and table
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Surfacing (im)possible victims
• Part II Female-perpetrated sex abuse victimisation: conditions of (im)possibility
• Part III Psychology and FSA victimhood
• Index