Are men biologically programmed to rape?
"Without exception, women's greatest risk of violence comes not from 'stranger danger' but from men they know, often family members or husbands", says Lori Heise, co-author of Ending Violence Against Women, a report from the John Hopkins School of Public Health and the Center for Health and Gender Equity in the United States. In the report, Heise and her colleagues analysed the results of numerous studies from around the world detailing the nature and incidence of violence against women.
The report found that worldwide, at least one woman in every three has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in their lives. Calling on the "world health care community" to act, the report said the physical and sexual abuse of women was "a major public health concern and a violation of human rights".
Heise said she found it striking how similar the problem is around the world, citing studies from Bangladesh, Cambodia and Mexico. In Zimbabwe, the report notes, many people see wife-beating as justified. A study in rural Egypt found that up to 81% of women believe wife-beating is justified under certain circumstances.
From more than 500 studies of domestic abuse, the report found that many women conceal their plight — up to 70% of women said that the researcher was the first person they had told about the abuse.
Long-term health problems were found in many studies, including chronic pain, physical disability, drug and alcohol dependence, depression and suicide attempts. The physical and psychological impact of different types of abuse and multiple episodes over time appear to be cumulative and can persist long after the violence has stopped. The studies examined showed that children of bashed women face a greater risk of low birth weight, malnutrition, behavioural problems and infant death.
Despite this overwhelming evidence of widespread violence against women, theories abound which partially exonerate the perpetrators of this violence, especially in cases where men rape women.
Biological reductionists, such as prolific writer Randy Thornhill, claim that men are biologically "wired" to rape. In a promotion piece for his new book A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, Thornhill and co-author Craig Palmer claim: "As bizarre as some of these facts may seem, they all make sense when rape is viewed as a natural, biological phenomenon that is a product of the human evolutionary heritage. We fervently believe that, just as the leopard's spots and the giraffe's elongated neck are the results of eons of past Darwinian selection, so also is rape."
Thornhill and Palmer say human males will rape whenever their capacity to reproduce is thwarted. Since all men are potential rapists, Thornhill and Palmer say that boys have to be taught to acknowledge this as they grow up, and thus learn to modify their "natural" instincts. Girls and women should also be aware and modify their behaviour accordingly.
"Surely, the point that no woman's behaviour gives a man the right to rape her can be made without encouraging women to overlook the role they themselves may be playing in compromising their own safety", say the authors, arguing that the way women dress may put them at risk of attack.
Most of Thornhill's research comes from animal biology. Animal behaviour cannot be extrapolated to human behaviour because humans do not act on the basis of mere instincts.
Rape in human society is not inevitable and, when it does occur, it has nothing to do with the desire to reproduce. The only scenario in which this may be a factor is the use of rape in war against ethnic groups to produce children of the perpetrator's ethnicity. Even then, rape is punishment and a means to inflict humiliation.
Men rape women because capitalist society has devalued women as people and they are seen as easy to dominate. Rape is about men asserting power in a society in which most women and men have no real control over their lives.
In Cuba, despite the 40-year-long US economic blockade, women's status has considerably improved since the revolution. As a result, rape and violent crimes against women are nowhere near as common as in capitalist societies.
Women and men are not prisoners of their biology, as Thornhill and others would have us believe. Being human is based on conscious thought. Violence against women can be eradicated because it is a social, not a biological problem.
Like all social phenomena, violence against women is linked to the political, social and economic ways that society is organised. We need to reorganise society and abolish the private profit system that produces endemic sexual violence on a world scale.
By Margaret Allum