Opinion: Improving Rhetoric About Rape: The Todd Akin Comments

Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) bombastic comments about “legitimate rape” should be heard as an urgent call for practitioners, researchers, and theorists working in the conflict analysis and resolution field to highlight more empirically sound understandings of rape, power and gendered violence within the public and political spheres. The recent political hoopla following Akin’s statement that a woman’s body has the ability to “shut down” a pregnancy resulting from “legitimate rape” suggests that Akin’s comments were atypical of rhetoric on sexual violence, abortion, and women’s health. However, despite wide condemnations from both the established Right and Left, critical analysis of public and political discourse surrounding rape suggests that Akin’s comments reflect larger the political discourse on rape, victimization, and reproductive justice.

Last year the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" (H.R. 3)—which would have cut off federal funding for Medicaid recipients seeking an abortion unless a woman could prove that she had been ‘forcibly’ raped—went to the House floor with more than 150 co-sponsors from both established political parties. Outside of the political sphere, rape jokes have become mainstream—see Daniel Tosh’s shameful attempt to silence a heckler in July at L.A.’s famed Laugh Factory, saying, "Wouldn't it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now?" Just as disturbing as jokes like Tosh’s (and the hordes of comedians that defended his comments) is the recent rise of the use of rape as a metaphor, ie: "The Yankees raped the Red Sox." As feminist sociologist Michael Kimmel glibly illustrated how absurdly inappropriate such comparisons are in his August 23 op-ed for the Huffington Post, “You got raped? Me too! I totally got raped in that math quiz.”

The current state of public and political discourse on sexual violence holds ghastly implications. The ‘legitimate rape’ discourse reinforces narrow conceptions of sexual violence that are deeply discordant with the lived experiences of most victims. Rape is positioned as an act of violence committed by a threatening, unknown male perpetrator who attacks a vulnerable female victim. Leading theorists and researchers on sexual violence argue that this construct excludes the vast amount of sexual violence—which often occurs between acquaintances or intimate partners. The narrow construct implied by the ‘forcible’ rape discourse tacitly implies that any rape that doesn’t fit within this conceptualization was in part a result of victims’ behaviors—what they were doing, what they were wearing, what they were drinking. Furthermore, this construct further stigmatizes men who have been victims of sexual violence. While the US Dept. of Justice has reported that one out of every thirty-three men has been raped, the pervasive conception of a rape delegitimizes these victims’ experiences.

While the ‘legitimate’ rape discourse impacts all victims of sexual violence, calls to legislatively redefine rape as within this narrow framework has even harsher implications for women victims on Medicaid seeking to terminate a pregnancy resulting from rape. Politicians’ cries to end federal funding for abortion serves a means of garnering votes from pro-life constituents at the expense of the relatively narrow cross section of society directly dependent on Medicaid funding for abortion: low-income, minority women with little political capital. We in the CAR field must view the current state of discourse surrounding rape and reproductive rights as an auspicious opportunity for addressing intersections of direct and structural violence.