Guilty minds
The courageous and trailblazing women who told their stories on the first instalment of David Goldie's documentary on sexual violence in Australia, Without Consent, explained aspects of rape and sexual assault that many viewers, myself included, never fully understood before.
You can know things without understanding them. Men can know that every woman fears the possibility of being raped, but many do not understand that this fear is present, like a stone lodged in your throat, every single time you are alone, or among men you don't know or don't trust. Feminists can explain that rape is not a sexual crime but a violent hate crime, but to feel and understand that reality requires a jolt strong enough to dislodge all the mythology about the relations between men and women, built up over centuries of sexist society.
Some people receive that jolt by experiencing sexual assault themselves, or by helping someone close to them who has experienced it. Director David Goldie says that he reached a new understanding by making his documentary.
"... I was tending to respond negatively to the hardline feminist view that it [rape] is all to do with power, not sex, and that it's a hate crime. It seemed to be too simplistic to me", he says. "When I started talking to rapists and reading case studies, I realised ... it seemed to be an exercise in the degradation and humiliation of another individual."
Most of Goldie's interviews with rapists are contained in the second part of Without Consent, to be screened on September 23. The one rapist interviewed in Part 1 has already given key insights into the reasons for the prevalence of sexual assault against women. When asked whether he felt remorse at his trial, he replied that he cried at the thought of spending six to eight years in prison (he in fact received a three-year sentence). When asked how he felt at the police line-up, at which he came face to face with the victim of his assault, he replied that he was angry with her for telling the police what he had done and thereby ruining his life. At the time of the rape, he said, he felt "the best kind of buzz" because he had a woman in a position (at knife point) in which she would do whatever he wanted her to do.
The legal definition of rape has three elements: penetration, lack of consent and mens rea (a guilty mind). If there is no "guilty mind", and the attacker "reasonably" believes the woman is consenting, even if she is not, then there is no rape.
In our sexist society there are men who feel no guilt at sexually assaulting a woman, and believe that women generally "ask for it", especially if that woman is their date, their girlfriend or their wife. They have no guilty mind, yet they may have destroyed the life of another human being. In too many cases their acts of violence r excusable, and the survivors of their attacks are further humiliated and degraded.
The 1990 report of the National Committee on Violence concluded that "attitudes of gender inequality are deeply embedded in Australian culture, and both rape and domestic assault can be seen as violent expressions of this cultural norm". The exposure of the true nature, meaning and impact of sexual assault alerts us to the need to fundamentally change the society which gives rise to such acts.
By Carolyn Beecham