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9780674749443

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[A] brave, simply focused and powerfully reasoned book.--Christina Robb Boston Globe

Why has the legal system historically been unsympathetic to rape victims? Under what legal circumstances may a woman expect to have her sexual autonomy respected? The exegesis of legal treatment of simple rape, with cases and commentary spanning the 1600's to 1985, is the subject matter of Real Rape, by a professor of criminal law at Harvard University, herself the victim of an aggravated rape. I am no objective observer. . ., she writes in her prefatory chapter. In writing about rape I am writing about my own life. Nevertheless, what follows in her scholarly, copiously annotated and closely reasoned work is more legal brief than autobiography, and conscientious in its distinctions. Estrich's analysis leads her to the law's distaste for interfering with private relationships, to its male-oriented concepts of force and resistance, to its assent to prerogatives of male sexual access, and to its distrustful hypotheses of complainants' motivations. She discerns a focus, unparallelled in the consideration of other crimes, on the precipitating behavior and mental state of the victim, expressed in a preoccupation with her complicity, risk-taking, and prior chastity. The law reform movement of the 1950's and subsequent statutes have not done enough to alter these dynamics, in Estrich's view; in some quarters, the belief still prevails that women don't know what they want or mean what they say. Other works have dealt with many of the psychological and sociological aspects of rape touched on here. Estrich's contribution is to expose and document the philosophy by linking it tightly to the language of the decisions themselves, highlighting the role of interpretation in diverse outcomes of similar cases. She presses eloquently for a standard of reasonableness and for the infusion of interpretation with the most enlightened perceptions of our evolving sexual mores. (Kirkus Reviews)

[A] brave, simply focused and powerfully reasoned book. -- Christina Robb Boston Globe

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Susan Estrich is Robert Kingsley Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Southern California.

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