RAPE is the most horrific form of torture. Rapists literally invade and attempt to conquer the psychological, physical and
sexual terrain of their victims. Rapists, through transforming their victim’s ‘no’ into a ‘yes’, also strive to triumph over the victim’s social territory. Though rape is generally more about power than about sex, the fact remains that it is one of the most heinous crimes imaginable. Humans, especially women, were victims of this atrocity for centuries before it was even recognised as a crime or a human rights’ violation. It continues to humiliate and demean the very soul and sanctity of women all around the globe. Though numbers are more frightening in our part of the world, rape is as much a crisis of manliness in the West as it is in the subcontinent. Rape remains primarily a problem associated with degraded masculinities.
Drawing together the work of criminologists, sociologists and psychiatrists to analyse what drives the perpetrators of sexual violence, the book under review is an intriguing treatise on rape and its
history in the West. The author Joanna Bourke is a professor of history at Birkbeck College in London and has previously written the prize-winning An Intimate History of Killing and the critically acclaimed Fear. In this latest work, Rape: A history from 1860 to the present, Bourke struggles with the definitions of rape and rapist, and of consent and compulsion in her part of the world. She proves with the help of real life cases that rape and sexual violence are deeply-rooted in time, and are ‘ever-changing’
according to specific political, economic and cultural environments. According to her, ‘the rapist, not the victim, is at the centre of this book.’