The phrase "forcible rape" probably brings to mind the legislative battle earlier this year over H.R. 3, when House Republicans attempted to restrict Medicaid funding for abortions even further than it does now by excluding women who'd been, y'know, raped but not rape-raped. But the sad truth is that the term "forcible" is deeply rooted in the way the federal government deals with rape. In April, for example, Ms. magazine and Mother Jones pointed out that when the FBI compiles crime statistics from police departments around the country for its Uniform Crime Report, it defines rape as "the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will" -- a definition that no one's apparently thought to change in 82 years. (The Feminist Majority Foundation is hosting an email campaign to get the FBI to change its definition.)
The Clery Act, which requires universities to report rape statistics to the Department of Education, uses a slightly different definition than the FBI: it requires reporting of "forcible sex offenses." That's still a blinkered and outdated definition, and one that shouldn't be too hard to comply with. When the DOE investigated Yale University's Clery Act reports from 2001 to 2006, however, it found Yale failed to do even that.
According to the DOE's citation (sent last week), Yale didn't bother to tell the government about four "forcible sex offenses" that were reported to its Sexual Harassment Grievance Board rather than to the police. Even worse, when the DOE asked about the cases, Yale admitted that the Grievance Board didn't keep statistics, or even case records for most of the incidents it handled. That means there could have been more unreported cases that members of the Grievance Board weren't able to recall. It also means that survivors reported "forcible sex acts" to a body that didn't keep permanent written records, and weren't encouraged to take their complaints to an agency actually equipped to handle them.
All of this points to a systemic tendency to deflect and minimize rape cases. (In Yale's case, the DOE's ongoing Title IX investigation will shed more light into just how systemic that tendency still is.) It's a vicious cycle: talking about "forcible" rape encourages the idea that rape is always the act of a wild-eyed sociopaths, not something that could ever be enabled or condoned by society. No university or community wants to "raise alarms" about sociopaths in their midst, so they have an incentive to find ways of dealing with assault cases outside the criminal-justice system -- and an incentive to sweep those cases under the rug instead of reporting them. Meanwhile, rape survivors are less likely to report cases to anyone if they don't trust the system to address those cases, and cases that never get reported to anyone to begin with are also left out of the crime reports. And when federal statistics make rape look rare, any attempt to deal with rape as a serious problem -- like changing the definition to line up with reality -- looks like unnecessary scaremongering.
Obviously, there's no one solution. But getting the word "forcible" out of federal definitions of rape might not be a bad place to start.
