Metadata of the chapter that will be visualized online Chapter Title Date Rape: The Intractability of Hermeneutical Injustice Copyright Year 2019 Copyright Holder Springer Nature Switzerland AG Corresponding Author Family Name Jackson Particle Given Name Debra L. Suffix Division Organization/University California State University Address Bakersfield, CA, USA Email djackson9@csub.edu Abstract Social epistemologists use the term hermeneutical injustice to refer to a form of epistemic injustice in which a structural prejudice in the economy of collective interpretive resources results in a person's inability to understand his/her/their own social experience (Fricker M, Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007; Medina J, Varieties of hermeneutical injustice, In: Kidd IJ, Medina J, Pohlhaus G Jr, The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, Routledge, New York, p 41–52, 2017). This essay argues that the phenomenon of unacknowledged date rapes, that is, when a person experiences sexual assault yet does not conceptualize him/her/their self as a rape victim, should be regarded as a form of hermeneutical injustice. The fact that the concept of date rape has been widely used for at least three decades indicates the intractability of hermeneutical injustices of this sort and the challenges with its overcoming. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 W. Teays (ed.), Analyzing Violence Against Women, Library of Public Policy and Public Administration 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05989-7_4 Chapter 4 Date Rape: The Intractability of Hermeneutical Injustice Debra L. Jackson Abstract Social epistemologists use the term hermeneutical injustice to refer to a form of epistemic injustice in which a structural prejudice in the economy of collective interpretive resources results in a person's inability to understand his/her/their own social experience (Fricker M, Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007; Medina J, Varieties of hermeneutical injustice, In: Kidd IJ, Medina J, Pohlhaus G Jr, The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, Routledge, New York, p 41–52, 2017). This essay argues that the phenomenon of unacknowledged date rapes, that is, when a person experiences sexual assault yet does not conceptualize him/her/their self as a rape victim, should be regarded as a form of hermeneutical injustice. The fact that the concept of date rape has been widely used for at least three decades indicates the intractability of hermeneutical injustices of this sort and the challenges with its overcoming. In 1988, journalist Robin Warshaw published I Never Called it Rape: The Ms. Report on Recognizing, Fighting, and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape. The book combined Warshaw's own interviews of victims with data from the first largescale nationwide scientific study of sexual assault in the United States. Sponsored by Ms. Magazine and coordinated by psychologist Mary Koss, the 3-year study of 6159 students at 32 college campuses exposed the prevalence of rape committed by dates and acquaintances, finding that 1 in 4 women respondents had experienced rape or attempted rape, 84% of victims knew their attackers, and 57% of the rapes occurred during dates (Warshaw 1988, 11). The title of Warshaw's book references the additional finding that only 27% of the women whose sexual assault met the legal definition of rape identified their experience as such (Warshaw 1988, 26). In the book's introduction, Warshaw reveals that even she was unable to recognize herself as a victim of date rape until 3 years after the event. Just a few years earlier, in 1985, Koss introduced the term unacknowledged rape victim to characterize "a woman who has experienced sexual assault that would D. L. Jackson (*) California State University, Bakersfield, CA, USA e-mail: djackson9@csub.edu 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 legally qualify as rape but who does not conceptualize herself as a rape victim" (Koss 1985, 195). In a survey of 2016 women, she found that 43% qualified as unacknowledged rape victims, and of those, 76% were romantically involved with their attackers (Koss 1985, 197). This paper argues that a woman's inability to name her experiences of date rape as such can be understood as a hermeneutical injustice, that is, a form of epistemic injustice in which a structural prejudice in the economy of collective interpretive resources results in a person's inability to understand their own social experience. I further argue that although feminist activists introduced the term date rape, as well as the related terms acquaintance rape and marital rape, as a means to correct this hermeneutical injustice and recognize what were previously unrecognizable crimes, women's continuing resistance to naming themselves as rape victims demonstrates the intractability of this form of hermeneutical injustice. 4.1 The Invisibility of Date Rape In her 2007 book, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Miranda Fricker focuses on two forms of epistemic injustice, namely testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Although she devotes most of the book to testimonial injustice, a more widely discussed epistemic harm which "occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker's word," she also describes hermeneutical injustice, a more recently recognized epistemic harm which "occurs when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences" (Fricker 2007, 1). In the latter case, a person is unable to recognize their experience of a phenomenon for what it is, because there is no concept of that particular phenomenon. Fricker emphasizes that hermeneutical injustice is not simply a result of bad luck; it is a result of systematic prejudice. It is not an accident that members of socially and politically marginalized groups lack the tools to understand and communicate their own experiences. This lack is a product of epistemic marginalization insofar as they are denied the epistemic authority to contribute toward and influence the body of accepted and acceptable interpretive resources. The most powerful example of hermeneutical injustice provided by Fricker recounts a story about Carmita Wood from Susan Brownmiller's memoir, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (1990). Ms. Wood had worked at Cornell University for 8 years, and during that time she endured unwanted attention from a male faculty member. This attention included him jiggling his crotch when he stood near her desk, brushing against her breasts when reaching for papers, and cornering her in an elevator to kiss her. Unable to avoid his behavior, Wood suffered stress and physical ailments such as chronic back pain and neck pain. She eventually left her position, but when she applied for unemployment insurance, she was unable to justify her resignation. The claims investigator listed "personal reasons" as the explanation for her departure, and she was subsequently denied unemployment benefits. Fricker characD. L. Jackson 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 terizes this as an example of hermeneutical injustice. Because this episode occurred prior to 1975, Wood was unable to identify her experience as the form of sex discrimination that we now call sexual harassment. As a result, she suffers not only the harms of the humiliation of enduring the sexually discriminatory behavior, the physical ailments produced by the hostile work environment, and the loss of income and unemployment benefits from the lack of workplace protections, but also the epistemic harm of being unable to understand and articulate what had happened to her. Crucially, Wood's lack of the interpretive resources necessary to understand her own social experience is a predictable result of the social and political marginalization of the social group to which she belongs. Without the concept of sexual harassment, both Wood and the male faculty member are at an epistemic disadvantage. Neither of them has the interpretive tools to understand the dynamics of their situation. However, it is Wood, not the male faculty member, who suffers an injustice. The gap in hermeneutical resources benefits him insofar as it is produced by and reinforces his male privilege, while for Wood the gap is produced by and reinforces her subordination. Philosopher Charles Mills explains, "[This situation] is not a matter of an innocent misunderstanding or gap, but of a misrepresentation generated organically, materially, from the male perspective on the world, motivated by their group interests and phenomenologically supported by their group experience" (Mills 2017, 105). Wood's lack of the epistemic resources to name the discrimination she experiences interferes with her ability to protest it and to enlist the help of others to overcome it. Further, it is this conceptual lack that reinforces the professor's male privilege in the professional academic environment. Fricker's example of sexual harassment is useful for understanding how women's experiences of date rape qualify as hermeneutical injustices. Like the term sexual harassment, the term date rape is also one that did not exist prior to 1975, although the phenomenon we would now recognize as date rape undoubtedly existed. As early as 1957, sociologist Eugene J. Kanin conducted a series of studies on "male sex aggression in dating-courtship relationships," but he did not identify this behavior as a form of rape (Kirkpatrick and Kanin 1957; Kanin 1957, 1965, 1967, 1969, 1971). Instead, he writes, "these aggressive acts...represent a sexconduct norm violation not ordinarily anticipated during the course of heterosexual interaction to be considered 'normal' or expected, and yet the expression of physical aggression manifested in trying to gain the erotic goal, coitus, is usually not so extreme that these acts could be labeled carnal assault or attempted rape" (Kanin 1967, 428). Kanin's view that "male sex aggression in dating-courtship relationships" does not qualify as rape was in line with prevailing legal statutes and social attitudes. At the mid-twentieth century, rape referred to sexual intercourse committed by a man upon a woman, not his wife, using force and against her will (American Law Institute 1985, §213.1). Notably, consent could serve as a defense to the charge of rape, even with the presence of force or the threat of force. In addition, if the woman was a "voluntary social companion" of the man who assaulted her, the offense was downgraded (American Law Institute 1985, §213.1). In other words, the term rape was reserved for incidents in which a victim was sexually assaulted by a stranger. 4 Date Rape: The Intractability of Hermeneutical Injustice 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 It is understandable, then, why women who were sexually assaulted by men they were dating would not be viewed as, nor would they view themselves as, victims of rape. Because the concept of rape excluded incidents of sexual assault occurring between people who were acquainted with each other, those who experienced what we would now identify as date rape were unable to understand their experience as rape. As a result, those who were sexually victimized by someone they were dating faced a hermeneutical injustice in addition to the harm they experienced from the sexual assault. Without the concept of date rape, it is not only the victim who lacks the ability to understand the encounter for what it is; the perpetrator, as well as scholars such as Kanin and the wider public, lack the ability to understand "male sex aggression in dating-courtship relationships" as rape. Nevertheless, it is the victim who suffers a hermeneutical injustice. A woman's inability to understand her experiences of gender-based violence is a product of the social and political marginalization of women with respect to men. As Susan Brownmiller famously states, rape is "a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear" (Brownmiller 1975, 15). To understand this, consider the history of the term rape and its role in preserving the authority of men over women. In early Roman law, raptus, the Latin word from which the modern term rape derives, referred to the abduction or kidnapping of a woman by force, not necessarily a sexual offense (Burgess-Jackson 1999, 16). That is, the crime of raptus was a crime of theft, the forcible taking of a man's property. Under this view, it is the household that is damaged, not the woman. Later, when raptus was considered a sexual offense, the crime was still considered a violation a man's property rights: the crime could often be forgiven if the "abductor" married the woman he "abducted" since marriage would transfer the status of her as the property of her father to the property of the offender. Moreover, the woman who was "abducted" could be punished along with the offender if she was found to have cooperated with him (Burgess-Jackson 1999, 16). The idea that rape was an offense against a person was first introduced in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, but the older view of rape as a property crime still played an influential role within the collective hermeneutical resources. Certain men could not be conceptualized as rapists and certain women could not be conceptualized as victims. For example, laws against rape did not criminalize the rape of a wife, a slave, or a prostitute. The reasoning for these exceptions reflected women's lack of a right to bodily integrity: a wife, as the property of her husband, could not be raped by him since a person cannot violate his own property rights; a female slave, as the property of her slave owner, also could not be raped by him because she is his property; and, a prostitute, as the property of no one, could not be a victim of rape since there are no property rights to be violated. Restricting the class of actions that qualify as rape thus allows for the policing of cross-racial and cross-class relationships while still preserving intra-racial and intra-class access to women's bodies. Without the term date rape to understand her social experience, a woman who is sexually assaulted by a man she is dating endures hermeneutical injustice. She is not D. L. Jackson 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 only harmed physically and emotionally by the sexual violence, she is also harmed in her capacity as a knower. Her cognitive disablement prevents her from understanding her experience as a form of sexual assault deserving redress. Instead, she may interpret her suffering as illegitimate or self-caused. If she has an ongoing relationship with her attacker, she may be exposed to recurring episodes of sexual violence, which she will also be unable to identify as such. Moreover, without the ability to name herself as a victim, she will not view law enforcement, medical personnel, and social services as resources available to assist her. She will be deeply confused about her experience and left to cope with her feelings in isolation. 4.2 The Recognition of Date Rape At this point in history we can recognize the hermeneutical injustice suffered by Carmita Wood because we now have the concept that refers to the phenomenon that she experienced. Once the lacuna in interpretive resources is filled, the hermeneutical injustices of the past can be retroactively recognized. Without that concept, she and others in similar circumstances would continue to suffer from hermeneutical injustice. One would predict, then, that we could witness hermeneutical injustices receding with the introduction of the new concept. The addition of that concept to the collective interpretive resources should allow for people in the present and future to leverage it to understand their own social experiences. However, while this has occurred in the case of sexual harassment, the overcoming of hermeneutical injustice with respect to date rape has not been as successful. According to Brownmiller, the term sexual harassment was coined in 1975. She credits this to a group of eight women from Cornell University's Human Affairs Office who, in a discussion of the similarities between Wood's experience and that of others they knew, wondered how to best to refer to the phenomenon. They considered the terms sexual intimidation, sexual coercion, and sexual exploitation on the job, before finally landing on the term sexual harassment (Brownmiller 1999, 281). A few years later, legal scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon called for recognition of sexual harassment as a punishable offense. In her 1979 book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination., she identified sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination, and distinguished between two forms of sexual harassment, quid pro quo and hostile working environment. MacKinnon applied her argument when serving as co-counsel for the respondent in the 1986 Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson case. The Supreme Court agreed with her, recognizing sexual harassment as a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Armed with a concept to understand their experience and an awareness of the law's willingness to redress the harm, victims began to speak out. Following the Meritor decision, the number of sexual harassment cases reported to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rose from 10 annually to 624 in 1986, 2217 in 1990, and 4626 in 1995 (Cochran 2004, 168). Five years after the Meritor decision, another case of sexual harassment garnered widespread influence. In 1991, attorney Anita 4 Date Rape: The Intractability of Hermeneutical Injustice 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 Hill testified against Supreme Court justice nominee Clarence Thomas, a man who had served as her supervisor at the United States Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Although her testimony did not prevent his appointment, the publicity of the event encouraged victims to recognize themselves as such and report the discrimination they faced. In the years following the hearings, the number of sexual harassment cases reported to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission combined with those filed with state fair employment practice agencies rose from 6883 in 1991 to 15,618 in 1998 (U.S. EEOC 2010, 1). Like the term sexual harassment, the term date rape first appeared in 1975: Susan Brownmiller used the term in her groundbreaking book, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. In the few pages she dedicates to addressing date rape, Brownmiller notes that in the context of a dating relationship, coercive power operates through gendered social expectations, often requiring less physical force than is often assumed to be present in sexual assault cases. She writes, "In a dating situation an aggressor may press his advantage to the point where pleasantness quickly turns to unpleasantness and more than the woman bargained for, yet social propriety and the strictures of conventional female behavior that dictate politeness and femininity demand that the female gracefully endure, or wriggle away if she can, but a direct confrontation falls outside of the behavioral norms" (Brownmiller 1975, 257). Because women are socialized to be emotional caretakers and "ladylike," a woman is less likely to actively resist an attacker known to her. Instead, she may employ passive resistance strategies and hope that her date doesn't increase his aggression. However, without active resistance, courts are more likely to view her as having consented to the encounter, and knowing this, she will be reluctant to report the incident or identify herself as a victim of rape. In her memoir, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, Brownmiller traces the development of her views on rape back to her involvement with the New York Radical Feminists. Under the slogan "Rape Is a Political Crime Against Women," the group held the first public speak-out on rape on January 24, 1971, during which 30 women testified to a crowd of over 300 women about their experiences with sexual violence perpetrated by strangers, acquaintances, and dates (Brownmiller 1999, 199). Through grassroots efforts over the following decades, the feminist movement's attention to violence against women brought about several reforms to rape law, including the introduction of the concepts date rape, acquaintance rape, and marital rape to scholarly and public discourse. By 1984, journalists and scholars, including Eugene Kanin (1984, 1985), started using the term date rape and counting sexual assault committed in the context of dating relationships as genuine instances of rape. At the same time, many believed that rape, particularly those involving intimates, was one of the most underreported crimes. Thus, many scholars understood that they could not rely on the numbers of victims who utilize rape crisis centers or turn to law enforcement agencies to gain an accurate picture of the prevalence of sexual violence. In her investigation of these "hidden rapes," Mary Koss did not only eschew reports to law enforcement and rape crisis centers as a source of accurate statistics, D. L. Jackson 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 she also questioned the use of self-report surveys for determining the prevalence of rape. She cautioned that surveys which use the expression rape victim may be unreliable since they would miss the class of victims she labels as unacknowledged rape victims, that is, women whose experience would legally qualify as rape, but do not conceptualize themselves as rape victims (Koss 1985, 195). For example, instead of asking women whether they had ever been raped, Koss asked whether they had ever had sexual intercourse when they didn't want to because a man used force. This strategy of avoiding the terms rape and victim was central to the findings from the first large-scale scientific study of rape on college campuses sponsored by Ms. Magazine and coordinated by Koss. Elaborating upon the results of this groundbreaking study, Robin Warshaw highlights how the interpretive framework women use to understand their experiences of sexual violence is often based upon a conceptualization of rape as a crime committed only by strangers. For example, about herself Warshaw writes, "Since my attacker had been my boyfriend, with whom I had had sexual intercourse before, I never attached the word "rape" to what had happened" (Warshaw 1988, 6). She also quotes other women who told her, "I was totally unaware that what he had done to me was a crime. I had no idea I could report it to the police" (Warshaw 1988, 32); and "I never told anyone I was raped. I would not have thought that was what it was" (Warshaw 1988, 120). Warshaw, like many other feminist thinkers, hoped that feminist consciousness-raising efforts, rape awareness education campaigns, and feministinformed scholarship could overcome this hermeneutical injustice faced by rape victims. 4.3 The Intractability of Date Rape Unfortunately, the widespread usage of the term date rape, acquaintance rape, and marital rape throughout the 1980s and 1990s did not result in the elimination of women's inability to name their experiences of sexual violence as rape. Over a decade after Warshaw's book was published, and 25 years after Brownmiller introduced the term date rape into public discourse, women who experience sexual violence in the context of dating relationships continue to be unable to recognize their experience as rape. In 2000, psychologist Lynn Phillips published Flirting with Danger: Young Women's Reflections on Sexuality and Domination. Of the 30 women she interviewed, 27 described at least 1 encounter that fit the legal definition of rape, battering, or harassment, yet did not name that experience rape or abuse (Phillips 2000, 7). In fact, these women explicitly resist naming themselves as victims. Consider the following four examples from her interviews with young women ages 22, 22, 21, and 21, respectively. It was violent and hurtful and really scary. But I don't think I could ever call it rape. Let's just say that things went badly. (Phillips 2000, 149) I mostly think of it as a really bad night. If you're asking do I think I was raped, no, I wouldn't really call it that. I mean, I was forced, yes, and I was hurt, and things didn't go 4 Date Rape: The Intractability of Hermeneutical Injustice 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 how I wanted, but I was in the car with him. It was all really complicated. I mean, I was there, I could have chosen not to go. So no, I don't really call it rape. (Phillips 2000, 154) It was like a kind of weird violent kind of thing. I don't feel like I could have really said no. I don't know if I necessarily would call it rape. But I would say that he was so strong and big and on top of me and it was like he was totally in control from the get go. Sometimes I think it was rape and sometimes I don't know if it was rape. (Phillips 2000, 161–162) I mean, I was crying and sort of pulling away, and hoping he'd notice I was upset and stop, but I didn't exactly tell him no. I could have said, "Get the hell off me! I want to go home!" But I didn't. I just laid there crying and hoping he'd stop. Maybe if I'd said something, who knows? Maybe things would have been different. But as it happened, I never exactly said no to him, so I really just have myself to blame. (Phillips 2000, 175) These women describe the encounters as "violent," "hurtful," "really scary," and "forced." They describe their dates as being "so strong," "on top of me," and "totally in control." They describe themselves as "hurt," "crying," "sort of pulling away," and "unable to say no." Yet, they resist naming the encounter as rape. Instead, they say that "things went badly;" they refer to the encounter as "a really bad night;" they describe the situation as "really complicated;" and they conclude that "I really just have myself to blame." To explain why women who endure rape often do not apply the term to their own experiences, philosopher Katherine Jenkins insists that the widespread acceptance of rape myths prevents the concept from genuinely being at a victim's disposal. Common rape myths include beliefs such as "consent is automatically present if a prior consensual sexual act between the same parties recently took place," and "rape is only committed by strangers and cannot occur within a marriage/a relationship/a friendship" (Jenkins 2017, 192). Employing Sally Haslanger's (2012) distinction between manifest and operative concepts, Jenkins argues that unacknowledged rape victims suffer from hermeneutical injustice due to a conceptual lack. While the concepts may be manifest in legal statutes, they are not operative in legal and social practice. Instead, the operative concept is shaped by rape myths that are either explicitly or implicitly accepted in public discourse in general and by unacknowledged rape victims in particular. Jenkins points to a 2004 study by psychologists Zoe Peterson and Charlene Muehlenhard, which found that unacknowledged rape victims were more likely to accept rape myths and to have been victimized in ways that were consistent with those rape myths. When women resist labeling their experiences of sexual violence as rape, they do so because their working understanding of rape excludes their experience. That is, rape myths hinder the manifest concept from becoming operative. As a result, Jenkins argues, unacknowledged rape victims can be understood as lacking the conceptual resource necessary to make sense of their experience. While Jenkins' account of the role of rape myths in preventing some victims from being able to recognize their experiences of rape as such, it does not account for them all. Phillips found that the same women who call their own experiences "just a bad night" or "really complicated" were willing to use words like rape, battering, victimization, and abuse to describe other women's experiences in similar circumstances. For example, when Phillips asked one 22-year old woman how she would define the experience if it had happened to a friend, she responded, D. L. Jackson 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 Wow, that is so awesome! If my roommate came home and told me the exact same story had happened to her, I'd tell her, "You call the hotline, you call the police! You're a victim! That guy raped you and you should report it!" Wow! But, I don't know. For her it would be rape. For me is [sic] was just so complicated. (Phillips 2000, 154) Similarly, a 21-year old woman admitted that she should label her experience as rape, but nevertheless resisted doing so. I mean, consciously I know, and if I were examining other women's experiences or something, and she said, "I went home with this guy and I didn't want to have sex but he forced me or I was so intimidated that I just did," I would say that's rape. But I feel like I have another standard and I did internalize a lot of ideas that it was sort of my fault, and how can I say it's rape when I went up there? You know, what was I expecting? (Phillips 2000, 155) These interviews suggest that not only can we not explain women's inability to name their experiences of rape as such as a result of a conceptual lack, since the concept of date rape has been developed and is present in policy and law, but we also cannot explain that inability as a result of lack of practical applicability of the concept of date rape, since the victims in question are able to apply the concept to other women's experiences. While Fricker and Jenkins describe hermeneutical injustice as a product of a conceptual lack, other philosophers such as Jose Medina argue that in pluralist societies there are often "diverse publics with heterogeneous interpretive resources and practices" (Medina 2013, 101), thus, one must attend to the ways in which competing interpretive resources can produce hermeneutical injustices. He writes, "When it comes to hermeneutical harms and injustices, the question is not simply whether or not there are expressive and interpretative resources available for meaningmaking and meaning-sharing, but how those resources are used, by whom, and in what ways" (Medina 2017, 43). This description of hermeneutical injustice as a product of competing interpretive resources, rather than as only a result of a hermeneutical incapacity, offers a powerful explanation for the intractability of hermeneutical injustice with respect to date rape. Consider, again, the testimonies from the young women in Phillips' book. On the one hand, Phillips describes the young women in her study as having been clearly influenced by feminist sensibilities. She writes, "The participants spoke often and easily about feminist politics and gender, race, class, and sexual inequalities. They were outspoken about violence against women.... And all were able to critique the sexist (and often racist, classist, and heterosexist) images they encountered in their women's magazines, in movies, and on TV" (Phillips 2000, 35). It is this set of interpretive resources that women draw upon when characterizing other women's experiences of sexual violence. Despite the influence of rape myths in their social landscape, they are able to make the manifest concepts in law and policy operative, at least with respect to other women. On the other hand, when describing their own experiences, the women express feelings of guilt and selfblame , which flatly contradict their conscious beliefs, values, and attitudes. The women emphasize what they did preceding the assault: "I was in the car with him;" "I was there;" and "how can I say it's rape when I went up there?" They also empha4 Date Rape: The Intractability of Hermeneutical Injustice 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 size what they didn't do: "I could have chosen not to go;" "I never exactly said no to him;" and "I could have said, 'Get the hell off me! I want to go home!' But I didn't." These reflections are offered as justification for their refusal to identify themselves as rape victims. Notice that the perpetrator's actions are less relevant than the victim's. Implicit in these testimonies is a narrow concept of victimization. Because the women exercise some modicum of agency, they cannot qualify as victims. To be considered a genuine victim, then, requires that they experience utter powerlessness, complete helplessness, and irrecoverable trauma. 4.4 Conclusion Caught between two competing interpretive resources, the women interviewed by Phillips use one interpretive frame for understanding other women's experiences, and use another frame for understanding their own. Faced with a choice between identifying as victims or blaming themselves, the latter often pays better dividends. While identifying as a victim normally allows one to claim the benefits of legal recourse and social sympathy, these benefits are all too often denied to victims of rape. When women report sexual victimization, their claims are rarely deemed credible and even rarer still do their assailants face legal consequences. Self-blame, on the other hand, invites a sense of agency and control, which is critical for someone who has been victimized. In Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma, psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman (1992) describes self-blame as a common adaptive strategy that functions to preserve three widely-accepted basic assumptions about ourselves and our world, namely that the world is benevolent, the world is meaningful, and the self is worthy. When a person survives a life-threatening event, these fundamental assumptions are challenged: perhaps the world is not a good place filled with good people; perhaps the world is not meaningful or sensical; perhaps I am not a person who deserves good things. Janoff-Bulman argues that self-blame reflects a person's attempt to make sense of her victimization, that is, to answer the question, "Why me?" and to be able to proceed into the future with the hope that her future actions can help her avoid additional harm. For many women, to identify oneself as a victim of date rape requires an ability to reconcile what appears to be a conceptual conflict: how can one exercise agency and yet be a victim? Reflecting on why so many women who endure date rape do not self-identify as victims, Warshaw writes, Because of her personal relationship with the attacker, however casual, it often takes a woman longer to perceive an action as rape when it involves a man she knows than it does when a stranger assaults her. For her to acknowledge her experience as rape would be to recognize the extent to which her trust was violated and her ability to control her own life destroyed. Indeed, regardless of their age or background, many women interviewed for this book told no one about their rapes, never confronted their attackers, and never named their assaults as rape until months or years later. (Warshaw 1988, 26) D. L. Jackson 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 It is instructive that some of these women eventually come to identify as rape victims, and that this revised interpretation of their experience is frequently influenced by comparing their own experience to that of others. Describing her own realization that she was a victim of date rape, Warshaw writes, "one day, after a close friend became head of a local rape-crisis group, I was listening to her tell me about some of her group's recent cases. They were all rapes committed by strangers, but the stories evoked a rush of feelings about my own experience. Then I knew: I had been raped" (Warshaw 1988, 6). That is, while having the concept as an available interpretive resource is useful, it is not always sufficient for motivating the choosing of one worldview over another. 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