The cultural and legal meaning of rape has changed dramatically over the past 30 years as the feminist movement has challenged traditional constructions of sexual violence and offered an alternative construction of the meaning of rape. The transformation of rape into a social problem has brought increased attention to the subject in both popular and academic realms. Despite the growing body of research and theory on sexual violence, little inquiry exists into women's everyday constructions of rape and the degree to which such constructions have been influenced by the feminist movement. This article uses a constructionist framework to examine the everyday understandings of rape held by a diverse sample of women. Data gathered through an open-ended survey instrument were analyzed to reveal both interesting similarities and significant differences in the ways women of different ages, races, and personal histories define and interpret the phenomenon of rape. By examining these data, the extent to which the feminist reconstruction of rape has influenced women's everyday assumptions is examined, and the role of differences among women in perceptions of rape is explored. The findings presented in this article have implications for theories of social problems, for feminist discourse, and for the application of research on rape in applied settings.

The cultural and legal meaning of rape has changed dramatically over the past 30 years. Largely as a result of the contemporary feminist movement, today we--as a society and often as individuals--no longer think of, respond to, or talk about rape as we did prior to the 1970s (Best 1999; Bourque 1989; Plummer 1995). The contemporary feminist antirape movement challenged traditional assumptions about rape's prevalence, causes, and consequences and provided an alternative framework for defining and interpreting sexual violence (Brownmiller 1975; Buchwald, Fletcher, and Roth 1993; Donat and D'Emilio 1992; Matthews 1994). Through the many political struggles around rape's definition and connotation that began with this social movement, sexual assault was brought out of silence and into the public eye.

The battles over the social meaning of rape that have transpired since the early 1970s in the United States illustrate how social problems can be constructed and reconstructed in various public arenas. As various scholars have noted (Best 1999; Pfohl 1977; Snow and Benford 1992; Reinarman and Levine 1989), conditions do not become seen as problems without being actively framed as such. The constructionist perspective on social problems focuses on how situations must be convincingly constructed as problematic before they will be publicly recognized as harms (Schneider 1985; Spector and Kitsuse 1977). This framing of circumstances as problems is a social process whereby public understandings of particular conditions are shaped through the efforts of activists, the utilization of various resources, and the resonance of claims with other cultural discourses (Best 1990, 1999; Gamson and Modigliani 1989; McCarthy 1994; Rafter 1992). Through the convergence of such efforts, social problems are constructed.

In the case of sexual assault, the condition--the reality of sexual coercion--is not new, but the construction of this condition as a social problem is a relatively recent consequence of activist efforts and ideological shifts. Throughout most of U.S. history, forced sex was an invisible harm, outside the domain of both public and scientific discourse. Today, however, stories of sexual assault are commonplace in virtually every media genre, and academic research on rape is relatively plentiful (Brooks 1997; Buchwald et al. 1993; Daly and Chasteen 1997; Donat and D'Emilio 1992; Estrich 1987; Finkelhor and Yllo 1985; Kelly 1988; Kilpatrick, Resick, and Veronen 1981; Koss 1993; Lloyd and Emery 2000; Matthews 1994; Scheppele and Bart 1983; Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1983; Scully 1990; Searles and Berger 1995). Rape has become, like many violent crimes, a staple of public discourse (Best 1999). Most important, not only is there more attention to sexual violence, but the nature of that attention is quite different from the sparse pre-1970s discourse. The feminist movement profoundly challenged everyday assumptions about the definition, causes, and consequences of sexual violence, bringing phenomena like date rape and concepts such as "rape trauma syndrome" into popular, legal, and academic discourse.

In this article, I use a constructionist framework that assumes problems must be actively "made" rather than merely revealed. Knowledge about any social problem is socially constructed through struggles between groups over who has the power to establish their argument as truth. As Foucault (1978:100) pointed out, "It is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together." In the case of rape, the reconstruction that has occurred over the past 30 years reflects a power struggle between the modern feminist antirape movement and various traditional bodies of knowledge. Despite the increased attention to sexual violence in both the popular and the academic press that this power struggle brought, little is known about how women define and interpret rape in their everyday lives. In this article, I explore how women understand rape and whether feminist arguments about violence against women have become part of how women construct the meaning of rape in their worlds. More specifically, following a review of the social reconstruction of rape fueled by the feminist movement, I present qualitative data on women's perception of rape's frequency, definition, and meaning and consider how differences among women are reflected in their everyday constructions of sexual violence.

Sexual aggression against women is not a new phenomenon. Examination of art, literature, and historical documents reveals that women in many cultures throughout history have been coerced into sexual encounters (Brownmiller 1975; Donat and D'Emilio 1992; Tomaselli 1986; Zeitlin 1986). The meanings attached to acts of coercive sex, however, have dramatically shifted over time. In the United States, rape has been redefined as a social problem and politicized since the 1970s as a result of several interrelated social forces (Best 1999; Bourque 1989). Most significantly, the contemporary feminist movement that began in the 1960s spearheaded a full-scale reconceptualization of sexual assault that transformed the law, popular culture, and people's everyday lives (Bourque 1989; Brooks 1997; Estrich 1987; Lloyd and Emery 2000; Plummer 1995). Concomitantly, social movements for equal rights and victims' rights, the expansion of therapists' authority, and a general concern with avoidance of "blaming the victim" have been shown by Best (1999) to contribute to a new cultural ideology about the high risk of random violent victimization, including sexual assaults. This new ideology has created a climate where victimization is a powerful social concern and numerous types of victims--from kidnapped children to targets of stalking to sexually harassed workers--are a recurring focus of mass media and academic narratives. Best (p. 95) used the term new victims to refer to "categories or social types describing people whose sufferings came to widespread public attention sometime around or after 1975." As he explained,

    In most cases, these new victims do not experience brand-new
    varieties of suffering; their advocates usually argue that
    these forms of victimization have long histories, but that
    they have been systematically ignored, neglected, or hidden
    from view. What is new is that they finally are receiving
    the recognition, sympathy and support they deserve, that
    Americans now recognize these new categories. (Best 1999:95)

Best identified women who have been raped as one of the categories of new victims that has received the most widespread acceptance by the public and in the legal domain as a legitimate type of crime victim.

Since the 1970s, once-radical tenets of the antirape feminist movement such as "any woman can be a rape victim," "any man can be a rapist," and "no means no" have become incorporated into popular crime narratives, including made-for-TV movies,[1] and soap operas (Brooks 1997), as well as legal statutes (Estrich 1987) and women's everyday understandings of rape (Daly and Chasteen 1997). Although debates certainly persist over the veracity of particular individual allegations of rape, the belief that rape does happen and the view that sexual assault constitutes a social problem were largely accepted as facts by the 1990s. Most significantly, common assumptions about the origin, patterns, and potential solutions to this social problem are quite different than prior to the 1970s (Donat and D'Emilio 1992). The modern feminist antirape movement that began in the 1970s has clearly been the most dramatic influence on the reconstruction of legal, academic, and popular ideas about sexual violence in U.S. history (Best 1999; Buchwald et al. 1993; Marcus 1992; Matthews 1994; Withers 1994). Although, as Lloyd and Emery (2000) pointed out, "feminist" discourse on rape is a broad umbrella term that includes a wide body of research and theory, some key elements of this discourse can be distilled from the vast literature that now exists on the subject.

Contemporary feminist antirape discourse was made visible in 1975, when Susan Brownmiller published the landmark feminist text on rape, Against Our Will. In the introduction to the book (1975:xi-xiii), she described the first time she talked about rape:

    when a group of my women friends discussed rape one evening
    in the fall of 1970, I fairly shrieked in dismay ... Rape
    wasn't a feminist issue, rape was ... well, what was it? At
    any rate, I certainly knew something about rape victims! The
    women's movement had nothing in common with rape victims.
    Victims of rape were ... well, what were they? Who were
    they?

As Brownmiller's comments indicate, prior to the 1970s rape was rarely mentioned publicly and was not seen as a "women's issue." Although some discussion of sexual assault can be found in literature dating back to the colonial period (Donat and D'Emilio 1992; Plummer 1995), this pre-twentieth-century discourse was far sparser than the late twentieth-century attention to sex crimes. Moreover, these early constructions of rape, rapists, and rape victims were structured by different assumptions about sex and morality than the constructions that would surface with the contemporary feminist movement.

When this feminist movement emerged, rape quickly became a central concern. From the beginning of this discourse in the 1970s, rape has been framed as both an instance and an example of larger patterns of gender inequality, women's oppression, and men's abuse of power (Clark and Lewis 1977; Griffin 1971; Lloyd and Emery 2000; MacKinnon 1987; Reynolds 1974). As such, struggles around the legal and public constructions of rape, rape victims, and rapists have served as a crucible for larger feminist concerns about women's subordination to men. As Brownmiller noted in Against Our Will (1975:343), "to simply learn the word `rape' is to take instruction in the power relationship between males and females." The feminist antirape movement postulates that rape is a crime against women that results from male dominance and aggression. Related to this tenet, feminist antirape claims makers offered a new interpretation of rape--that it is a crime of violence, not sex (Brownmiller 1975; Buchwald et al. 1993).

The feminist antirape movement formulated several radical new ideas about rape, including three main tenets: Any woman can be a rape victim, any man can be a rapist, and rape itself occurs in many forms, including acquaintance or date rape and marital rape (Brownmiller 1975; Burgess and Holmstrom 1974; Griffin 1971; Russell 1975). Rather than searching for physical evidence of a woman's loss of chastity, feminists argued, the law and the public should focus on a woman's consent or lack thereof as the key element in whether an act constitutes rape. Verbal consent was framed as particularly salient, as illustrated by the well-known slogan "No means no." Feminist discourse has sought to judge acts as rapes or not depending not on the man's perception of a woman's interest or virtue but rather on a woman's interpretation of the situation. By constructing rape as any violation of any woman's nonconsent, feminist discourse broadened the meaning of rape to include a wider variety of situations (e.g., marital relationships) and to encompass acts that did not contain overt physical violence.

The notion of the rapist as a rare, fringe character was also reconstructed in feminist discourse. Prior to the feminist movement, the image of the stranger rapist in the proverbial dark alley was commonplace; feminists argued that this mythology hid the reality that the vast majority of assaults are by acquaintances or someone else the woman knows, such as her date or boyfriend. These are not unknown assailants, but often men that women think they can trust. Feminists argued that people learn scripts of male sexual aggression and female passivity that encourage sexual assault of women; thus, a "rape culture" exists that fosters widespread assault of women not by men outside the mainstream but rather by men who are in some ways hypermasculine, overly socialized males (Buchwald et al. 1993; Finkelhor and Yllo 1985; Jackson 1978; Scully 1990). As Brownmiller put it (1975:189), "the typical American rapist might be the boy next door." Men who rape are from every strata of society, sharing only the desire to dominate and control women through violence.

As any man can be a rapist, feminists argued, women of all classes, races, ages, and backgrounds are potential victims of rape (Kelly 1988; Russell 1975; Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1983; Stanko 1985; Warshaw 1988). As Catharine MacKinnon (1987:7) put it, "To be about to be raped is to be gender female in the process of going about life as usual." The feminist antirape movement has sought to force the law and the public to recognize previously ignored categories of assaulted women--especially women of color and married women--as legitimate rape victims who have been disregarded by the state and the public (Buchwald et al. 1993). Feminists also documented long-term devastating consequences of the rape experience for women who are survivors, using the term rape trauma syndrome to highlight the ongoing suffering associated with sexual assault (Burgess and Holmstrom 1974; Burgess 1995). The experiences of women who are raped were conspicuously absent from pre-1970s discourse on sexual assault, where the perpetrator was the typical focus. Feminists sought to reorient the public toward the victim's experience and to document the suffering brought to women by the assault (Carter 1995; Katz 1984; Kelly 1988; Kilpatrick et al. 1981; Ledray 1994; Medea and Thompson 1974; Scheppele and Bart 1983).

Thus, in challenging traditional notions of rape, rapists, and rape victims, the feminist movement sought to broaden definitions of each category and call public attention to sexual assault as a serious crime resulting from male domination. Expanded definitions of rape led to a call for new estimates of rape's frequency; existing statistics were viewed with skepticism and presumed to exclude many forms of victimization, such as date and marital rape. The result of feminist research has been a dramatic new set of statistics showing that rape is a relatively common facet of women's everyday lives. Statistics regarding the prevalence of rape have been calculated by researchers such as Russell and Howell (1983) and Warshaw (1988) indicate that 25-50 percent of women in the United States will be raped in their lifetimes; these numbers are more than 100 times greater than the estimates of "official" crime statistics. (Eigenberg 1990; Koss 1993). These new data document that sexual coercion is far from rare and most often, probably 80 percent of the time or more, occurs at the hands of someone the woman knows (Kelly 1988; Russell and Howell 1983).

The history of discourse on rape in the United States illustrates a process of transformation in how this crime is defined, measured, and interpreted. Many challenges to the traditional construction of rape brought by feminism were further supported by a broader cultural concern with criminal victimization. Together, this growing preoccupation with victimization and feminist efforts to challenge traditional assumptions fueled a reconstruction of rape's meaning. In many ways, this reconstruction of rape thus parallels the construction of many other social problems that have become central concerns over the past 30 years. These trends and their relevance to sexual assault are discussed below.

As defined by Best (1999:103-116), the "contemporary ideology of victimization" that emerged around newly addressed crimes in the post-1975 era has several key components, all of which relate to the reconstruction of sexual violence that has occurred over the past 30 years. First, in this new ideology, victimization is argued to be very common, and claims emphasize the large numbers of people affected (Best 1999:103). In the construction of any set of circumstances as a social problem, claims of widespread harm to large numbers of people are an integral part of framing the problem as serious and in need of public attention (Best 1990, 1999). Such claims routinely rely on the expansion of the problem's domain, which has occurred with rape. As Best (1999:104) noted,

    The evolution of feminist thought on rape has led to
    increasingly broad standards for redefining the domain of
    sexual assault, including arguments that "no means no," that
    anything short of an explicit "yes" means no, and even that
    "women in our patriarchal culture can never freely consent
    to sex."

A second component of the contemporary ideology of victimization involves framing victimization as highly consequential, with long-lasting damage (Best 1999:106). The characterizations of contemporary problems thus often involve terminology such as syndrome and disorder. In the case of sexual assault, the concept of "rape trauma syndrome" was developed to gesture to the lasting impact of a rape experience; this concept has become integrated into not only academic literature but also legal contests (Estrich 1987).

Third, in the new ideology, victimization is argued to be unambiguous, though it often goes unrecognized by both the public and the individuals involved (Best 1999). Although the definition of rape may be clear-cut--any violation of a woman's nonconsent--the reality is that various instances of rape may not be defined as such by the law or by the people involved; indeed, research has often indicated that women whose experiences meet the definition of rape used by researchers may well not regard those encounters as rapes (Warshaw 1988). Thus, as Best pointed out, another theme in the ideology of victimization is that "new victims" must learn to rename their experiences as victimization, so "advocates seek to teach individuals to recognize, acknowledge, and address their own victimization" (p. 111), through support groups, media tales, or college classrooms. Such education has been a priority for the feminist antirape movement (Fonow, Richardson, and Wemmerus 1992; Warshaw 1988). An additional component of the ideology is that anyone's "claim to the status of victim must not be challenged" (Best 1999:114). The notion that disbelieving a woman's account of rape is "blaming the victim" is a central element of feminist discourse. Finally, Best noted that many social movements around various forms of victimization have argued that "the term `victim' has undesirable connotations" (p. 116). This point is indeed true in feminist discourse, which favors the term survivor over victim as a more powerful and positive label (Kelly 1988).

In considering the social history of rape's meaning, it is clear that the feminist movement has sought to reframe rape as a "new crime," to use Best's (1999) terminology. By reconstructing the definition of rape, the character of the rapist, and the role of a rape survivor, feminist discourse has profoundly challenged traditional ideas about sex and violence. Legal, media, and academic discourse reflect the broadened definition of rape, newly discovered facts of rape's prevalence, and arguments about the ongoing deep trauma that sexual assault survivors must cope with (Brooks 1997; Donat and D'Emilio 1992; Freetly and Kane 1995; Ledray 1994; Plummet 1995). To what extent do these elements of the new ideology on rape filter into the everyday routine perceptions of women?

The goal of this research was to explore the everyday definitions and interpretations of rape held by women. Because little research has been done on everyday constructions, this project was primarily exploratory in nature, designed to probe general definitions and meanings held by women. Rather than assuming a particular definition of rape or a specific meaning it holds for women, I sought to reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions about sexual violence held by a diverse group of women. These understandings are then compared with the feminist reconstruction of rape that has occurred over the past 30 years, allowing several key questions to be addressed: To what extent are broadened definitions of rape embraced by women in their everyday lives? Are concepts such as "no means no" integrated into respondents' explanations of their rape definitions? Is the notion of rape as a permanently devastating experience part of how women imagine what rape is like? Do women share a unified "woman's perspective" on rape, or do significant points of diversity exist?

The methods used for this project were centered around obtaining a diverse sample and providing women with a forum to express their ideas about sexual assault. To explore the influence of differences among women, I developed a sampling methodology that would reach a wide variety of women. I wanted to include both students and nonstudents, women who had been raped and women who had not, older and younger women, and women of different racial groups. I elected to use a sample of beauty salons in the Ypsilanti, Michigan, area as the base for soliciting participants to complete a series of written, open-ended questions regarding their definition and understanding of sexual assault.[2]

To contact a diverse group of women, I developed a sampling strategy based on the solicitation of participants in a series of beauty salons. Salons typically cater to a relatively homogeneous clientele, and I began by contacting all salons[3] in the Ypsilanti, Michigan, area by telephone and inquiring about the range and price of services (from $5.00 to $70.00 for a haircut), the size of the salon, and the race of clientele.[4] On the basis of this initial contact, I took a sample of 25 salons that represented various racial-ethnic groups, price variations, and locations in Ypsilanti township. I approached these 25 salons in 1994 to request their participation. Of the 25, 3 refused, 1 had permanently closed, and 21 accepted. I spoke to workers and salon owners, explaining the purpose of the research in case they were asked questions by clients.

In Fall 1994, I began visiting each salon with the questionnaires and a sealed box for their return. I placed both the forms and the box in the waiting room (e.g., on a coffee table). I then allowed women in the waiting room to complete the questionnaire voluntarily and return their forms to the box. I initially visited the salon on a weekday and sat in the waiting room for several hours, watching to make sure the box and forms were visible and not tampered with; no one ever attempted to open the box or otherwise interfere with the collection process. If I witnessed five surveys gathered from a particular salon on the first day, I removed the materials.[5] If not, I left the box and forms for women to complete voluntarily as they waited, then I returned the following Saturday to retrieve them. In 1995, after a period of 4 months and visits to each of the 21 salons, I had received 90 completed forms containing primarily qualitative data on women's definition and interpretation of rape.

The instrument used included four primary questions designed to elicit women's definitions and understandings of rape. The first two questions asked women to estimate the prevalence of rape. The first question was "What percentage of women do you think will be raped in their lifetime by a stranger?" The second question asked, "What percentage of women do you think will be raped in their lifetime by someone they know?" For each question, respondents were given five options for their answers--fewer than 10 percent, 11-20 percent, 21-33 percent, 34-50 percent, and more than 50 percent. These two questions were designed to elicit women's perception of rape's commonness and to gauge whether they thought strangers or acquaintances were the most frequent assailants.

The third question focused on women's definitions of rape. A sexual scenario was presented to the respondents to reveal what elements they focused on in deciding whether to label an encounter as rape. Other researchers have used vignettes to educe respondents' implicit definitions of rape and to consider how manipulation of certain variables (e.g., use of force) alters respondents' willingness to label an encounter as rape (Bourque 1989; Burt and Albin 1981; Freetly and Kane 1995). However, rather than altering the scenario to test variation in response, this instrument used a far more ambiguous sexual situation to see what percentage of women assumed a definition of rape that applied to such a situation. I chose a story that was not clear-cut in order to reveal differences among women in their everyday definitions of sexual assault. This story, referred to in this article as "Jane's Story," is presented here:

    Jane and her boyfriend haven't had sex in weeks. They are at
    home, and he doesn't try to have sex with her. She feels bad
    and thinks they might be about to break up. They go to bed.
    She wakes up in the middle of the night and feels one arm
    around her waist and another around her left leg. She feels
    something push inside her and realizes he's having
    intercourse with her. She stares at the wall and pretends to
    be asleep. She's 19 years old, and he's the second person
    she's had sex with. She doesn't like what's happening now,
    but she doesn't usually like sex with him so much. In a
    couple   of minutes it's over, and he rolls away from her
    and goes to sleep. They both get up the next morning, and
    neither one mentions what happened the night before.

The story was followed by an open-ended question: "Do you think this is rape? Why or why not? What would you say to Jane or her boyfriend if they told you this story?"

The fourth and final question probed the meaning rape held for the women in the sample. Respondents were asked to generate analogies for sexual assault as a way of illustrating the understandings of rape they carried with them in their everyday lives. The question used was this:

    Imagine that someone came up to you and said, "I see the
    news and I know what rape is, but I don't know what rape is
    like for women when it actually happens to them." What is
    another experience or event that you think would be useful
    to illustrate what rape is like?

These four primary questions on the instrument were followed by a series of items asking the respondents to list their age, educational level, and marital status. I then asked them to identify their social class,[6] sexual orientation,[7] and race.[8] The next three items were open-ended questions on religiosity,[9] identification with feminism,[10] and rape history.[11]

The 90 respondents represent women of varying backgrounds and experiences with more variation on some items than others. Most respondents were heterosexual (86 percent) and single (73 percent), and only a minority (19 percent) identified as feminist. About 59 percent of the women stated that they attended religious services regularly, and the vast majority of these respondents noted affiliation with a Protestant denomination. Table 1 shows the profile of respondents according to the other questions asked. As Table 1 indicates, the sample consisted primarily of young women, with only 12 women over the age of 40. The data thus do not reflect the age distribution of the larger community, but rather a sub-group within the area. The respondents were predominantly Black or White, although a few women were Asian or Hispanic, a racial distribution similar to the make-up of the city as a whole. The most common class response was "middle class," but a substantial number of women also identified as working class or upper class. The median educational level was "some college"; fewer than a fifth of respondents had obtained a college degree or higher. The self-reported rape history of respondents indicates that about a quarter of the women in this sample had been raped or sexually assaulted, although 10 percent of women did not answer this question at all and may or may not have been raped or sexually assaulted.[12]

In line with other feminist qualitative analyses, this research sought to explore "women's experience of women's reality" (Stanley and Wise 1983:165). Although a written instrument was used for this project, the data collected were primarily qualitative, centered around the two open-ended questions on women's definitions and interpretations of rape. Both of these questions were broadly phrased, designed to elicit women's everyday understandings of sexual assault. The responses by women were routinely a paragraph or so long, which enabled analysis by the same qualitative techniques used for analysis of written transcripts. By focusing on women's words as written in their responses, then building analyses from these data, the constructions of these women came to the forefront.

Coding of the data followed the constant comparative method described by Glaser and Strauss (1967). Reactions to Jane's Story were examined for whether the woman viewed Jane's experience as a rape or not, as well as for the explanation provided by the respondent for her answer. The response to analogies were coded for themes in women's answers. Initial coding categories were developed by identifying key phrases in each response (e.g., "breaking and entering") and grouping these words into larger thematic categories (e.g., "theft"). Each woman's response was categorized according to the themes it contained, then compared to all other responses in that category and in other categories. This process allowed for both the emergence of central, divergent themes and the refinement of categories to clarify the differences in women's responses.

The data collected on women's ideas about rape illustrate points of both homogeneity and diversity in respondents' definitions and perceptions of sexual assault. Importantly, the findings suggest that several key tenets of feminist discourse have become part of how many women, both those identifying as feminist and others, see rape. However, some significant points of disagreement also emerged in the data that hold theoretical and practical implications for research on sexual assault. As stated earlier in this article, a constructionist perspective recognizes that conditions must be constructed as problems in order to be seen as such. From this perspective, what acts are considered "rape" is a matter of debate on both the macro and the micro levels. The legal and political struggles of the feminist antirape movement have evidenced change in the macro-construction of sexual violence (e.g., in legal statutes regarding marital rape). To what extent have these reconstructions influenced women's everyday ideas about rape? It is this micro level of social construction that the data presented here address.

Women in this study estimated the lifetime risk of rape to be quite high, and no variation emerged in the rate estimated by women of different backgrounds or experiences. The most common responses were that 11-20 percent of women will be raped by strangers in their lifetime, and more than half of women will by raped by someone they know. The distribution of responses is illustrated in Table 2.

Women, as indicated by the respondents in this sample, see rape as a highly likely crime and one that is most often perpetrated by someone the victim knows. Indeed, nearly half of respondents marked that most women will be raped by someone they know during their lifetimes. The rape rate women assume is far different from the statistics of "official" crime data--the Uniform Crime Reports or (UCR) the Bureau of Justice's. National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS; Eigenberg 1990). The lowest of official figures on rape is the FBI rape rate as presented in the UCR; the UCR data indicate that 97,464 rapes were reported in the United States during 1995, the time when data were collected from women in this study. The NCVS during the same year found that around 260,000 women were raped.[13] In contrast, Russell and Howell (1983) and Warshaw (1988) both argued that a quarter of U.S. women--more than 30 million--will be raped in their lifetimes.

The responses of women in this sample to the question of rape's prevalence are thus in line with (or higher than) the highest estimates given by researchers and far from the estimates of the UCR or NCVS. Women routinely assume that rape is extremely common and most often perpetrated by non-strangers; this central, once-radical argument of the feminist antirape movement is part of how the women in this sample viewed rape. However, women's estimates of the rape rate do not tell us how women define rape. And how do women understand the consequences of a rape experience? The two primary survey questions--the vignette and the analogies--addressed these points.

The reactions to Jane's Story were diverse and often very strong. Out of the 90 surveys collected, only six people left the question blank. Another eight women wrote comments without ever mentioning rape. The remaining 76 responses ranged from "yes, of course it's rape" to "no--what does this have to do with rape?" with 12 women stating that they "didn't know" because "it depends" on other factors (discussed below). The distribution of all 90 responses to Jane's Story is depicted in Table 3.

Approximately 44 percent of respondents stated that Jane's experience was rape--either a clear-cut case of rape or, as 10 percent of women stated, "a form of rape" in their definition, although perhaps not prosecutable. Consider the following responses:

    Well, of course this was rape. He had sex with her without
    her consent. She wasn't even awake (so he thought). I would
    try to talk to the woman about why she didn't resist. My
    guess is that she was afraid to do so.... I don't know
    what to say to this man. Someone who would violate someone
    this way and then go to bed as though nothing unusual has
    happened is so far off the moral deep end that I doubt my
    talking to him would help. Sadly, my wish would be for him
    to drop dead and rot in hell.

      Sexual intercourse that occurs without mutual consent is
    rape. The man needs to be told of and be held accountable
    for his unacceptable and criminal behavior.

      Hell yes, anytime someone has sex without someone else's
    consent or permission and willingly forces him- or herself
    on somebody, that is rape. It doesn't matter if it was
    violent or not, the action was still rape. She was asleep,
    and he had sex against her will, which is an illegal act. To
    the woman, report the incident and get counseling because it
    does not go away. To the man, I'd try to punch his lights
    out. Why is it that so many men, maybe even women, figure
    that they can use the advantage of the physical bodies to
    conquer or control over people with less strength by using
    sex as a dominant control over someone. It's wrong!

      Jerk! Yes, it is rape. Anytime someone is forced to have
    sex or says no, or isn't even asked, it's rape. I'd tell
    Jane that she doesn't need him and should confront him about
    it and even the police [if] she feels like it. To her
    boyfriend, I would let him know exactly howl feel and where
    he should go!

      Upset. Yes. He did not have her consent. I would recommend
    that she press charges. I would deck him, then ask him why
    he would do something so stupid.

      It is definitely a case of rape because the intercourse
    [without] the permission and willingness of this girl.

      Nonconsensual! I feel that this is a second-degree
    criminal sexual offense, she should get out of the
    relationship.

      He raped her. Yes! She did not consent. She should stop
    seeing him. She should press charges. The man is wrong.

For these women, Jane was without a doubt the victim of rape. For another 27 percent of respondents, however, Jane was definitely not raped. Most commonly, these women cited Jane's silence as their reason for not defining the encounter as a rape. Some of their comments included the following:

      If she didn't like it, why didn't she tell him to stop? If
    she had said anything, "No" "Stop"-- I would consider it
    rape.

      I do not think it was rape. Even though she didn't like
    what happened, she never said no. I'd say to her, "If you're
    not happy and do not like what has and probably will happen
    again, leave."
       No, it is not rape because she did not tell him "no" or
    that she did not want to have intercourse.

      No, I think she should [have] said no, then it would
    [have] been considered rape.

      The woman must be enjoying it because she did not say
    anything. I know if something happened like that to me I'd
    say something! I really would not consider this rape because
    by law date rape is legal until the woman says no!

      No, I do not think that the woman was raped. Personally,
    the woman was not raped, because she did not tell her
    acquaintance that she did not want to have sex.... If she
    did not want him inside of her, she should have told him to
    stop. Now, if he would not have stopped, then she could
    consider the incident as rape. Taking everything into
    account, the man probably wanted to wake her up to something
    nice. On the whole, the lack of communication is the
    problem.

      I do not think this incident was rape. She said nothing;
    therefore, we don't know whether or not he would have
    stopped.

A small group of women who did not see Jane as a rape victim assumed that she consented to sex with her boyfriend. Consider the following sample of this point of view:

    Jane seems to have allowed the boyfriend to have sex with
    her because she thought he might break up with her.... If
    she doesn't want to have sex with the man this way she
    should tell him.

      If she doesn't want sex with him, she should say so. I'm
    sure he would feel justified that her noncommunication meant
    "OK." ... I probably would classify this situation under
    meaningless sex.

      I wouldn't say it is rape because she consented.... It
    sounds like they are both screwy in their attitudes about
    sex.

Another 13 percent of women in the sample said that they "didn't know" whether Jane was or was not a victim of rape. These women were unsure about whether Jane had been assaulted and believed they needed additional information before a conclusion could be drawn. For instance, consider these replies:

    If the woman feels it was rape, I would say it was one....
    It's not simple, though! I was in a similar situation ...
    and it didn't occur to me that it wasn't `OK'--it was okay.
    It was more of a nice surprise than an invasive affront....
    But in the story above, the situation seems very different,
    chiefly because the woman did not feel nice, but felt upset
    .... I would be supportive to her, ask her how she feels.
      I don't feel it's right to force sex on any human
    being--he probably did not view this as rape, nor did she;
    she may, but I'm not sure.

      I'm not sure if I think this was rape or not. He shouldn't
    have done what he did but she should have said something. I
    think it was pretty stupid that she didn't say anything.

Another 9 percent of respondents wrote general advice to Jane or her boyfriend without ever addressing the case of rape, and approximately 7 percent of women left the question blank.

When all responses to Jane's story were examined according to the variations in women's life experiences and backgrounds, some differences did emerge. The three factors that revealed the most variation in women's reaction to Jane's Story were race, age, and rape history.[14] As shown in Table 4, some racial differences between Black and White respondents[15] can be seen. As Table 4 indicates, White women were less likely to see Jane as a rape victim and were much more likely to report being uncertain about whether Jane was raped or not. Although 27 percent of White women reported that they didn't know whether Jane was raped, not a single Black respondent was uncertain. The percentages of Black and White women ignoring the question or leaving it blank were roughly the same. As Table 5 indicates, the age of respondents was also related to their response to Jane's story. As Table 5 shows, the 20-29 age group was that most likely to identify Jane as a rape victim; the majority of respondents in their 20s saw Jane as having been raped. All other age groups contained about a third of respondents who considered Jane a rape victim. Those who were unsure about whether Jane was raped or not were also most likely to be young; 27 percent of women under the age of 20 and 15 percent of women in their 20s were not sure if Jane was raped, but fewer than 10 percent of women over 30 reported not knowing if Jane had been raped. Finally, women over 30 were much more likely than women under 30 to leave the question of rape completely blank, and women over 40 were twice as likely as any other age group to write a lengthy response without answering the question of rape.

The self-reported rape history of women and their responses to Jane's Story also revealed some interesting patterns, as noted in Table 6. Importantly, the two groups of women--those who had been raped and those who had not--were equally likely to see Jane as having been raped. The most common response to Jane's Story by both groups was that Jane was a rape victim; roughly 48 percent of women who identified as rape victims and 45 percent of women who did not identify as rape victims saw Jane as having been raped. Women who had not been raped themselves, however, were more likely than rape victims to say that Jane had definitely not been raped and less likely to be uncertain or to ignore the question of rape. Whereas 31 percent of women who identified themselves as not having been raped stated that Jane definitely was not sexually assaulted, only 13 percent of rape victims gave the same response. Interestingly, 22 percent of women who did not say whether they had been raped also ignored the question of Jane's rape.

Clearly, the diversity of women's narrative responses to the ambiguous sexual scenario of Jane and her boyfriend indicate that women do not define rape in a uniform fashion. Rather, a wide range of ideas about and understandings of sexual assault exist among women in this sample. Some women considered any unwanted sexual contact to be rape; other women stipulated that a woman must aggressively fight back or that a woman cannot have an ongoing relationship with a man for a sexual act to constitute rape. Do similar differences emerge in the respondents' understandings of rape's meaning and consequence for women who are raped?

Jane's Story is useful for getting at the ways women define rape; the boundaries around their definitions were brought to the surface when they responded to the scenario of Jane and her boyfriend. This question, however, did not explore what rape meant to the women in the sample, a point addressed in the analogies for rape suggested by women. The answers women provided for events that hold a similar meaning to rape were extremely heterogeneous, ranging from "getting your purse snatched" to "being drawn and quartered" to "having cancer." Themes, however, did emerge over the course of the 90 surveys, as many women wrote analogies that are similar in key ways. Four themes in particular recurred throughout women's descriptions: personal destruction, theft, betrayal, and social status.[16] In addition to these themes, some women wrote comments without mentioning an analogy or left the question blank. A significant number of women (11) wrote a general comment about rape (e.g., "rape is wrong!") or provided a definition of rape (7; e.g., "rape is sex against a woman's will"), and other women (5) simply wrote that they did not know an analogy for rape. The distribution of responses is depicted in Table 7.

Personal Destruction

The most common theme in the images evoked by women in this sample was personal destruction. Among survey respondents, 30 percent described examples that dealt with destruction of the physical and/or emotional self, most often combining these two types of destruction into one explanation. For these women, the losses involved in rape were more than monetary or momentary; they were, as one respondent said, being "stripped of everything you ever had." One woman described rape in terms of someone "taking your emotions" and "thoughts and altering them so that you can never experience them for yourself." Another woman talked about a loss of identities, saying, "The closest analogy I can think of is having everything you own, everything you've earned, including jobs or titles, taken away." Thus, she imagined rape as an erasure of one's public roles--jobs, titles, everything. Others echoed these views:

    [Rape is] taking a part of you that can never be replaced.

      [Rape is] taking a part of you that you never thought could
    be taken away.

      It must be like having every bit of pride stripped from
    you. The feeling of violation must be so intense that it
    cannot be described.

Another woman made a strong statement of identity loss when she analogized rape to being hit and permanently injured by a drunk driver, saying that it "takes something away from you that you can never get back." The image of rape involved in this theme centers around devastation of who you are. This loss of self is unpredictable, explained in terms of drunk drivers or more vaguely and more typically as "something happening." The loss is described passively, not as the woman doing something and losing as a result, but as things "being taken" or as "having things taken."

Women often used analogies that evoke images of something done to someone helpless in front of others for the purposes of embarrassment, punishment, or destruction. Rape is a social act involving public condemnation. Women framed rape in terms of a concerted effort to seek out and harm someone or something. One woman described a gruesome scene:

    The only thing that came to my mind, so I'll just say it
    because I don't know why it came to my mind ... I sort of
    pictured a bunch of birds preying on something dead ...
    something kind of helpless, sort of like those films you see
    of animals, the lion tracking down its prey. That's exactly
    what it is.

Other images the women invoked were equally vivid:

    You know what drawing and quartering is, don't you? Where
    they split you open and then they tie your, your insides,
    your intestines, to four different horses, then they slap
    the horses and they pull you into four pieces. That's what I
    think of when I think of rape.

      Hmmm. I saw a TV special about the fur industry in Alaska
    or somewhere. They were beating these seals. And I'm a
    person who likes fur coats, but they were, the seals, these
    fat waddly seals got no ability to get anywhere. And the
    people walk up to it just beating it with a stick. And it's
    bloody, all over its white fur, and it's just lying there,
    feebly, with its little seal limbs trying to escape and it
    can't go anywhere and it can't do anything and you have to
    feel sorry for it. But, um, I think that that's about
    equivalent to rape.

      You feel like you've been stripped of your clothes in the
    middle of the Super-Bowl stadium.

      [Rape is like being] run over by a TANK and ground into
    the pavement. Skinned alive and left. Having your tongue cut
    out--you want to scream but you can't.
      Imagine [being] naked in front of many people and having
    sex with strangers, but not under he or her [sic]
    willingness.

Each of these images involves a group of people who do something to a helpless victim. In these images, women are preyed on; rape is about capture and public devastation.

For some women describing rape as a form of personal destruction, rape was primarily about losing control of one's physical body. Through the act of rape, the body of the victim is captured, manipulated, and controlled exclusively by the assailant. For instance, some women described rape as being paralyzed, as did one when she stated: "It is like being paralyzed, but yet able to feel pain and degradation." Others put into words situations in which others take bodily control from a person:

    Someone being in complete control of one's body, i.e.,
    prison. A prisoner within your own body.

      [Rape is like] being a POW subjected to physical
    violence, torture, or other deprivation, i.e., helpless to
    change what is happening to you.

Others focused on rape as a chronic, terrifying physical disease, like AIDS or cancer. Several women imagined rape in terms of something that a woman "gets" that lingers inside of her, must be treated, and may cause permanent damage. Rape is something that one has to carry around daily. One woman wrote:

    It is like having a cancer/parasite inside of you. Something
    you had no control of allowing in, and one which cannot be
    gotten rid of. It is like having a cancer/parasite which
    feeds on you (by definition), shutting down spaces and
    functions at times, threatening to consume you at times,
    lying dormant at times, but always uncontrollably inside of
    you.

This vivid example conveys the perceived deeply affecting, longlasting consequences of the experience of rape that she, and other women like her, imagined.

Theft

In contrast to the strong, graphic images illustrated by the personal destruction theme, descriptions of rape as "like" theft are often blunt and much less vivid. Among the women in this sample, 16 percent invoked images that fell into the thematic category of theft. Women relying on this theme described rape primarily in terms of robbery or burglary of something material. Some women wrote things like "rape is like armed robbery--you steal something valuable" or talk about "the criminal act" of someone breaking into a house as similar to rape. The image of breaking and entering was used by several women, two of whom stated:

    Rape is violence. It is similar to someone breaking into
    your home and taking or destroying something very important
    to you.

      [Rape is like] coming home from being out and finding
    your house broken into and all your most prized collections
    stolen.

For others, the theme of theft did not center around their house or any particular location. Rather, it was simply theft:

    Stealing something extremely valuable--priceless--from the
    most sacred place you can think of. What does it feel like
    to know you can't get that valuable thing back?

For other women, the object lost during theft was not that valuable. Two women mentioned getting your purse snatched or your billfold stolen as being similar to rape. Or, as one woman put it, rape is "like a bully stealing your lunch money, then beating you up."

Social Status

In a sharp narrative turn from tales of theft or personal destruction, some women provided images of rape as an event that propels one into a particular position in a social structure, similar to other stigmatizing events that place a person in a particular status in a larger, stratified system. Rape, in this view, is not about personal loss but about an ascribed status that affects others' perceptions and actions toward you. Among respondents, 8 percent of women used images of rape as a social status. One woman, for instance, simply stated that being raped was like being a slave in a plantation society, and another identified rape as similar to "the more general subjugation of the woman, in job situations, societal expectations, etc." that are seen in everyday society.

Other interviewees pointed to racial--ethnic stratification in the United States and analogized that being raped is a status much like being a racial minority:

    A single incident of rape is like a lifetime of race and
    gender discrimination laid on your chest in one package. In
    a single instant, you are totally devalued; less than
    nobody.... You know that the burden is yours alone.

      Rape is like being a minority. You know it's wrong
    because you're afraid of what might happen, how people will
    judge you, and how it will affect your life, and you might
    get discriminated against.

In these narratives about rape, being a sexual assault victim is a status one is ascribed as a result of the experience. Much like racial or ethnic status, the raped woman is subjugated, stigmatized, and judged for her new status as victim.

Betrayal

The 3 percent of women using the betrayal theme described, often vividly, the ways in which they thought about rape as being coerced, either through force or deceit, to enter into a relationship with someone, only to be betrayed as a result. This betrayal was typically followed in the narratives by the woman being blamed for what occurred. Two strong examples illustrate this theme. First, one woman described rape as being trapped with someone you do not like who coerces and manipulates you. She provided the following situation as an illustration: "Being told I wanted food when I know I couldn't eat a thing and someone makes you eat it anyway and tells you that you were hungry." Another answer gaves more detail:

    Put it like this, if you were standing in the middle of the
    street and a dog came up to you licking your hand and being
    friendly. You start to pet it and trust it and be nice to
    it. You develop a friendship and a relationship. You may
    even take it home with you. Then one day, all of a sudden,
    the dog attacks you for no reason, biting you, leaving a
    scar. You feel physically hurt as well as mentally hurt that
    your dog betrayed your trust, feelings, and friendship.
    Neither you nor the dog will have the same relationship or
    level of trust.

For these women, rape was fundamentally about betrayal within the context of a trusting relationship. Clearly, the rape they described is an acquaintance rape, not sexual assault by a stranger. The assailant is presumed to be someone a woman knows and trusts who takes advantage of her faith to cause her harm.

Several patterns emerged in which themes were used by which women. As with the responses to Jane's Story, negligible differences in response existed for most factors, but race, age, and rape history again revealed interesting patterns in the analogies women generated. First, differences between Black and White women emerged in the data, as indicated by Table 8. White women were four times as likely as Black women to use analogies involving theft; although 30 percent of White women used images of theft, only 7 percent of Black women did. The most common response for Black women (36 percent) was the theme of personal destruction; for White women, the most common response was theft.

Second, age of respondents was also related to analogies, as indicated in Table 9. Those under the age of 20 were most likely (33 percent) to use analogies to theft, those in their 20s most often used images of personal destruction (44 percent), those in their 30s most typically (38 percent) left the question blank, and women over 40 most frequently used images of social status (33 percent). In general, women over 30 were most likely to leave the question blank, and women in their 20s were least likely to leave the question blank.

Third, and finally, the self-reported rape status of respondents was also related to women's use of analogies, as shown by Table 10. As shown in the table, women who reported being raped were 2.5 times as likely to use images of theft when describing sexual assault as women who said they had not been raped or sexually assaulted; 26 percent of rape victims used the metaphor of theft as compared with 10 percent of women who did not report being raped. No rape victim stated that she did not know a metaphor for rape, although nearly 10 percent of women who did not report being raped stated that they did not know. Among women who had not been raped, the most common response by far--36 percent of respondents--was personal destruction. In contrast, only 13 percent of rape victims described it in terms of such destruction.

The research presented here reflects a sample of women's everyday constructions of rape. Most women agreed that rape is a common crime perpetuated most often by someone the woman knows; however, the everyday constructions of what rape is and what it means varied considerably among women in this sample. The female respondents in this study were a diverse group, and differences among the women in the sample resulted in variations in the answers they provided to questions on Jane's Story and analogies for rape. The meaning of rape is complex and difficult to explore. By asking women to respond to an ambiguous scenario and to generate situations that are similar to rape, I was able to open women's everyday constructions of rape to some light. Although this research involved a relatively small sample and was exploratory in nature, the results are provocative and indicate some interesting patterns worthy of further examination.

Perhaps the most striking and significant factor emerging in this research involved the differences in Black and White women's responses to Jane's Story and the analogy question. Research on racial differences in perceptions of rape has been minimal (Wyatt 1992), although more data do exist on historical patterns in the prevalence and social responses to Black and White women's rapes (Bynum 1992; Davis 1981; Getman 1984; Giddings 1984; Wyatt 1992). In this study, Black women were more likely than White women to label Jane's encounter a rape, and, more strikingly, not a single Black respondent said she didn't know whether Jane was raped, although more than a quarter of White respondents said they did not know. Black women in this sample thus held more clear-cut definitions of rape. Regarding analogies, Black women were considerably more likely than White women to use images of personal destruction (36 percent vs. 24 percent). This finding may be related to Wyatt's (1992) argument that Black women are especially likely to associate rape with a perception of being "ruined," primarily because of greater community demands for Black women to resist attack strongly. Clearly, more research is needed to provide thorough explanations for the differences in Black and White women's constructions of rape that emerged in the data presented here.

Women of various ages in this sample also tended to react to Jane's Story differently and to provide divergent analogies for rape. The relationship between age and perceptions of sexual assault has not been investigated thoroughly, although both the frequency of sexual assault and fears about rape have been linked to age. More specifically, older women tended to have lower rates of sexual assault (George, Winfield, and Blazer 1992) and higher levels of fear of rape, as well as fear of crime in general (Gordon and Riger 1989). The differences found among women of various ages in this sample, however, were most likely related to generational differences in the discourse about rape to which these women have been exposed. As Press (1991) has documented, women who came of age prior to the contemporary feminist movement often differ markedly from women of later generations in their attitudes toward gender-related issues.

Feminist ideas, according to Press (1991:142), have become prominent in post-1960s media culture, influencing young women growing up during the 1970s and after. In the case of rape, news and fictional media coverage are now commonplace, and feminist ideas have become integral parts of how stories of sexual assault are told (Best 1999; Daly and Chasteen 1997; Surette 1992). In addition, new cultural attention to victimization in general has been documented, and people are more willing today than in the past to see themselves as victims of crimes (Best 1999). Although women in this sample may or may not have been actively involved in the feminist movement, they nonetheless have been exposed to a cultural milieu in which sexual violence is a steady staple of the mass media diet and matters of victimization are routine parts of public narratives. For younger women, this culture of "new" victimization, as Best (1999) described it, has been a constant throughout their lives. Indeed, younger women are more likely to be comfortable with thinking about crime and victimization. Regarding Jane's Story, more than one third of women over 40 either ignored the question of rape or gave no response; about 20 percent of women in their 30s did the same, but just slightly over 10 percent of women in their 20s failed to respond. Clearly, older women were more reticent to address the question of rape at all.

The analogies women used also varied by age. The most dramatic images of sexual violence were generated by women in their 20s, who most often used themes of personal destruction. These respondents came of age in an era when concepts like rape trauma syndrome were part of mass media narratives, which may have influenced their assumptions about the permanence of rape's devastation. In contrast, women over 40 most often used the theme of social status. These women grew up in part before the feminist antirape movement; prior to the 1970s, the harm of rape was framed in terms of its social consequences rather than its personal ones (Donat and D'Emilio 1992). Thus, respondents over 40 were exposed to this earlier construction of rape, unlike their younger counterparts, which influenced their perceptions of the meaning of sexual violence and the losses it entails.

Women in this sample who reported having been raped or sexually assaulted also differed in their responses from women who stated they had not been raped or sexually assaulted. With regard to Jane's Story, women who had been raped were much less likely than others to say that Jane was definitely not a victim of rape. Having experienced assault themselves, these women were more unwilling than others to reject the possibility that Jane experienced rape. However, they were only slightly more likely to say she was raped; they were just more likely to ignore the question or state that it depended on other factors. With the analogy question, an interesting pattern emerged around the rape history of respondents. Women who had been raped most often used images of theft, whereas women who had not been raped most frequently described rape in terms of personal destruction. Indeed, the most graphic, devastating images came from women who had not been raped. Many feminists have noted the power of the fear of rape in women's lives, both women who have been raped and women who have not (Gordon and Riger 1989). For women who experience rape, the event becomes part of who they are and something they survived, like a robbery of something "sacred," as one of the women here put it. For women who have not been assaulted, rape remains a horrifying specter, what Brownmiller (1975) described as "the dark at the top of the stairs." They may imagine themselves--like the butchered baby seals or the victim of being drawn and quartered--as unable to survive the experience. In this case, survivors of rape indeed have an important and powerful lesson to teach.

Although the differences in women's responses by age, race, and rape history are provocative and deserving of further examination in future research, the data presented here also gesture to a broader pattern of change in how women construct rape. Estimates of rape's prevalence among women in this sample, for instance, illustrate overwhelming agreement that rape is extremely common and most often perpetrated by acquaintances; this once-radical argument of the feminist antirape movement appears to have become a more common part of the routine, everyday constructions of rape held by women of various life experiences and backgrounds.[17]

Among many women in this sample, a broad definition of sexual assault, like that advocated by the feminist movement, has been embraced. Even among those women saying that Jane had not been raped, many of the explanations they gave relied on feminist tenets, such as "no means no." One woman stated that Jane was not raped because "she never said no," and another stated that "date rape is legal" until the woman "says no." Thus, the concept of date rape and the salience of a woman's "no" were relevant to the women who did not see Jane's case as an assault. Similarly, many of the women who were unsure whether Jane had been raped or not turned to her perspective for their answers; as one woman said, "If the woman feels it was rape, I would say it was one." Clearly, the victim's perspective and the woman's consent were the key issues for most respondents, whether they interpreted Jane's experience as a rape or not.

As noted earlier in this article, Susan Brownmiller (1975) commented that when she first discussed rape with her friends that she had no image of who rape victims were or how rape affected them. In considering the responses of women in this sample to the analogy question, this situation is clearly not the case. Although some women (18 percent) left the question blank, most did not; moreover, most women generated powerful, intense images of experiences they thought were "like" rape in the impact they had on victims. The single most common theme was personal destruction, with close to a third of all women in the sample using such images. This theme, and that of social status, indicate a clear perception that rape is not a fleeting trauma that women quickly bounce back from. Women thus not only see rape as extremely likely, but they also see it as a permanently devastating experience.

The data presented here have three primary types of implications and suggestions for fruitful avenues for sociological research and theory. First, this research contributes to the literature on the construction of social problems. During periods of social change in the meaning of particular problems, such as rape, individual definitions as well as public ones are reconstructed. In this article, I presented microlevel data that reflect individual constructions of social problems in the face of large-scale changes in legal and popular constructions of sexual assault. The variations found in women's responses point to the need for further investigation of everyday constructions of sexual violence. Although the literature on rape has exploded in recent decades, the data on how people define and interpret sexual assault remains relatively sparse, and the connections between large-scale changes and everyday assumptions need to be further explored.

Second, this research speaks to many assumptions in feminist research and theory about rape and differences among women. Although women appeared to "agree" about rape at first glance--they estimated it to be very common and most likely between acquaintances--further inquiry revealed deeper differences. Women do not define rape in a uniform way, and, more-over, they do not understand it in a homogeneous way. The varying life experiences and social positions of women clearly influence their understandings of sexual assault, and consideration of "differences among women" with regard to rape must take these constructions into account.

Third and finally, the data presented here also have applied implications for people involved in rape education or who work with institutions to address the needs of women who have been raped. All too often, women are assumed to be a homogeneous group with similar ideas and beliefs about sexual violence. However, women clearly make very different assumptions about when their own experiences constitute rape and, if so, what that means. To address the public's need for awareness and the victim's need for adequate social responses, the variations among women must be taken seriously to examine their relevance in applied situations.

Received 20 January 2000; accepted 23 October 2000.

Funding for this research was provided by the Guggenheim Foundation and the University of Michigan. I wish to thank the editors of Sociological Spectrum and the three reviewers for their helpful comments. The following people also provided valuable criticism on drafts: Renee Anspach, Janet Hart, David Hunt, Misty Jaffe, Richard Lempert, Ann Marie Kinnell, Kim Lane Scheppele, Tom Shriver, Shana Walton, Carolyn Ware, and Amy Young.

1 For example, NBC's Fall 1996 made-for-TV movie titled "She Said No" explored the college date rape of a young co-ed at a fraternity party and the ensuing poor treatment of the victim by authorities.

2 Thanks to Kim Lane Scheppele for pointing out the possibility of beauty salons to me in the first place.

3 The vast majority of salons were sex segregated at the time in this area. Only one salon in the sample--a beauty college's salon--catered to both men and women, and very few men were clients.

4 Salons were quite candid about the racial composition of their clients. Several "Black" salons told me that they didn't cut "White hair" or that only one person in the salon could do so and a special appointment would be needed. Other "White" salons told me that they did not have anyone who could "do" Black or African American hair, and they would occasionally suggest another salon to contact. Only one salon--the local beauty college--described itself as catering to all groups.

5 I began with an initial goal of collecting data from around 100 women, thus my choice to stop at approximately 5 per salon.

6 Respondents were asked "Which of the following best describes your social class--upper class, middle class, or working class?"

7 The options were "heterosexual/straight," "gay/lesbian," and "bisexual."

8 Respondents were given the following categories to choose from: Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, and other.

9 Religiosity was measured by asking the respondent, "Do you attend religious services regularly? If so, what religion?"

10 This question was phrased as "Do you consider yourself a feminist?"

11 This question, asked last, was phrased as "Have you ever been raped or sexually assaulted?" As researchers have documented (Bourque 1989; Eigenberg 1990; Koss 1993), question wording has significant impact on findings. The results of this study should thus be interpreted in light of this particular question format. For example, women who said they had not been raped may nonetheless have had experiences that meet the legal definition of rape or sexual assault. Researchers have found (e.g., see Warshaw 1988) that asking about experiences that meet the definition of rape leads to a higher percentage of women classified as having been raped than does asking women directly to classify themselves. In this study, however, I was less interested in whether their experiences met a particular definition of rape than in whether they considered themselves to have been raped. Thus, I asked the women to classify themselves.

12 Of the nine women who did not answer the rape history question, two wrote marginal comments; one wrote "I don't know" and the other wrote "it depends."

13 Although these are point-in-time statistics rather than lifetime prevalence estimates, one can extrapolate from them to see that the implied lifetime risk according to these data are still rather low.

14 The other differences among the women in the sample, such as religion, evidenced only negligible variations (less than 3 percent) in the percentages of respondents seeing Jane's Story as a case of rape or not.

15 Although the numbers of Hispanic (4), Asian (5), and "other" (1) respondents were quite small and thus meaningful patterns cannot emerge, the samples of Black and White women were considerably larger and did reveal some interesting differences.

16 Although some women relied on more than one of these themes to convey their ideas about tape's meaning, all women emphasized one of these categories of analogies more than others, and most only mentioned one of them at all.

17 Many feminist scholars of the 1970s described arguments such as "no means no" and assertions that rape is a common crime to be "radical" and not widely accepted in that era (Brownmiller 1975; Clark and Lewis 1977; Griffin 1971; Russell 1975).

TABLE 1 Profile of Respondents

        Variable                                    %

        Age

            Under 20                             16.7

            20-29                                43.3

            30-39                                26.7

            40 or older                          13.3

        Race

            Black                                46.7

            White                                41.1

            Asian                                 5.6

            Hispanic                              4.4

            Other                                 1.1

            No response                           1.1

        Social class

            Working                              31.1

            Middle                               46.7

            Upper                                14.4
            No response                           7.8

        Educational level

            High school                          28.9

            Some college                         46.7

            College degree                       15.6

            Graduate degree                       4.4

            No response                           4.4

        Self-reported rape history

            Raped/sexually assaulted             25.6

            Not raped/sexually assaulted         64.4

            No response                          10.0

TABLE 2 Estimated Lifetime Rape Prevalence (Percentage of Respondents Marking Each Category)

Legend for Chart:

A - What percentage of women will be raped in their lifetime ...
B - by a stranger?
C - by someone they know?

A                                       B                    C

<10% of all women                    15.6                    0

11%-20% of all women                 33.3                 10.0

21%-33% of all women                 28.9                 17.8

34%-50% of all women                 12.2                 25.6

>50% of all women                    10.0                 46.7

TABLE 3 Responses to Jane's Story: Was it Rape?

                     Responses                     %

     Yes                                          44.4

     No                                           26.7

     I don't know/it depends                      13.3
    Written comments without mention of rape       8.9

    No response                                    6.7

TABLE 4 Responses to Jane's Story by Race of Respondents

                              Black women            White women
                               (n = 42)                (n = 37)

Response to Jane's story       %      n                %      n

Yes                          50.0    21              35.1    13

No                           33.3    14              24.3     9

I don't know/it depends         0    --              27.0    10

Ignore question of rape       9.5     4               8.1     3

No response                   7.1     3               5.4     2

TABLE 5 Responses to Jane's Story by Age of Respondents

Legend for Chart:

A - Response to Jane story
B - Under 20 (n = 15): %
C - Under 20 (n = 15): n
D - 20-29 (n = 39): %
E - 20-29 (n = 39): n
F - 30-39 (n = 24): %
G - 30-39 (n = 24): n
H - 40 or older (n = 12): %
I - 40 or older (n = 12): n

A                                B               C            D
                                 E               F            G
                                                 H            I

Yes                           33.0               5         53.8
                                21            37.5            9
                                              33.3            4

No                            33.0               5         20.5
                                 8            37.5            9
                                              25.0            3

Don't know/it depends         26.7               4         15.4
                                 6             4.1            1
                                               8.3            1

Ignore question of rape        6.7               1          7.7
                                 3             8.3            2
                                              16.7            2

No response                      0              --          2.6
                                 1            12.5            3
                                              16.7            2

TABLE 6 Responses to Jane's Story by Self-Reported Rape History of Respondents

Legend for Chart:

A - Response to Jane's story
B - Women who have been raped (n = 23): %
C - Women who have been raped (n = 23): n
D - Women who have not been raped (n = 58: %
E - Women who have not been raped (n = 58: n
F - Women who don't answer the rape question: (n = 9): %
G - Women who don't answer the rape question: (n = 9): n

A                               B               C             D
                                E               F             G

Yes                          47.8              11          44.8
                               26            33.3             3

No                           13.0               3          31.0
                               18            33.3             3

Don't know/it depends        17.4               4          12.1
                                7            11.1             1

Ignore question of rape      17.4               4           3.5
                                2            22.2             2

No response                   4.3               1           8.6
                                5               0            --

TABLE 7 Responses to the Analogy Question

                                                  Women

     Response                              %                   n

     Personal destruction               30.0                  27

     Theft                              15.6                  14

     Social status                       7.8                   7

     Betrayal                            3.3                   3

     No analogy--provides
       commentary about rape            12.2                  11

     No analogy--provides
       definition of rape                7.8                   7

     No analogy--"doesn't know"          5.6                   5

     Question left blank                17.8                  16

TABLE 8 Comparison of Analogies Generated by Black and White Respondents

Legend for Chart:

A - Category of analogy
B - Black women: %
C - Black women: n
D - White women: %
E - White women: n

A

                  B              C              D              E

Theft

                7.1              3           29.7             11

Betrayal

                2.4              1            5.4              2

Social status

                7.1              3            5.4              2

Personal destruction

               35.7             15           24.3              9

No analogy--provides definition of rape

                9.5              4            2.7              1

No analogy--provides commentary about rape

               16.7              7            8.1              3

No analogy--"doesn't know"

                4.8              2            5.4              2

No response

               16.7              7           18.9              7

TABLE 9 Analogies for Rape by Age of Respondents

Legend for Chart:

A - Category of analogy
B - Under Age 20 (n = 15): %
C - Under Age 20 (n = 15): n
D - Age 20-29 (n = 39): %
E - Age 20-29 (n = 39): n
F - Age 30-39 (n = 24): %
G - Age 30-39 (n = 24): n
H - Over age 40 (n = 12): %
I - Over age 40 (n = 12): n

A

                  B                    C                    D
                  E                    F                    G
                                       H                    I

Theft

               33.3                    5                 10.3
                  4                 16.7                    4
                                      83                    1

Betrayal

                  0                   --                  7.7
                  3                    0                   --
                                       0                   --

Social status

                6.7                    1                  2.6
                  1                  4.1                    1
                                     333                    4

Personal destruction

               20.0                    3                 43.6
                 17                 20.8                    5
                                    16.7                    2

No analogy--provides definition of rape

                  0                   --                 12.8
                  5                  4.1                    1
                                     8.3                    2
No analogy--provides commentary about rape

                6.7                    1                 18.0
                  7                  4.1                    1
                                    16.7                    2

No analogy--"doesn't know"

               13.3                    2                    0
                 --                 12.5                    3
                                       0                   --

No Response

               20.0                    3                  5.1
                  2                 37.5                    9
                                    16.7                    2

TABLE 10 Analogies for Rape by Self-Reported Rape Status of Respondents

Legend for Chart:

A - Category of analogy
B - Women who have been raped (n = 23): %
C - Women who have been raped (n = 23): n
D - Women who have not been raped (n = 58): %
E - Women who have not been raped (n = 58): n

A

                  B              C              D              E

Theft

               26.1              6           10.3              6

Betrayal

                4.3              1            3.5              2

Social status

               13.0              3            5.2              3

Personal destruction

               13.0              3           36.2             21

No analogy--provides definition of rape

                4.3              1            6.9              4

No analogy--provides commentary about rape

               21.7              5           10.3              6

No analogy--"doesn't know"

                  0             --            8.6              5

Question left blank

               17.4              4           19.0             11

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~~~~~~~~

By Amy L. Chasteen, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA

Amy L. Chasteen, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS 39406-5074.E-mail: amy.chasteenl@usm.edu.