Why do Men Rape?

the scarring aftermath is something we've come to know all too well--but we have much to learn about the dark urges that incite this brutal crime

Predators stalk our cities. They roam the streets, quarter apartments, steal into homes. Sometimes they carry weapons: guns, knives, pointed tools. More often, their fists and their voices are weapons enough. They identify their prey exactly as carnivores do, selecting a target and testing it for vulnerability. If it is vulnerable, it signals its condition to them. They cajole it into proximity, dominate it with threats, isolate it from aid, calm it with comfortings. When it is under control, when it is compliant, they release themselves and their fantasies flower into dark ordinances.

In open court, a stranger seated among strangers, I listened to one victim's testimony. She lives in a poor neighborhood in a Midwestern city. She is 29, a country girl, plain, religious, innocent, law-abiding, and before dawn one Saturday morning in May, she lay asleep in her apartment, a virgin alone:

A loud noise woke me up. I put on my glasses and got up to see what it was. I was wearing my nightwear. I went into the living room and I noticed a black man squatting down in the patio entranceway like he was trying to hide. The sliding door was open. I always kept it locked. I said, "Who are you? What do you want?" I ran toward the door. I got it open just a tiny bit when he grabbed me. I tried to scream, but he put his hand over my mouth and told me not to say anything. He had a screwdriver or something and he poked it against my back.

He said he'd kill me if I didn't cooperate with him. He asked me if I had any money. He made me lie on the floor on my stomach and told me to keep my eyes closed tight and not to scream. He told me he'd kill me if I looked at him or screamed. Then he started going through my apartment. I heard him open my hall-closet door--I knew because it squeaks--and I heard him pulling out drawers in the chest in my bedroom.

He came back to the living room and got me. He took me over to the chair and made me go through my purse. I gave him some one-dollar bills, four or five. That's all I had. I kept my eyes closed like he told me. I was throwing the stuff in my purse out onto the floor, trying to find a check to give him. I had a check. I told him I'd give him a check.

Then he took me to my bedroom. He made me get on my bed and he tied my hands behind me. I didn't know what he was going to do. He said something about masturbation. I thought he was just going to manipulate me with his hand and I said OK, but I told him I was a virgin and I didn't want him to do it. I heard him making a noise, like he was breathing hard. I guess he was doing it to himself.

Then he raped me. I was lying on my back and he climbed on top of me. He talked to me and had me move into different positions. I didn't want to, but he'd threatened to kill me, so I did.

He asked me to talk dirty. He told me what to say. I wouldn't do it. It was using God's name in vain and I wouldn't do it.

He asked me what I thought of it. Of sex, I guess he meant. I said it was something different. It seems like he kind of got disgusted with me then. He wanted me to tell him that I liked him and I told him I did, but I didn't. It seems like he had intercourse with me for quite a while.

Afterward, he asked me if I took any kind of birth control. He made me feel he didn't want to get me pregnant. He took me into my bathroom and told me to wash. I turned on the faucet on the sink and he said not there, in the bathtub. I got into the tub. I still had on my night-wear, but I guess by then my hands were free. I ran the water. He wanted me to cleanse myself real well. I was still keeping my eyes closed. He must have left while I was in the tub. The next thing I knew, a policeman was there, asking me if I was all right.

A year later, telling her story, she is still terrified. Her rapist--in his late 20s, well dressed, bearded, intelligent, married, gainfully employed, a frequenter of discos and a tennis buff--listens calmly, his arms folded at his chest. When she finishes her story, she is only gently cross-examined, and then the prosecuting attorney, a woman, leads her away. The testimony of police--who had staked out the suspect, lost him, then caught him leaving the victim's apartment--and pubic hairs he left on the sheet mingled with semen and hymenal blood convict the man, his second conviction in 15 years (he spent five years in the state prison for his first). He is suspected of committing 12 other rapes. With this second conviction, his sentence will stretch for more than five decades. For once, says the prosecuting attorney grimly, the chain of evidence is strong.

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Rape is an ugly, odd crime. By its usual legal definition--"carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will"--rape is a crime only men can commit, but it is also a kind of behavior that women have sometimes displayed. In a few primitive tribes, women occasionally rape men; in a few U. S. jurisdictions, women can be charged with rape for aiding men in raping; but rape is ultimately something men do, to women and other men and children, and a minority of men have done it regularly and repeatedly throughout recorded history, whatever the strictures and the severity of the law.

Another oddity: Reported rape has been increasing steadily in the United States since at least the beginning of the 20th Century. It has increased by more than 100 percent in the past two decades, while other kinds of crime--burglary, robbery, assault--have declined. But no one knows how many rapes are committed each year, and the fact that more and more are reported may be a hopeful sign. Because the sad fact is that rape has not been especially risky to the rapist.

A study by the Criminal Justice Research Center of Albany, New York, of National Crime Survey data for 26 U. S. cities found in 1979 that "only slightly over half" of rapes and attempted rapes had been reported to the police. A University of Chicago study conducted in the mid-Sixties among 10,000 households found that the true forcible-rape rate was at least three and a half times the rate reported in the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Reports, which collects statistics from police departments throughout the United States. Other studies put the true rate even higher--at five and even 20 times the official rate. The official rate of reported rapes in the U. S. in 1979, the national average, was 34.5 rapes per 100,000 people; but the rate per 100,000 was 34 in Chicago, 43.1 in Baltimore, 44.5 in New York, 61.8 in Denver, 62.1 in Portland and 67.9, highest of all, in Atlanta. Those numbers don't necessarily mean that Chicago, Baltimore and New York are the safest cities in America. They probably mean that women who are raped in these cities don't think reporting their rapes to the police will accomplish anything, while women in Denver, Portland and Atlanta do.

That pessimism is well founded. Counting only officially recorded rapes nationwide (and therefore leaving out, at least, more than half), almost 50 percent are not cleared by arrest. Of the 50 percent of suspects arrested, about two thirds are prosecuted. Of this greatly diminished remainder, 40 percent are acquitted or dismissed, 13 percent are found guilty of a lesser offense and only 47 percent are found guilty as charged. Since women face harassment, embarrassing publicity and potential danger in reporting rapes, not many of their original reports are likely to be false. Rapists are hard to catch, and even when they're caught, rape is hard to prove: The evidence usually isn't strong.

The possibility that an increase in reported rapes means that more rapes are being uncovered rather than that more are being committed rests on one slim but monumental study. Titled "The Criminal Patterns of Boston Since 1849," it was published in 1967 by criminologist Theodore N. Ferdinand.

Ferdinand sifted through Boston's arrest records from 1849 to 1951, adding up and graphing police information on seven major crimes: murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, assault, burglary and larceny. All but forcible rape showed a "distinct downward tendency."

From a low of fewer than two per 100,000 in 1849, rape in Boston rose to a high of 13 per 100,000 in 1951. The increase wasn't regular. Rape declined, Ferdinand noted, during "major wars and severe depressions." He explained the decline during major wars simply: Young men, potential rapists, had been absorbed into the military and removed from home. The decline during severe depressions wasn't so simply explained. Ferdinand speculated that economic problems are psychologically depressing, and other researchers have reported a dramatic increase in impotence among men out of work in hard times. In fact, and curiously, the national rape rate has varied directly with the national index of business activity--the more prosperity, the more reported rape.

Although the rate of reported rape tended steadily upward throughout the 102 years of Ferdinand's study, the increase accelerated after 1906. One reason for the acceleration, he thought, was the introduction of the automobile. "As young couples found it easier to seclude themselves from the gaze of society," he wrote, "the incidence of every type of illicit sexual activity increased, including those based on force."

But the persistent upward tendency in reported rape in Boston may represent another and more pervasive phenomenon. It may reflect, Ferdinand concluded, "a gradual expansion of the middle class in the social structure of Boston and the accompanying rise in the status of women. As a greater proportion of the population came to adhere to a middle-class style of life, the likelihood that a rape would be brought to the attention of police and the offender arrested probably also increased." There is every reason to believe that what happened in Boston has happened in other U. S. cities and continues happening today. Atlanta, Portland and Denver are predominantly middle-class cities; Baltimore, New York and Chicago--in their run-down inner areas--are not.

Bizarrest of oddities is the act of rape itself. A crude, ugly, clumsy parody of seduction, lust compounded with violence and moral sadism, it would unnerve most men to the point of impotence. Predictably, it unnerves many rapists: Fewer than half of reported rapes culminate in ejaculation. A considerable number of rapists can't even manage erection, though they are almost always physically healthy young men.

Since most rapes aren't reported, it's impossible to reconstruct an "average" or prototypical rapist. What can be reconstructed is a portrait of a prototypical convicted rapist. He's probably under 25 years of age and he's likely to be between 15 and 19, with acne. He is almost as likely to be black as white (47 percent vs. 51 percent). He is probably of shorter than average height. He is as likely to be single as married. He is almost certain to be poor and to live in the inner city. He may be dumb, average, smart or anywhere between. He is almost never psychotic. He is almost never a (continued on page 172)Why do men rape?(continued from page 114) murderer. He is usually unresponsive to pornography ("What the hell can you do with a picture?") and his sexual experience usually began earlier than that of most American males. He is as likely to have had previous arrests as not, but fewer than one in ten rapists has been previously arrested for rape. Three fourths of the time, his rape is planned rather than impulsive. One important study, in Philadelphia, found that he raped in pairs--with a buddy--or in groups--with a gang--43 percent of the time. Whether or not that is true nationally no one knows. Teenagers run in pairs and gangs and teenagers commit a significant minority of reported rapes, so gang rape is probably more common than most people think. But most rapists work alone.

Convicted incest offenders--they are rapists, too--are older, on the average, than common rapists, are fathers with growing daughters, and the majority of them are apparently alcoholics. Child molesters are usually timid, damaged men, except for a significant minority who are what psychologists term polymorphous perverse--meaning, as one psychologist bluntly explains it, "They'll fuck anything warm." But child molesters are not usually the nasty old men of the familiar stereotype. In one extensive national study, their average age was 31.

One possibly measurable difference between convicted rapists and other men was reported in 1977 in a psychiatric journal by Drs. Gene G. Abel, David H. Barlow and others: Thirteen rapists studied showed strong erection responses to taped verbal descriptions of rapes, while seven nonrapist convicts studied as controls did not. Some of the 13--men with particularly violent records--actually showed more response to descriptions of beating up women than to descriptions of mutually enjoyable intercourse. This study was too small to generalize from. It included only confessed rapists and those willing to cooperate in an experiment that involved attaching transducers to their penises to measure their response. But its results are, at least, provocative. Normal males who try realistically to imagine raping are predictably repelled; apparently, some rapists are stimulated.

Dr. John Money, the distinguished sex researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, traces the sources of rapists' violence to childhood. "It always exists before puberty," he told Playboy. "It has very early origins. In rape, with men, I usually get a story of very excessive punishment for sexual activity in their early childhood years, around the first-grade level. Very commonly, there's some kind of seduction on the part of an older female for which the boys then get punished. And that is such a traumatizing and devastating experience that instead of getting rid of sex, they get rid of females. The more you talk to these people and uncover their history, the more pathetic it becomes, because you realize that they are victims of their own brains. They can't control what's going on in their brains. And then you find that they have this huge traumatic event which existed in their own history, and it put them on the wrong tracks and then they simply can't switch tracks again."

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Rapes occur almost anywhere: in streets and alleys, in buildings and apartments and homes. In crowded Boston, rapists usually work indoors; in sprawling Los Angeles, they usually work outdoors and in automobiles. In the 26 cities studied in the National Crime Survey data, "More rapes and attempted rapes occurred in the evening and nighttime hours than during the day, and more took place in an open public area such as a street or a park than in any other location." Rapes are frequent in college towns, for obvious reasons of opportunity, but they're most frequent in cities of populations greater than 100,000 and, within those cities, in rundown inner areas, in ghettos and in slums. Opportunity rather than mere crowding seems to make the difference. In crowded Hong Kong, the rape rate is almost nil; a Chinese criminologist speculates that it simply offers no place where a rapist can isolate his victim.

The majority of rapes follow a common pattern. A burly, articulate New York--born clinical psychologist named James Selkin discovered that pattern by interviewing hundreds of rapists and rape victims in the course of evaluating and treating them. I talked with Dr. Selkin in his crowded office at Denver General Hospital. Cartons of records--testimony, police reports--nearly covered the floor.

Selkin breaks down rapes into several categories, some of which overlap. "I'd estimate that 35 to 40 percent of reported rapes are familiar cases," he told me. "The victim knows the rapist. He's her boyfriend's brother-in-law or someone who's in her social milieu. A former husband or a former lover. Somebody she met at a party or a bar. Teenage girls often report a family friend or a teacher who took them out and raped them. Familiar rape."

The other 60 to 65 percent of rapes, Selkin discovered, were stranger-to-stranger rapes, and he distinguishes two kinds. "Very few, maybe 10 to 20 percent of stranger-stranger rapes, involve an immediate and overwhelming physical attack. The victim's hit, just like that, and has no previous indication that it's going to happen. Someone comes up from behind and hits her. Or two assailants come up and grab her and pull her into an alley. Or she's asleep and alone in an apartment and she awakens to find a man on top of her. A physical attack, so sudden that the victim is unable to organize any kind of response."

But the majority of stranger-stranger rapes, Selkin found, and almost all familiar rapes, involve distinct stages.

The first stage is target selection: identifying a potential victim. "The concept here," says Selkin, "is vulnerability. Some rapists look for victims who are impaired--retarded girls, aged women, women who are physically disabled. Or women whose state of alertness is reduced--they're asleep or they're using the bathroom. Other rapists check out the vulnerability of the victim's environment, which is one reason there's more rape in run-down neighborhoods. Does she live alone? Can they get into her house? One Denver rapist works with a ladder and he's uncanny about locating again and again a single woman living alone in a second-story apartment with an accessible window. Others work an isolated street or an empty laundromat or a theater rest room. The point is, they select the scene of the crime for its natural advantages."

The second stage Selkin describes is a testing stage. "The rapist approaches the potential victim with the question, in effect, 'Can you be intimidated?' Two guys in a van. They've been drinking beer--'Hey, let's get laid.' A woman walking down the street. They pull up next to her. 'Miss, can you tell me the way to the state capitol?' She says, 'Well, it's just up the street.' So, 'Miss, would you have a match?' She goes over to offer them a match and they grab her.

"Or a guy knocks on a door in an apartment house and a woman answers--these are real cases I'm describing. 'Does Elaine live here?' The woman who answers the door has a latch chain. 'Sorry, I've never heard of Elaine,' and (continued on page 224)Why do men rape?(continued from page 172) she closes the door. The guy goes to the next door. 'Does Elaine live here?' This woman has no chain and she opens the door and says, 'Well, there was an Elaine who lived here a couple of years ago, but she moved out. I don't know where you'd find her.' The guy says, 'Well, did she know a guy named John?' He strikes up a conversation. Then, 'It's a hot day. Could I ask you for a drink of water?' She says, 'Sure,' and she goes to the kitchen for a glass of water and the door's open."

"We begin to suspect," Selkin wrote a few years ago in a monograph on rape, "that women with a strong desire for service, with a need to help others, may be particularly susceptible to the intimidation of a rape scene. In the extreme, women have been known to offer food and drink to strangers at their doors, provide them with a telephone, bathroom facilities, and even lend them articles of personal clothing belonging to a husband or a son."

Notice: "A strong desire for service" is a quality women have been traditionally trained to show, and is therefore behavior a rapist can expect to find and to exploit.

Testing a woman for vulnerability continues until she is isolated. Selkin: "The guy at the apartment, having got in the door, checks the place out. On the way to get the glass of water, he looks in the bedroom to see if there's a man there. He looks in the living room to see if there's a dog. If he hasn't checked the bathroom yet, the next thing he says is, 'Can I use your bathroom for a moment?' The victim says, 'Sure.' Nobody in the bathroom. She's isolated."

Targeted, tested, isolated, the victim still has to be intimidated. Up to that point, Selkin emphasizes, the rapist hasn't broken any law. "He hasn't committed a crime until he threatens the victim. That's a criminal statement. If it's followed by sexual contact, it's first-degree rape. If it's not followed by sexual contact, then it's menacing, and menacing and rape are felony crimes."

Along the way, proceeding through those stages, the victim may find it possible to escape. "The girl who's walking down the street near the capitol building should tell the guys to fuck off. Screaming and running away are the two most successful methods I know for warding off attack. Rapists tend to run away when victims scream. They're frightened. The key to a victim's defense against attack is that the defense should be vigorous and loud. But once the victim's isolated and cut off from help, I don't know what I'd recommend, because then the assailant's level of security goes way up."

Intimidation takes many forms. Verbal threats are commonest. Don't scream or I'll kill you. I've got a gun/knife/weapon. Do what I tell you and you won't get hurt. Or the rapist robs the victim, testing her willingness to submit to him. But he alternates threatening with cajoling, the stick with the carrot. If you do what I tell you, you won't get hurt. It's OK. Take it easy. You'll be all right.

Negotiation, Selkin wrote in his monograph, also occurs at this stage. "Some victims will allow themselves to be intimidated for sexual intercourse but will balk at taking part in deviant acts. Of course, once the victim has acceded to the initial intimidation, her bargaining power has been effectively destroyed and a determined assailant will do whatever he wants with her." (The victim whose story I listened to in court balked not at rape nor at praising her rapist's sexual prowess but at swearing--a fragile bargain but the only one she could make, and one she struck to help restore her sense of dignity and remembered with pride at her rapist's trial.)

In Selkin's view, the intimidation stage is a rape's crucial fulcrum, the point at which the attack may sometimes be turned aside. A victim may decide to cooperate, or she may refuse to cooperate, or she may become so terrified she is unable to function. If she cooperates, the rapist will proceed to the sexual stage, acting out whatever scenario of fantasies he commits rape to release. The rapist I observed in court apparently imagined himself a lover, indicating he wanted to excite the victim by masturbating her, changing positions, asking her if she liked sex and liked him. Forensic psychiatrist John M. MacDonald, in his standard police text on rape, quotes a convicted rapist who describes a similar scenario:

I had a complete fantasy life that involved my being stronger than all men, irresistible to all women, a doer of great things. I had no sensitive contact with either men or women, men were something to beat at all cost, women were something to screw if at all possible....

I had fantasies about the woman I was raping, how she felt physically, where she had been in life, some resentment that she'd done things in life without me. I had a longing to do things in general with people. Sometimes I'd verbalize these fantasies if the woman was quite submissive; otherwise, I'd just take the trip within myself.

If, instead of cooperating, the victim gives way to hysteria--or successfully imitates it--the rapist will work harder to calm her down, but Selkin's studies indicate that rapists who can't successfully calm their victims usually break off their attack and leave the scene.

The crucial and controversial figure at this stage of a rape is the victim who resists. The National Crime Survey study found that "when a woman did something to defend herself, she increased the chances that the rape attack would not be completed: however, she also increased the likelihood that she would receive additional (nonrape) injuries." The injuries were most often "minor additional injuries such as bruises, cuts and scratches." Selkin advocates resistance if the victim sees any chance of getting away--not by fighting but by screaming and running. He's unsure what to advocate if the victim is isolated, but he writes that "the resistive victim, contrary to popular belief, is not likely to be killed." Rapist-murderers are different personality types from rapists--they're far more disordered--but they share with many rapists a staged approach to their crimes, targeting, testing, isolating and intimidating their victims and calming them down before they proceed to sexual assault and violence. "The weight of clinical evidence," Selkin says carefully, "is that the rape-murder victim sets out to cooperate with her assailant." Furthermore, rape-murder apparently accounts for fewer than one percent of known rapes, though, as elsewhere in criminal statistics, the numbers aren't reliable.

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None of this is meant to imply that any rape victim is culpable for her behavior. Victims may be service-oriented; they may choose to cooperate with their assailants rather than risk resisting. They are nevertheless victims, not cooperators: threatened, violated, criminally deprived of their basic human right to the safety and sanctity of their person. That right is one that police, courts and juries have not always honored, demanding signs of struggle and injury to determine if a rape charge is convincing. But it is a right honored by law: Threats are legally as determining in first-degree rape as physical assault.

Rapists are frequently brutal in their sexual attack, but some of them, caught up in fantasy, manage grotesque parodies of tenderness. MacDonald quotes one such offender:

I'd be kissing her, sucking on her breasts as I opened her legs, telling her, "You're beautiful, you're warm, you're soft," kissing her stomach. I'd put a leg in each arm, with my face over her vagina, warning her a last time to lay still and keep her blindfold on, holding a leg firmly in each arm. I'd begin to brush her pubic hair and inner thighs with my face and lips; gradually I would kiss her vagina directly. I'd do this for maybe five to ten minutes. I'd tell her to respond, to let herself go. I thought that this appealed to the women, that they would like it.

A small percentage of offenders use condoms or promise their victims they'll practice coitus interruptus to protect them from pregnancy. Some ask for kisses and caresses. Some talk at length with their victims before assaulting them. One victim, remembering her peculiar assailant, told MacDonald:

He said that he'd never had sex before, that he wasn't too good at it and would I help him? He asked me my age, if I ever loved anyone and if I had a boyfriend. He said he was 34 and he wondered what I'd be doing 14 years from now, when I was his age. He supposed I'd be married and have two darling children. He asked if I was religious and what church I belonged to, and he said he was a Catholic and had sinned.

Brutal or grotesquely tender, a rapist usually initiates a termination stage after he has raped, attempting in various ways to prevent the victim from calling for help until he can get away. Terminations are usually consistent, part of a rapist's identifiable M.O. He may tell his victim to count to 100, hide outside her door, crash back in if she stops counting and threaten her again, tell her to start over, then leave for good. The rapist I observed on trial directed his victim to the bathtub to wash away his semen, which could serve as evidence (he forgot the sheets), to cover his getaway with the noise of running water and to make it unlikely that the victim would immediately follow him out. Other rapists apologize for raping and beg their victims not to turn them in, sometimes promising to seek psychiatric help. Others threaten to return and kill their victims or to send their buddies if they're caught. The point of all these strategies is to confuse the victim and escape.

Selkin distinguishes among various types of rapists in assessing their degrees of dangerousness and their potential for rehabilitation. "The people who come to your attention in a treatment setting," he says, "are not the same offenders who do long sentences in the penitentiary. The guy in the penitentiary gets there because he's done repeated crimes, shown little remorse, doesn't have a wife and five kids who'll go on welfare if he's sent up. He's committed collateral crimes. He has a long record of burglaries, theft, and so on, along with the rapes. He doesn't make self-help efforts. I don't find the term psychopath particularly useful, but with these guys, you're almost forced to use it. They'll usually tell you it's a bum rap, they were seduced, they weren't really responsible for what they did. That makes them hard to work with, because accepting responsibility for their actions is critical.

"Then there's another type. He's committed maybe five or 15 rapes, but he's been arrested only once or twice before, and he walks in and says, 'Well, it was like living in another world.' Or, 'Yes, I did it. I don't know why I did it. I'm disturbed by it. It was a part of me that I don't understand. It was almost like watching a movie.' If he's not so heavily into drugs or alcohol that he can be considered addicted, then he can usually be helped. He's confused. He's split. He wants to know who he is. He wants to put himself back together. He can usually be treated with some success, given the right setting."

Most psychologists who work with rapists believe, obviously, that they are psychologically disordered--damaged by childhood experiences that twist them to behave in socially forbidden ways. The experiences mentioned are abuse, poverty, difficulties with female figures within the family and broken homes. Convicted rapists do share these experiences with other convicted criminals, but so do many other men who neither rape nor commit other crimes. In fact, they're commonplaces of lower-class, inner-city childhood. The psychological model is shaky. At its worst, it becomes a circular argument: Rapists must be sick because rape is sick behavior. But colleagues of Alfred Kinsey at the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University conducted a monumental study of convicted sex offenders in the Forties and the Fifties and seemed to say that rapists aren't much different from other criminals--nor, for that matter, from many ordinary, law-abiding men.

Feminist historian Susan Brownmiller examined the Kinsey and other studies in her 1975 book Against Our Will and proposed an alternative way of looking at rapists. She argued that men rape women not because they are psychologically disturbed but because they have the biological equipment with which to do so. "The typical American rapist," she wrote, "might be the boy next door. Especially if the boy happens to be about 19 years of age and the neighborhood you live in happens to fit the socioeconomic description of lower class or bears the appellation of 'ghetto.' That is what the statistics show."

Brownmiller describes the "typical" rapist much as I described him earlier, but she emphasizes the large number of pair and gang rapes that some major studies reveal. She recalls the fact, seen over and over in history, of rape in war, rape perpetrated by young men officially healthy enough mentally and physically to be soldiers, rape usually carried out by groups of men, as it usually was, for example, in Bangladesh and Vietnam. And she concludes:

Rape is a dull, blunt, ugly act committed by punk kids, their cousins and older brothers, not by charming, witty, unscrupulous, heroic, sensual rakes, or by timid souls deprived of a "normal" sexual outlet, or by Supermenschen possessed of uncontrollable lust. And yet, on the shoulders of these unthinking, predictable, insensitive, violence-prone young men, there rests an age-old burden that amounts to a historic mission: the perpetuation of male domination over women by force.... That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation.

Brownmiller studied statistics and history; Selkin and his colleagues study cases and men. Both their rape-offender models, the feminist and the psychological, fit some of the known facts, but neither is an adequate theory by itself.

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Brownmiller's discussion of group rape is one clue to further lines of examination. She emphasizes that one result of group rape is to strengthen the bonds among the males involved. Groups have leaders, and some leaders lead their groups in rape. In effect, they supply their followers with women in barter for loyalty and isolate their followers from the straight world by encouraging them to break the law. Brownmiller borrows a term from anthropologist Lionel Tiger to identify this process: She calls it male bonding. It's common to many social species besides Homo sapiens. It confers decided reproductive advantages on groups of males who practice it, merging their separate strengths and resources into a single powerful unit; groups of males, particularly adolescent males, practice it in our society as certainly as groups of low-dominance male langur monkeys do. Teenagers--some teenagers--form gangs, and mark and defend territories, and sometimes bind themselves closer by raping unprotected females who stray within range.

Selkin's description of the stages of rape could be another inspired clue to rape's hidden origins. Until the moment of sexual assault, the stages of a rape are identical with the stages of a predatory hunt. Students of wolf behavior describe remarkably similar patterns. "I think wolves kill the way paleolithic hunters killed," writes naturalist Barry H. Lopez, "by paying close attention to the movement of game herds and by selecting individual animals on the basis of various cues." Vulnerable prey animals, Lopez notes, "apparently 'announce' their condition to wolves by subtleties of stance, peculiarity of gait, rank breath or more obvious signs of visible infection." Finding a vulnerable animal, the wolf pack isolates it. Along the way, there is communication between predator and victim. "The killing," says Lopez, "is by mutual agreement." But even when a victim is surrounded, sufficient resistance on its part will usually drive the wolves away. "When a wolf 'asks' for an animal's life, he is opening a formal conversation that can take any number of turns, including 'no' and 'yes.' " Wolves don't use their hunting patterns for sexual assault, as rapists do, but behavioral patterns borrowed from one setting for use in another are a commonplace of the animal world--and the human. Adapting hunting behavior to raping--stalking victims as group or solitary predators stalk their prey--increases the rapist's chances of success.

What about rape itself? If men who rape aren't much different from other men, why do they rape when others don't?

Rape isn't exclusive to advanced Western societies. Men have raped, as Brown-miller's detailed historical research makes clear, throughout human history. They have raped in "primitive" societies and in "sophisticated" societies, in the modern world and the ancient, and rape has always been a special privilege of conquerors in war. Furthermore, rape is only selectively disapproved. Laws against it, like laws against murder, have been enforced most vigorously within societies rather than between them: Men may kill in war officially and rape in war unofficially, and through most of the human past, men could kill or rape individuals in subordinate cultures (Indians, blacks, Jews, Vietnamese) with less risk of punishment than they could kill or rape their own. In short, rape may be minority behavior, but it's also pervasive. It's common to almost all human societies, whatever their complexity and whatever their values, and it reaches back in time to mankind's dim beginnings. For women, it has been (and still is) a universal and perpetual scourge; in that, Brownmiller is bitterly right.

Whenever a pattern of behavior, even a minority pattern, appears to be more or less universal in a species, biologists find strong reason to suspect that it is genetically based--that it has evolved because it increases an individual's chances of reproducing. Rape may be a pattern of behavior that is evolutionarily adaptive, a strategy genetically available to low-dominance males that increases their chances of reproducing by making more females available to them than they would otherwise acquire.

Rape doesn't look like successful behavior. To begin with, not many men rape. With the small minority who do, fewer than half of their reported rapes culminate in ejaculation and a much smaller number result in pregnancies. If, by raping, a rapist improves his chances of reproducing, he doesn't improve them much. The question is, how much improvement is necessary for the behavior to be advantageous and therefore to be passed on?

Looking for an answer to that question, I visited a leading biologist, Edward O. Wilson, in his laboratory at Harvard University. Wilson's specialty is social insects; he is also a theoretical biologist and spokesman for the new and controversial discipline of sociobiology. Sociobiology is the study of the biological basis of all aspects of social behavior. In 1975, Wilson published its standard text, drawing together information from hundreds of studies in such diverse fields as population biology, ecology, sociology, anthropology, neurophysiology and zoology. "For the moment," he wrote in Sociobiology, in a characteristically unsentimental passage, "suffice it to note that what is good [genetically] for the individual can be destructive to the family; what preserves the family can be harsh on both the individual and the tribe to which its family belongs; what promotes the tribe can weaken the family and destroy the individual; and so on upward through the permutations of levels of organization." The book was hailed as a wonder for its treatment of social behavior in animals, but it was widely condemned for daring to suggest that what applied to animals might also apply to man. In fairness, it hardly proved its case--it wasn't meant to, but rather was meant to establish a basis for further study--but it does make a case, and one strong enough to be considered seriously, and one that appears on immediate inspection to have application to the obscure origins of rape.

Wilson answered my question immediately: A behavior doesn't have to be successful often to survive natural selection. If it works for a small minority of a population some of the time, it can be genetically sustained along with other behaviors that work better for the majority.

We discussed reproductive strategies. "In Homo sapiens," Wilson said, "the female is the limiting resource. She can reproduce only at roughly 12-month intervals. She has the burden of gestation and early postnatal care. Given these limitations, the best way she can maximize her genetic fitness is by forming alliances with males, males she can commit to investing their time and energy to her care and that of her offspring, and allowing only them to inseminate her."

But, Wilson continued, from a genetic point of view, the male's perspective is different. "A virile young male can reproduce almost nightly. He may form an alliance with a female, but it's to his genetic advantage to be allied with more than one. About three fourths of human societies have practiced polygamy, usually in the form of marriages among one man and more than one woman. Fewer than one percent have been polyandrous. The rest have been monogamous, but everyone knows that's strictly on the books and sanctioned in the breach, rife with mistresses and affairs."

I described to Wilson the information about rape included in this report. He considered it and responded: "I think you're onto something very logical. It's a very worthwhile proposition that, ugly as it sounds, rape does, indeed, give genetic advantage. If the rapist can escape unpunished--and apparently most do--then he has put himself reproductively a little ahead of the game. Rape may very well have evolved as a behavior pattern, a way of extending sexual behavior into the realm of violence and the stalk. We really have to examine directly the dark side of human nature. We're talking about inherited predispositions in the form of learning rules, predispositions that make it very likely under a wide range of environments that you will develop one pattern of behavior, often quite complex, structured and predictable--rather than another. The hypothesis that rape is one of those patterns may be superior, fitting more of the facts than the hypothesis that rapists are simply psychopaths, mad dogs, wrong in the head. It's logical and it's possible."

One way to test the hypothesis, Wilson proposed, would be to see if the incidence of rape increases with the permissiveness of the circumstances--"which," he said, "is exactly what happens in war." Another way would be to find rape a prevalent behavior in societies organized differently from our own. It is--among African and South American tribes, for example, during border warfare and in intertribal raids.

Rape as a reproductive strategy of low-dominance males explains much about the act and its consequences. It explains why rapists are usually ordinary, marginal young men. It explains why male-dominant society has never quite put the screws to rapists--because one effect of tolerating rape is to force women back under the protection of men, perpetuating the system. Brownmiller and other feminists believe the cause of rape is a history-long, deliberate male conspiracy. Equally plausible is the possibility that the "conspiracy" is not deliberate but unconscious and biological, a cold balancing of reproductive opportunity and reproductive need. The feminist theory misses a crucial fact: Men willing to invest themselves in strong alliances with women--high-dominance males, better men--share with women an equal biological stake in reducing rape. Rape is not only not advantageous to the victim; it is also not advantageous to the man with whom she may be allied.

I did not track rape into the amoral twilight of evolutionary strategy to make an academic point. Knowing rape's origins can help society determine how better to deal with the crime.

To the extent that rapists are psychologically disordered, for example, they need to be securely committed to institutions for effective treatment. "We know, first of all," Abel told a Playboy interviewer, "that these arousal patterns have been present for a number of years. Many of these fellows want to do something about that arousal pattern. They want to stop. But they don't have any mechanism for getting that treatment. Right now, there's no place for them to go. If you're a child molester or a rapist in this country, the only routes normally available for you are to turn yourself in and go to prison for ten years. We need to provide interventions right now for those people who have those problems. And we need to do research to establish what develops those patterns."

Money discovers a similar impasse: "You cannot get money for sexual research. Senator Proxmire spoiled all that. If the Government funding agencies were getting ready to help out on honest-to-God studies on human sexuality, then he ruined all that. They're frightened to allow their names to be associated with sex research. So are the private foundations. I was talking with one of the administrators of the National Institute of Mental Health about five years ago and he showed me a computer printout of how much research funding was going out to projects that had anything at all to do with sex. We're putting some money into it, he said. In fact, we're putting in $13,000,000. But listen to this. Of that total of $13,000,000, $8,000,000 was put into grants for the prevention of rape. Every rape study, all the money that's been given for rape, has always been given to projects that are going to stop it and punish the men who did it. There's no money to try to understand why it happens and what its origins are in the development of the persons concerned. But if we want to know what makes a teenager a rapist, then we've got to find out how he developed as a little boy. They're teenage kids who wake up with a wet dream one night when they're 13 and realize they're rapists and it terrifies them and we're so cruel we won't let them talk about it to anybody."

Similarly, to the extent that rape depends for its virulent contagion on distortions of cultural values--on a male chauvinism that reduces women to victims, on a puerile machismo that reduces women to objects of pleasure--then such distortions need to be reshaped throughout our institutions of society, education, politics and religion. The feminist movement has been a necessary, healthy move in that direction, one strongly deserving of committed public support.

And if, as it appears, rape carries at its diseased heart a small pressure of genetic advantage; if rape is, among other things, an automatic, unconscious reproductive strategy of low-dominance males--of biological cowards--then women and better men must ally themselves to prevent its success.

Women can work to make themselves less vulnerable, can learn to regard their personal space as their own and to react fiercely to protect it. Men and women can work together within their communities to make sure that rapes are reported, investigated and prosecuted, so that rapists feel the full force of the law as they now so shamefully do not. No society, no community can claim to offer its citizens equal protection under the law so long as a crime as heinous and sex-specific as rape goes largely unpunished, and those who suffer in that society or community are justified in judging it callous if not, in fact, active in complicity if it continues unchecked from year to year.

The most effective way to reduce rape for the long term is almost certainly by raising the social and economic status of women and the consciousness of men. By the ugly measure of rape statistics, America has a long way to go.

"A criminologist speculates that Hong Kong simply offers no place where a rapist can isolate his victim."

"Rapists are frequently brutal in their sexual attack, but some manage grotesque parodies of tenderness."