For all the advances that America has made towards justice for all, when it comes to victims of rape, we may still be in the Dark Ages.

"It is surprising that society's response to rape has changed very little over the past 300 years," said Peggy Reeves Sanday, professor of anthropology. In her newest book, "A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial," Dr. Sanday examines America's views of male and female sexuality through a close look at landmark cases of rape in America and England from 1631 to 1991.

In the legal cases covered in her book, Dr. Sanday describes how defense lawyers portrayed the women bringing rape charges by a host of stereotypes: the sexually insatiable, the blackmailer, the extortionist or the woman scorned.

"Consistently, the forensic evidence was and is swept under the rug, eyewitness evidence is ignored, and the defense concentrates on attacking the character of the woman," said Dr. Sanday. The complainants, not the perpetrators, end up standing trial.

This wasn't true in earliest Puritan times when both genders were thought to have the same sexual desire and both were expected to keep this desire under control.

"It was in the 18th century, at the birth of the nation, that we embraced the dual notion that men have uncontrollable sexual desires and women are passionless," Dr. Sanday noted. Proper women were expected to keep men in control. If a situation got out of control, it was considered the woman's fault.

Societies that hold both sexes equally responsible for sexual situations have fewer incidents of rape, Dr. Sanday argues. She has lived on and off for years among the Minangkabau of Indonesia, who are virtually rape-free. She knows of other societies studied by anthropologists where both sexes are sensual and sexually active, but have almost no rapes.

In the 1960s, the United States started accepting the idea that women have sexual desires and should be free to express them. But the old notion that it was a woman's job to control sexual situations by the way she looked and acted did not change. Neither did the belief that a woman who accuses a man of rape is a woman scorned by an innocent man.

Significant activism for change began in the 1970s with the formation of the anti-rape movement. Women challenged the belief that males are not accountable for their behavior toward women. Rape laws were changed to protect women complainants from being tried according to the old stereotypes.

Yet the old stereotypes prevailed, especially in cases of acquaintance rape. Dr. Sanday's book was prompted by the comment of a juror, explaining to a reporter why he voted for acquittal in a rape trial involving students from St. Johns' University in 1991. "What was that thing that Shakespeare said?" he asked. " 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?' " Similar arguments were used in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas case and in the William Kennedy Smith case, which Dr. Sanday also examined.

Today, anti-rape activism is widespread on college campuses. Dr. Sanday believes that this movement constitutes a sexual revolution far more profound than the 1960s sexual revolution because male and female students are in it together, struggling against the old ideas.

A backlash against this movement began in the 1990s with books by Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe, who argued that uncontrollability is a natural--not a social--force among men. "As defenders of existing stereotypes, these women became heroines of the status quo," said Dr. Sanday.

"As long as men are not accountable for their actions, women will be sexually abused," she argued. "We have to extend the dialogue of anti-rape activism to universities and high schools across the nation. We must talk about our notions of sexuality and about who should be accountable for what.

"Men should realize that if a women doesn't say clearly that she wants to have sex with him, he may have to account for his actions in court. We must treat sexual aggression for what it is, a criminal, not a manly, act. That's how we can advance the cause of greater equality between the sexes," she concluded.

"A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial" was published by Doubleday on March 8.

Return to Compass Features for March 12/19, 1996