That’s what we are calling rape these days why punish the criminal when you can let them hide behind a fancy term. It has become fashionable nowadays to find a psychological cause for everything we cant understand, we need to find a cause within the individual to absolve them from responsibility or to put the blame squarely on their shoulders.
The other day I brought this issue up the issue of medicalising rape with another psychologist who actually thought it might be a good idea. The rapist I am sure had some neurochemical imbalances which made him do it or perhaps it’s a genetic thing getting the rapist to therapy will do him/her wonders. Perhaps we can understand them better, or maybe we can make them see how wrong they are, or maybe we will change them, maybe we can release them from their inner trauma that causes them to rape, maybe maybe………… how naïve does one have to be not to see the stupidity of it all. Why not legalise rape while we are at it, and while we are at it lets look at the trauma a murderer feels when he kills.
The new DSM (diagnostic manual) is planning to include rape as a disorder. Move over victim your rapist needs to get the attention now. I have gone hoarse pointing out how the mental health system is oppressive but this takes the cake. The psychiatric institution has never been known for niceness towards its consumers but getting a rapist to sit in for therapy and to take away the autonomy form the crime is collusion between two oppressive forces.
Rape is not a crime of passion to call it paraphillic is absurd philia means love, rape DOES NOT INVOLVE LOVE. Forced sex isn’t sex at all it is an act of asserting power over another person. Though all rapists aren’t men most rape cases involve female victims (we may not have adequate data form male victims), one cant help but look at rape through a power structure – patriarchy.
I don’t know how many men sat and wrote the new DSM but I have a hunch a large majority had to be men. As for calling a spade a spade the mental health field fails miserably. Why call it rape when you can give it a pretentious Latin name, which is not only misleading but will also take away some of the revulsion one feels with the term rape. We minimise the seriousness of the crime (I still think it is a crime) by giving it a term very few people are bound to understand. The term rape conjures up violent images but the term Paraphilic Coercive Disorder does nothing of that sort the perpetrator can very easily hide behind the veil of science and obscure language. Lets call it rape and see how many people will want to include it in the DSM. Those in power benefit with the addition of the new diagnosis it allows them to wield greater power over people without actually asserting themselves too much.
In the midst of all this controversy somehow we forgot to ask the victim if they would like to share their therapist with their rapist.
