I’ve watched Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, read all kinds of mysteries, and as a reporter covered police and the courts, including sex crimes. I realize, however, the more I learn, the less I know. This is especially true about crimes such as rape, which are so vile they are difficult to even comprehend,
For example, how many – other than victims and sex crime investigators – would understand that rape is not about sex but instead the need to control, torture, and terrorize?
Alice Vachss understands very well. In her book, THEN AND NOW: MY YEARS ON THE FRONT LINES PROSECUTING RAPISTS AND CONFRONTING THEIR COLLABORATORS she shows this with sometimes uncomfortable clarity based on her decades of experience as a sex crimes prosecutor. Vachss explains:
“…the deliberate humiliation of a human being by force and the twisted imposition of one’s sexual will on another are truly ugly... There’s nothing erotic about rape. Rape is neither sexual nor sexy; it is an ugly act of dominance and control...they use the sex act itself to make their abuse of power more personal.”
Vachss spells out this ugly truth through stories of the cases she has prosecuted during her career. Truths that most of us prefer not to even think about. As she explains, “People believe that if something is unthinkable, it can’t be true. I wish they were right. I wish it were fiction.”
One case involved “eleven first-degree robberies, twelve first degree rapes, nine first-degree sodomies, seventeen counts of either gun possession or gun use, two first-degree kidnappings, and seven other unlawful-imprisonment counts. In all there were twenty-two indictments…against one defendant…” In another case, the attacker “had a machete. He forced sex on her, several different ways and positions, in different locations. She bled a lot. Then he forced her to go through the house looking for valuables, making her separate the real jewelry from the junk. He made her lie on the bed beside him–an endless stretch of terror–while he watched TV…” Others included child rapists, serial rapists, rapists who spiked drinks and raped while the woman was passed out…
Vachss also talks about the politics of prosecuting crimes. About judges who are less than noble. About attorneys who may not be much a better than the rapists. About how guilt is often assigned to the victim. About how a privileged son of a “good family” can often get away with awful crimes.
Not that Vachss has only bad and ugly stories to tell. She has a number of successes. Though they may seem trivial in comparison to the evil, they are still worth celebrating. She wrote, “Sex-crimes prosecution may be a war where we lose a lot of the battles, but it’s one where we can never afford to surrender… the one truth that remained more important to me than all the rest is that what the public is entitled to from prosecutors is not any particular verdict but the willingness to step into the ring again and again.”
THEN AND NOW: MY YEARS ON THE FRONT LINES PROSECUTING RAPISTS AND CONFRONTING THEIR COLLABORATORS is far too valuable, and complex, to distill down to one review. Perhaps one of the most important lessons of this book might be that rape is not about sex. Vachss explains:
“People seem to have this idea that rape happens when a male gets so overcome by his sexual desire for a woman that he loses all self-control. That’s not what I saw in the crimes I prosecuted. It wasn’t that rapists were oversexed. If anything, they seemed to have an unusual amount of difficulty… [performing normally] … All the prostitutes who are in their graves because they laughed at a John’s lack of performance learned the hard way: These were crimes not of excess hormones, but of power, coercion, control.”
Rather than sex, rape is about inflicting pain:
“People who think rape is about sex confuse the weapon with the motivation…For most rapists the act of deliberately humiliating another human is integral to what they do…they look for that …opportunity to degrade and control–forcing the victim into acts of compliance… Humiliation is their foreplay…a rapist is a single-minded, totally self-absorbed sociopathic beast . . . a beast that cannot be tamed with ‘understanding’… they look for whatever vulnerability might insulate them from capture and punishment. Sometimes that means raping a child, because we seem as a country to doubt the word of children who say they’ve been raped. And sometimes that means trying to sell the rest of us on the concept that it isn’t really rape if the victim is someone we don’t like…The motive for rape is rape.”
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