Defining 'rape'

[N Tasker <pia03nt@sheffield.ac.uk>]

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How do we define rape? No doubt there will be extensive literature on this
topic, particularly in feminist philosophy. I haven?t read any of this; what
follows is the result of discussions with friends and personal thought. It
seems to me that ?rape? has a very vague extension. As a first attempt, I would
be inclined to say that ?rape? means inducing someone to perform a sex act
without their consent. There appear to be three terms in this definition which
allow vagueness to creep in: ?induce?, ?sex act?, and ?consent?.

Consider these problematic examples:

1. A man seduces a woman who has strong religious convictions that pre-marital
sex is wrong. She agrees to have sex with him after he exerts emotional
pressure, but only on condition that he promises to marry her the next day.
When morning comes, he breaks his promise. 

2. This one comes from a film I saw recently: a young mentally disabled man,
Anthony, is encouraged to smoke cannabis by older people. When he is
subsequently in bed sleeping off the effects, one of his ?friends? uses threats
of violence to force one of the women present to have sex with Anthony. Here it
seems that neither party involved in the intercourse gives their consent; we
seem to have the bizarre situation where a third party is ?raping? two people
from a distance. 

Example 1, if it really is a case of rape, seems to be a counterexample to the
definition given initially, since consent is given by both parties. Example 2
is not so much a counterexample to the definition as I have formulated it, but
it has some strange consequences for what might be considered as rape. How
would the law consider example 2? Would it punish the woman, or the third
party, or neither? My intuitions are fairly clear that only one person is to
blame, but he wasn?t even in the room when the rape occurred.


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