• DOI:10.1177/0361684311404307
• Corpus ID: 145146774

Sexual Violence Against Women

@article{Rutherford2011SexualVA,
  title={Sexual Violence Against Women},
  author={Alexandra Rutherford},
  journal={Psychology of Women Quarterly},
  year={2011},
  volume={35},
  pages={342 - 347}
}

• A. Rutherford
• Published 1 June 2011
• Political Science
• Psychology of Women Quarterly

In 1977, one reviewer of Susan Brownmiller’s classic work, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975) wrote that rape was a topic ‘‘hitherto as well known to conventional scholars as the dark side of the moon’’ (Shorter, 1977, p. 471). Conventional scholars were not alone in their ignorance. Their lack of awareness mirrored the general lack of knowledge—or denial—in the public at large about the prevalence and nature of violence against women to that time. Sexual violence, or the threat thereof, has been an omnipresent part of women’s lives throughout history (see Clark, 1987; D’Cruze, 1993), yet as Davis (1991) noted in Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960: ‘‘Until the 1970s, most Americans assumed that rape, incest, and wife-beating rarely happened’’ (p. 308). Thus, despite the undeniable, experiential reality of sexual violence in women’s lives, sexual violence as a public reality, and subsequently as a viable topic for social scientific and historical inquiry, did not emerge until this time. The women’s liberation movement created the conditions that made possible— and salient—the articulation of the problem and its alarming normalcy in the lives of women and girls, thus altering public awareness, if not the prevalence of sexual violence itself, in unprecedented ways (Bevacqua, 2000). Research by feminist psychologists and other social scientists both emanated from and contributed to this sea change in awareness, and it is to their work that we turn in this second anniversary section devoted to the most highly cited articles in Psychology of Women Quarterly’s (PWQ) publishing history. The theme of this section is ‘‘Sexual Violence Against Women,’’ and it features commentaries by four authors of six of the most highly cited articles in PWQ on this topic: Mary Koss, Christine Gidycz, Antonia Abbey, and Jeanette Norris. In the introduction to this section, I set the stage for their reflections by (a) very briefly reviewing the political, social, and intellectual contexts in which psychological research on rape became possible in the United States in order to remind readers how new and unprecedented it was for social scientists to study rape; and (b) outlining some of the challenges that have beset this research enterprise over the course of the last 30 years to help contextualize the commentaries provided by our authors. (For an excellent treatment of both of these topics, see Gavey, 2005, especially Chapters 1 and 2; also Bevacqua, 2000; Rozee & Koss, 2001.) Speaking Out About Rape