Abstract
Up Against a Wall vividly portrays the position of Rape Crisis Center (RCC) staff and administrators as they pursue social change aimed at stopping rape. Rose Corrigan contends that the best test of antirape policy reform is its implementation, and explores three postreform efforts that demonstrably fail to improve medical and legal institutional responses to victims or bring perpetrators to justice: Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) programs, emergency contraception, and sex offender registration and notification statutes. Corrigan supports this contention with evidence from interviews with 167 executive directors and advocates working in 112 RCCs in six states. Corrigan uses the accounts she elicits from RCC workers to analyze how the successes of legal reform (e.g., rape shield laws that protect the sexual histories of victims; repeal of the marital exemption in rape law; improved training for police, prosecutors, and judges) have been undermined by failures of implementation. The argument and evidence will interest scholars of gender and the state, legal and medical experts and institutions, feminist social movements and organizations, and U.S. politics.
To persuasively show “the failure of success” of feminist rape law reforms, Corrigan must first set out the conventional wisdom: The antirape movement mobilized “legal concepts and language to articulate grievances, translate individual experiences into social problems, and create or transform legal mechanisms for redress of those problems” (p. 1). Rather than pursue a rights-oriented litigation strategy, “feminists opted to pursue statutory protections enacted by elected legislators in statehouses across the nation” (p. 2). In this effort, and in generating the widespread perception that the law now delivers justice and good care for victims, accountability and punishment for perpetrators, viable evidence and procedures for police and prosecutors, and improved public safety for local communities, feminist legal reformers largely succeeded—and then, Corrigan claims, moved on. Reformers left implementation to a highly asymmetrical combination of relatively powerful law-and-order and medical bureaucracies and underfunded, politically isolated advocacy and direct service organizations (namely, RCCs). The resulting institutional responses entrenched the powers of police, prosecutors, and medical professionals at the cost of women’s rights to bodily integrity, respect, timely and appropriate physical and mental health care, and redress for the harms of rape.
Early chapters explore the “leaky pipeline” of rape reporting, show the many shortfalls in current medical and legal institutional responses to rape, and present Corrigan’s sources and methods of gathering and analyzing interview and policy data. Corrigan then devotes a chapter to each of her three implementation cases. Much of the research on the institutional responses to rape (and violence against women more generally)—even book-length analyses—has been limited to a particular jurisdiction (often a county or state) or a single type of organization or institutional response. Corrigan’s strategic choice to interview RCC personnel in an important set of contrasting states allows her to address their practices, perceptions, and critical concerns in the complex context of both medical and legal institutions, the politics of both law and order and women’s reproductive rights, and antirape mobilization and service provision in both “red” and “blue” states.
The resulting comparisons highlight RCC advocates’ insights into the character and dynamics of their varied (but by and large politically and financially vulnerable) situations. Corrigan’s cases together support political sociologists’ hypothesis that implementation and rule making are at least as significant as policy, and the book thus contributes to research and theory on politics and culture as well as social movements and feminist organizations. The cumulative picture is depressing. However, because Corrigan resists the temptation to excoriate feminist theorists and lawyers, pragmatic activists, or overextended service providers, she opens the possibility for them to collaborate in creating political, cultural, institutional, and personal “responses to rape that could prioritize gender justice, autonomy, and dignity” (p. 263).
Informed readers might disagree with some of Corrigan’s readings of the theoretical and empirical literature. For example, Patricia Yancey Martin’s analysis of the internal contradictions of antirape organizations is hardly “triumphalist” (p. 3). Moreover, although Corrigan complements her accounts of her respondents’ self-understandings of feminism and the problematic political cultures of the law-and-order and medical bureaucracies with a theoretically sophisticated critique of organizations, law as discourse and structure, and the politics of reform and social change, her focus on “the failure of success” sometimes shortchanges the ongoing controversies among feminist legal scholars over these complicated issues. Finally, the gap between rape law reforms and the evidentiary, medical, and surveillance practices of implementation is sometimes so large that “the failure of success” seems like a timid critique. Readers with no axe to grind on these issues will find Corrigan’s account accessible, reasonable, and persuasive. I suspect such readers are as rare as hens’ teeth. Even readers with strong partisan views, however, will benefit enormously from reading Corrigan’s framework, findings, and concluding vision of revitalized feminist coalitions to stop rape.