Abstract
Rose Corrigan, Up Against a Wall: Rape Reform and the Failure of Success, New York University Press: New York, 2013; 319 pp. (including index): 9780814707937, $39.00 (cloth)
Rape and sexual assault are making a comeback – as public issues, that is. Events such as the highly publicized Steubenville High School (Ohio) sexual assault charges, allegations that US Armed Forces may be incapable of policing themselves with respect to gender-based violence, and the notorious ‘legitimate rape’ comments by 2012 Missouri Congressional candidate Todd Akin, among others, are just a few recent examples of the surge in attention to sexual assault in the public sphere. In light of these events, scholars of anti-rape campaigns have some important work to do.
Rose Corrigan’s Up Against a Wall sets out to address the long-term effectiveness of feminist rape law reform that began in the early 1970s. She questions whether and how law reforms have influenced policies and institutions. The book is based on interviews with 167 staff members from 112 rape crisis centers in six states. This deep base of qualitative data provides an abundance of information on current practices in rape victim services in the United States.
When feminists first identified rape and sexual assault as important gender issues – for some the defining feminist issue – they set about to challenge what has come to be called rape culture in all its forms. Some founded rape crisis centers, and others worked to reform antiquated laws, but all were focused on reforming the institutions that were in a position to do something about rape. Even radical feminists, who theorized that rape was the symbolic and real manifestation of men’s dominance over women, recognized that working within the system could make a difference in victims’ experience. Corrigan addresses the question of why, given the law reform efforts of the 1970s, the treatment of victims and handling of cases by institutional actors are not significantly better than they are.
The book’s most valuable contribution is the richness of the interview data. The author quotes heavily from interviews to allow the participants’ voices to be heard. Her analyses of Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) and Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) programs – so pervasive now in the delivery of rape crisis services – are important, as are the providers’ experiences related to emergency contraception in the emergency room (EC in the ER) and sex offender registry laws and policies. Extensive quotations from interviews brightly illuminate the challenges and (occasional) victories of delivering services on the ground.
Yet, the book’s flaws cannot be ignored. First, Corrigan misrepresents previous literature on the anti-rape movement. While she posits that the reform of rape laws did not yield sufficient redress for victims, her target in reviewing the literature seems to be the literature itself as much as the shortcomings of the legal strategies or the resulting reforms. In doing so, she conflates the anti-rape movement as a whole with the rape law reform effort. Indeed, the anti-rape movement’s success is evidenced, in significant part, by the large number of crisis centers and other agencies that respond to rape. Using the testimony of rape care workers to call into question the purported success of the movement that made such a vocation as ‘rape care worker’ a possibility is a surprising leap. The widespread availability of rape crisis services is a mark of success of the anti-rape movement that Corrigan fails to acknowledge. The author also leaves out valuable research on the related social movements to end gender-based violence (e.g. Baker, 2008; Rambo, 2009), especially these books’ valuable legal contributions.
Further, Corrigan vaguely criticizes the rape law reform effort for failing to ‘articulat[e] a positive vision of rights to go along with their political and ideological critique of rape’ (p. 22), as well as failing to offer civil legal services for victims to pursue outside of the criminal justice system. The author all but ignores the civil remedy of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, struck down in 2000 by the Supreme Court.
A final important flaw of Up Against a Wall is its refusal to consider the intersections of oppressions, such as gender, race, class, and sexual identity. Feminist intersectionality theory posits that these identities cannot be easily separated from each other and analyzed one at a time. So, in spite of Corrigan’s assertion to the contrary (p. 56), an analysis of race is not beyond the scope of her project – it is implicated in the study whether stated or not.