Rape, says Joanna Bourke, used to be understood as the act of sex with a woman who does not “belong” to the perpetrator. In the 19th century it was widely thought that an unwilling woman could not be raped because “merely by vibrating”, a vagina “could ward off attack”. A victim of rape was, therefore, a contradiction in terms. Some thought that if the woman had experienced orgasm in the act, or had finally succumbed, then she could not claim to have been raped. The belief that women were prone to lie about rape to gain attention was, of course, widespread, and rape trials were notorious for their prurient investigations into a woman’s past. In the past 50 years or so, western feminists have argued – with some success – that rape is more about power than sex. In British courts these days, rape does not have to involve violence to justify the name. Lack of consent (which is itself potentially ambiguous) suffices.

As Bourke shows in her scholarly historical survey of rape and rapists, part of the problem with this subject is that “imprecision permeates much of the clinical and psychiatric literature”. Her examination of the many preposterous ways that rape has been explained over time by all manner of experts – doctors, academics, lawyers, psychologists et al – is an attempt to lift the obfuscation.

Her book was, she claims, conceived in fear. But as she began to write, “she became angry”, on learning that only 5% of rapes reported to the police in the UK end in a conviction. Anger has certainly given her prose dynamism and momentum. She applies a crusading passion to her scrutiny of the appalling miscarriages of justice relating to her subject over the centuries. Bourke is a campaigning feminist with an urge to bring rape onto the agenda and that is indeed noble and important.

But anger appears to have given Bourke’s inquiry a Panglossian ambition. In exploring the various dimensions of rape and in demystifying the “category of rapist”, she thinks we can “make [the rapist] less frightening and more amenable to change”. And she asserts that “by revealing the ‘specificities’ of the past, we can imagine a future in which sexual violence has been placed outside the threshold of the human”. Even after puzzling over precisely what that sentence means, it is hard to see how an attempt to “look at” the problem in a different way brings such a future any closer. Her own definition of rape is also dauntingly broad. Sex, she says, is whatever someone calls sex, and rape is any act that anybody involved or a witness calls abuse. All this rather ignores the ambiguities in sexual desire and assumes there is likely to be passionate conviction either way.

There are problems with using history like this, in an attempt to formulate a future ideal. And Bourke cites fascinating historical detail, but does not flesh out the context. In the 19th century, for instance, sexual psychopaths were understood as “morally insane”. By the 20th century, psychopaths were “neither insane nor mentally deficient”, but lived in a no-man’s-land between these two extremes. Bourke is interested in the range of opinions but not, apparently, in the reasons for the shifts in view. She does not explore why certain values of the Enlightenment, so readily invoked in modern debates on human rights, took several centuries to be brought to bear on acts of sexual aggression. She lays out a range of hypotheses about rape before the reader, without joining the dots. It is history as display case, rather than history as journey.

Finally – and worryingly, given the claim to universality in the book’s title – I found Bourke’s almost exclusive focus on the Anglo-Saxon world highly presumptuous. She omits any discussion of the religious dimension, and, more specifically, of certain cultural practices sanctioned by some Islamic teaching. Surely, if large numbers of girls who live in Europe today are still subjected to genital mutilation, precisely so that they should not feel pleasure in sex and so that man’s “ownership” of woman can be more clearly ascertained, this affects the way we understand consent in sexual relations. Incomprehensibly, Bourke ignores both genital mutilation and forced marriage. The same Anglo-Saxon world now has a large Muslim constituency that is not brought into Bourke’s discussion, even though the Koran contains many important passages about the relationship of women to men that have a bearing on rape.

You have only to read Sheikh Al-Qaradawi on the inadvisability of female masturbation (it is a “dangerous” exercise for a woman in case the hymen is broken, which will “expose the person to accusations of fornication, disgrace” and “some relatives may kill her for it”) to understand that the grossly outdated view of rape as sex with a woman who does not “belong” to the perpetrator is still alive and well in many parts of the world.

But then, western feminists have for long scandalously ignored their Muslim sisters. That blindness is part of the fashionable retreat from asserting universal values. The cult of multiculturalism has much to answer for.

Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present by Joanna Bourke
Virago £25 pp565

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