RAPE WORK: VICTIMS, GENDER, AND EMOTIONS IN ORGANIZATION AND COMMUNITY CONTEXT

Vol. 16 No. 6 (June, 2006) pp.503-507

RAPE WORK: VICTIMS, GENDER, AND EMOTIONS IN ORGANIZATION AND COMMUNITY CONTEXT, by Patricia Yancey Martin. New York: Routledge, 2005. 296pp. Hardcover. $125.00/£70.00. ISBN: 0415927749. Paper $29.95/£16.99. ISBN: 0-415-92775-7.

Reviewed by Sally J. Kenney, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. Email: kenne030 [at] umn.edu.

Patricia Yancey Martin’s book brings the lenses of organizational sociology and the sociology of work to the question why society’s representatives continue to commit a “second assault” of rape victims as they go about their jobs more than twenty-five years after feminist activists documented this wrong and developed policies to remedy it. The book is chockablock with examples, from hospitals who refer to the victim as “the rape” and make her wait for hours in public waiting areas, to billing rape victims for the rape exam. The answer: their organizations require it. Martin’s work supplements cultural explanations of misogyny, sexism, or patriarchy with a structural analysis of how three different types of organizations respond to rape victims: the hospitals and medical personnel who conduct the forensic rape exam, the criminal justice system, including police officers, prosecutors, and judges, and the staff of rape crisis centers. Rather than examining what she labels rape work in isolation, or as part of a social movement, Martin situates it instead in its organizational context. Rape work—responding to a victim’s charge of rape, pursuing and punishing rapists, and educating society to prevent rape—takes different forms and is done by men and women in different organizational structures.

As we might expect of the co-editor of FEMINIST ORGANIZATIONS: HARVEST OF THE NEW WOMEN’S MOVEMENT, Martin invites us to go beyond the question of whether hierarchical organizations rather than collectives can be feminist, or whether feminists are irretrievably co-opted through engagement with the state. She dives into the messy empirical business of assessing the progress, obstacles, hidden successes, and failures of feminist organizations engaged in the day-to-day work of serving rape victims and making mainstreaming organizations deal with rape victims humanely while they seek to eradicate rape. For this task she is extremely well suited. As a sociologist of gender, she has been a pioneering scholar in studying and theorizing feminist organizations. As an engaged scholar and committed activist, she has been an active participant in the anti-rape movement since 1983, primarily, but not exclusively, in Florida. RAPE WORK, however, is neither the reflections of a participant-observer nor a selection of anecdotes of a small case study; rather, it brings all the rigor of quantitative sociology to the questions at hand, gathering and assessing evidence, weighing and analyzing possible explanations. Martin has interviewed rape workers. She has observed rape trials and interviewed judges, defense [*504] attorneys, prosecutors, and victim-advocates. She has conducted a fifty-state survey of rape crisis centers. And she has collected technical reports and statistics from researchers and state agencies that work on rape.

There are a number of surprises and interesting findings. Law enforcement officers, with the exception of a few Florida sheriffs, come off rather well. They are less villainous than feminists found them to be in the past. Doctors come off badly. While the women who work in rape crisis centers have feminist consciousness, in other organizational contexts—emergency rooms or police stations—Martin does not find gender predictive of whether one adopts a feminist approach to rape work. Such a finding shows the power of her organizational approach. Just as Rosabeth Moss Kanter argued in 1977, organizational context, rather than essential race or gender characteristics, explained behavior. Many police, despite having conservative attitudes toward gender roles, recognize the violation of rape as a crime. They are closer to victims than prosecutors and judges, focused on “making the case” or ensuring the rights of the accused. Medical personnel are so blinded by their organizational context dedicated to healing the sick and injured, rather than the “merely” traumatized, and are so averse to having to testify in court that these organizational imperatives trump any compassion one might expect from the healing profession and eviscerate basic human compassion. Only rape crisis workers can place top priority on serving victims rather than “building a case” or “healing the sick.”

Rape crisis centers (RCCs) are what Martin calls “unobtrusive mobilizers.” In the early days, RCCs had a contentious relationship with police and hospital employees whom they frequently publicly criticized. Given their core task of obtaining services for victims, however, trashing the others who did rape work was immediately apparent as counterproductive, and RCCs devote considerable effort to maintaining a good relationship with all in the cause of better service for victims. Working behind the scenes means they help give credit to others for policies they initiated and made happen, making it difficult to document their own contributions. Martin rejects a commonplace view that RCCs have been co-opted by working as system insiders, and she was also surprised to discover that, contrary to the assumption that they have abandoned their political work in favor of service delivery, they still identify political work—community education—as their single most important task (p.43). Freestanding RCCs do more political work than those imbedded in hospitals, legal justice organizations, or colleges and universities. RCCs see more victims than criminal justice personnel or medical staff. Given the poor record of prosecutions, could anyone in good conscience insist that a victim report the crime and press for prosecution? It seems obvious that low levels of reporting and low levels of prosecution create a vicious circle. The mission, “all we do comes from victims,” is to transform a rape culture, a much different frame from the other institutions who do rape work. Most rape crisis center workers are white, and [*505] many women of color see them as providing services for white women. Nevertheless, some rape crisis centers have focused on women of color and a handful have deliberately transformed themselves to take on anti-racism work.

Much has improved since second-wave feminists placed the mistreatment of rape victims on the public agenda, led by the women who created rape crisis centers (Bevacqua 2000). A movement to place rape exam “kits” in all emergency rooms and to train medical personal, especially sexually assault nurse examiners (SANE), to conduct rape exams rather than doctors who do not want to do them has been a success. Creating Sexual Assault Response Teams, multidisciplinary teams that coordinate rape work on behalf of victims and allow prosecutors to specialize and build up expertise, dramatically increase the effectiveness of police and prosecutors. Victim-advocates, funded by the Violence Against Women Act, like rape crisis workers, decrease the likelihood that victims will be mistreated. Lastly, feminists have succeeded in changing many public policies, such as the requirement that victims physically resist, the requirement that others corroborate their testimony, the charge to jurors that rape victims are likely to lie, and the practice of questioning victims about their prior sexual history and dress. Despite these successes, feminists feel only limited progress has been made in the treatment of rape victims—judges, medical personnel, defense attorneys, prosecutors, and police can still treat rape victims with contempt—and almost no progress has been made in ending rape altogether, even if women may now be more likely to report it.

In addition to calling for a shift in a simple condemnation of misogynistic practices and viewing these behaviors through an organizational lens, Martin calls upon organizations to “own rape work.” Owning rape means not trying to avoid rape work, or shunt it off on low-status workers, or defining it as women’s work. It means validating and comforting victims and bringing rapists to justice. It calls for training and most importantly, on-going rather than one-time training, not conditioning it on the presence of one enthusiastic employee.

The payoff of the large study as opposed to the single case study is that it displays the variation and offers the possibility of explaining it. Police and sheriffs departments differ significantly in how they treat rape victims despite identical missions. Hospitals and prosecutors, too, varied enormously. And the differences mattered to victims. Martin persuasively argues that only a system that has coordination among all who do rape work effectively serves victims. Rather than being co-opted by working within the system, RCCs can serve as the glue that ties rape workers together in an effective network. Martin’s study uniquely focuses on the system of rape work and shows why it matters if the police do not want to work with RCCs or if hospitals and police and prosecutors do not have productive functioning relationships. Responsiveness is not the same as centralization, Martin finds. However much these community networks determine the effectiveness of [*506] dealing with rape victims, they seem to matter little to the incidence of rape itself.

Although mixed-gender organizations often relegated rape work to women, they did not necessarily do it better than men; some men doing rape work had a feminist orientation, some women did not. (“Rape is the most highly cross-gendered felony crime [other than stalking] with men offending and women their targets” (p.25)). Many women, such as women jurors, judge rape victims harshly. Martin concludes that how victims are treated is more important than the gender of the person who processes them (p.169). As one might expect of an organizational sociologist who has focused on feminist social movements, Martin calls special attention to the emotional demands of rape work. Interacting with rape victims compassionately means taking on board their pain and injury. Prosecuting rapists means watching many go free as legal institutions “settle cheap.” Rape work leads to burnout, and thus organizations often rotate the work which diminishes the opportunities for developing skills and expertise. Emotional labor can entail expressing a compassion one does not feel or suppressing distress in order to fulfill a role. Rape workers may not only feel distress but anger at rape victims who do not cooperate with what they want them to do, or who make emotional demands on them.

If I had to offer a criticism of the book, it would be that Martin repeats herself, making the organizational point again and again (probably an asset in a teaching text), where I might have preferred simply to make points in the conclusion, introduction, and in the relevant part of the text. Moreover, the social scientific approach leaves less room for the voices of victims or the people who do rape work to really come through—I was left still curious about the people and organizations who do this work and wanting to know more about them as individuals and organizations.

I taught this book with much success in my graduate course on women, law, and public policy, but it would have fit equally as a compliment to James Q. Wilson’s book, BUREAUCRACY, in my course on the politics of public affairs. Placing rape work in an organizational context is a huge conceptual leap forward, not just for organizational sociology (showing why it is difficult to get the different institutions to cooperate with one another), but feminist sociology (understanding the difficulties of rape crisis centers). Understanding frames, rules, core tasks, and organizational missions illuminates both. Martin artfully combines the sophistication of a gender theorist, the social scientific expertise of an organizational sociologist, and the passion of an experienced and reflective activist.

REFERENCES:

Bevacqua, Maria. 2000. RAPE ON THE PUBLIC AGENDA: FEMINISM AND THE POLITICS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT. Boston: Northeastern University Press. [*507]

Ferree, Myra Marx, and Patricia Yancey Martin (eds). 1995. FEMINIST ORGANIZATIONS: HARVEST OF THE NEW WOMEN’S MOVEMENT. Boston: Temple University Press.

Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. 1977. MEN AND WOMEN OF THE CORPORATION. New York: Basic Books.

Wilson, James Q. 1989. BUREAUCRACY: WHAT GOVERNMENT AGENCIES DO AND WHY THEY DO IT. New York: Basic Books.

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