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Excusing Rape
| Article
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11009 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1993 |
2,610 Words |
| Author
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Darcy O'Brien
Darcy O'Brien, who won the PEN/Hemingway Award for his first
novel, A Way of Life, Like Any Other (1978), is the author of
several best-selling and critically acclaimed nonfiction
crime
narratives. His most recent book, A Dark and Bloody Ground
(HarperCollins, 1993), will be an ABC television movie. He is
professor of English at the University of Tulsa. |
SEX CRIMES
Ten Years on the Frontlines Prosecuting Rapists
and Confronting Their Collaborators
Alice Vachss
New York: Random House, 1993
260 pp., $21.00
"All the men in my family are highly sexed," an assistant district attorney recently told me. "I am, too. But I have managed to control it." The man's uncle, a judge, was notorious for having used his position to coerce female litigants and employees into having sex with him in his chambers; caught, finally, in a federal investigation, he was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison without possibility of parole. The uncle, if he survives, will be eighty-one upon release.
Yet the nephew, if I interpret his sentiments correctly, views his felonious uncle less as a criminal than as a man victimized by an overabundance of hormones. Trendy psychotherapists might label him, incredible as it sounds, as suffering from a disorder called "rapism."
That men who rape women possess a stronger than normal sexual drive is one of several myths about rape that Alice Vachss attacks in her angry new book, Sex Crimes, an account of her ten-year ordeal as an assistant district attorney and, eventually, head of the Special Victims Bureau of the DA's office in Queens, New York. This is an impassioned book, deservedly so, and convincing because it is rooted in vast and frustrating personal experience. In skewering the delusion that rapists are men led, as it were, by their perpetual erections, Vachss connects it to the notion that convicted rapists should be castrated, as if their criminal aggression were centered in the testicles rather than in the head. Lacking standard equipment, she writes with characteristic sarcastic bite, they can and will make use of a Coke bottle or broomstick.
As you may have gathered, this is not a book for the squeamish. But how can one write about ugly aspects of human nature, about outrages to women and children and, to a lesser extent, grown men, without describing the crimes themselves in plain, often blunt, language? If the task of a novelist, as Joseph Conrad said, is to make a reader see and hear and react to characters and scenes, surely the task of a legal advocate and reformer must include an assault on our senses.
Vachss
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