leadership structures in his movement, someone who had often been the sole man repeatedly arguing for the recognition of sexual harassment as violence in his organisation, and that unfashionable person who not only intervened when a man beat his girlfriend at a party, but also once broke a neighbour’s door down in order to assist the woman screaming in pain inside. He was the kind of man women consider an ally.
He has never asked me whether I was in fact a rape survivor. He readily assumed that if I was, he would have known. I asked him how a non-survivor feminist’s opposition to rape retained legitimacy when a feminist who was also a rape survivor would be disqualified. My ambivalence about this conversation notwithstanding, it illustrates something about many people’s responses to rape.
When I asked my friend whether he believed Khwezi, he responded without hesitation that he did. When I asked him whether he thought she deserved support, he responded similarly. What struck me as counterintuitive about my friend’s concern was how those with experience were least qualified to speak against rape. In most other contexts, intimate familiarity with a subject and an experience raises you above those with less direct contact. We live in a global culture that reminds us that experience is the best teacher, where having gone through something not only makes you worth listening to, but also builds careers. Bestseller lists are brimming with books penned by authors who have bounced back from bankruptcy to attain affluence, offering advice on how to also acquire wealth. We listen attentively to experts who have studied phenomena as they explain to us how things work, and help us make sense of what is in front of us. Everywhere I looked, people who knew what they were talking about were celebrated. We think of first-hand accounts as more reliable than second-hand ones, make witnesses indispensable to fact-finding missions and court processes alike.
But none of this applies to the testimony of those who have survived rape.
My friend was right. The dominant script on rape inverts the usual expectations. When a rape survivor speaks of her own rape, she is only generally believable under very narrow circumstances. When she speaks about rape inflicted on another, she is assumed unreliable because she is too emotionally invested, ‘biased’ – too quick to believe rape is widespread. It is not empathy, recognition or knowledge that is assumed. It is a form of paranoia. If the rape survivor’s own rape was disbelieved, speaking in solidarity with another is also dismissed.
Jane Bennett’s research shows how the believability of a rape survivor depends on how closely her rape resembles her society’s idea of what a rape looks like, who rapes, who can be raped, when and how. In other words, every time a woman says she has been raped, whether we believe her or not depends on what we believe about what rape looks like. The closer her story is to our preconceived ideas about what rape looks like, the more likely we are to believe she is telling the truth.
When feminists insist, as we must, that rape is violence and not sex, this information is filtered through lenses that cast violence in physical ways. Commonsensical understandings of violence often assume it will leave a ‘physical’ imprint on the body: a bruise, blood, a broken bone. A visibly injured or broken body provides a form of ‘proof’ of coercion, allowing the listener to turn away from the story told by the survivor to the body of the survivor. The story told by a woman needs a body of evidence. It is not an interest in the pain of the rape, but a burden of proof placed on the survivor or victim of the rape. Jane Bennett speaks about what it means to live “within and across the failures of language” because rape is not only violence enacted on and against the body with an external weapon that leaves the kind of proof often expected. Sometimes rape leaves bruises on skin, cuts, tears. Sometimes it leaves invisible scars only. The body that seems whole, then, can work against the experience of violation narrated by the violated woman.
Bennett explains that women’s stories of rape are believed or doubted based on the relationship between plausibility and credibility. This is true inside and outside court.
When a rape closely resembles what the hearer expects a rape to look like, then the survivor’s tale is plausible. Plausibility is about, and dependent on, the hearer and what that hearer deems possible; it is not about the specific person speaking. Bennett writes:
[t]he plausibility of a story in itself is a function of its hearer’s readiness to make sense of its organisation at multiple levels: the plausibility of narrative relies on the symbiotic relation of text organization (schemas) and cultural assumptions about the way the world works.
In other words, plausibility depends on a range of things all of which are dependent on the audience of the narrated events. The listener/reader has to: firstly, be open to believing and understanding what is presented; secondly, find that the different events and aspects of what is being told individually make sense; thirdly, be convinced of the connections between said events/aspects of the narrated rape; and finally, everything together has to be possible in how the listener/reader thinks the world works. A rape story is plausible when all four requirements are consistent.
Let me illustrate.
When a teacher listens to a crying student narrate her rape, the latter’s story’s plausibility depends on the teacher believing that the torn skirt, dirty shirt, and unruly soiled hair and cut lip of the student in front of her are valid signs of the student’s struggle and violation. The student’s body looks like she has been attacked. The teacher has to believe each of the events are logical, that their sequence makes sense and that the student’s way of telling them is logical. The correlation between what the teacher sees and hears is seamless. The teacher also has to believe that in the world, girls are sometimes pulled into the bushes by boys, that boys from a competing school are thugs, and that when girls are in pain, they cry. The student’s story is coherent in itself, her body backs up what she says, and what she tells her teacher is possible in the world.
This plausibility is disrupted if any of these elements are missing. Bennett reminds us that when survivors present a story that meets expectations of the audience, such plausibility often increases the likelihood of a guilty verdict in court cases.
In other words, what Bennett is saying here is that inside and outside courts across different countries, what is accepted as plausible is that which confirms preconceived ideas about what rape is, who rapes, when, who gets raped, when and how. Therefore, when we live in societies that hold onto the view that those likely to rape look and sound a certain way, which is clearly defined as very different from how those who can be raped look, we may find specific narration of rape plausible. Plausibility relies on the construction of rapist-potential, what Bennett calls “a strongly about-to-be-rapist” and the consistency of the combined picture of who says she was raped and her narrative, or “momentary steadiness”.
In addition to plausibility, credibility is required. Plausibility is about the listener, whereas credibility is about the person telling the story of the rape. Credibility depends on how believable the speaker is. To be believable, the speaker has to fall into a category that is seen as possible-to-rape; it has to be someone who can be raped. Not all people are seen as possible-to-rape. Sex workers, wives, slave women and men are all categories of people that have at different stages been placed in the category of ‘impossible-to-rape’. This does not mean that nobody raped them. It means that when they were sexually violated, it was not recognised as such, legally and socially. People who are placed in the category ‘impossible-to-rape’ are routinely disbelieved when they report rape.
Because societal attitudes to rape continue to frame it as a kind of inappropriate sex, sex workers/prostitutes have a harder time convincing people they have been raped. Sex workers belong to a group marked as ‘impossible-to-rape’. This is because of what they do for a living and patriarchal attitudes to women who have sex. In other words, many people assume that sex workers/prostitutes need to have insatiable appetites for sexual intercourse in order to work daily, and because women’s sexual appetites are already always policed, this perceived desire/capacity for abundant
