Introduction
Rape is a legal concept established by a criminal code with the court’s help for the majority of investigators. It makes better sense from a medical than a legal viewpoint to treat rape as any forcible sexual harassment, whether the aggressor seeks to engage in intimacy or any other form of the sexual act (Coy, 2016). The analysis of these laws is challenging at best, and downright perplexing and frustrating at worst.
For practical criminal trials, criminal codes appear to describe rape in unemotional and pragmatic terms. The United Nations Secretary-General has stated that ending violence against women is one of the most pressing issues of recent times (Aranda, 2017). Rape is a clear example of this challenge since it is a crime that disproportionately affects women and is prevalent in all nations, societies, and backgrounds, whether in military confrontation or peacetime. The United Nations has dubbed sexual abuse perpetrated in military conflicts “history’s greatest silence,” and its abolition is considered a key concern and a “top priority” in the organization’s work (Louderback & Sen Roy, 2017). Ending the “biggest silence” – that is, consistently addressing and condemning sexual abuse – has become a part of the mission.
The prohibition of sexual harassment has been approached tentatively in the area of public international law until recently. Rape is described in the 1949 Geneva Conventions as a violation of a woman’s honor rather than a violation of a person’s physical integrity or autonomy (Aranda, 2017). Transcripts from the Nuremberg war proceedings, which took place in 1945-1946, indicate that many nations’ armed forces participated in systematic rape in different areas of conquest during the Second World War (Coy, 2016). The use of sexual assault as a weapon of war in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, with about 500,000 and 60,000 rapes committed respectively, is a monument to the world (Louderback & Sen Roy, 2017). Rape by outsiders, friends, and sexual partners happens in all cultures outside of armed conflict (Evans, 2019). Domestic rape laws differ widely, often reinforcing gender roles, such as portraying the crime as an assault against the woman’s honor, and excluding some groups of victims, such as husbands, or needing evidence of resistance. This article aims to look at two different theories of rape and address one initiative or policy that can help minimize rape crime.
Theories of Rape
Gender Inequality Theory
As per the feminist theory, violation serves as a social power mechanism in patriarchal societies. Rape and the threat of rape, according to feminist theorists, allow men to assert their dominance over women and perpetuate the current structure of gender inequality (Evans, 2019). According to Aranda (2017), rape is more common in societies where women are treated as property and where they are seen as sexual and reproductive vessels. In such communities, men maintain their power and privilege by threatening and using force and enforcing their sexual freedom. Rape is also linked to conventional gender roles, according to feminists (Wickes, 2016). According to this viewpoint, norms correlated with masculinity phrases, such as superiority and violence, allow men to assault women sexually (Evans, 2019). Given that the creation of sexual scripts is linked to gender roles, male sexual activity is likely to be infected with stereotypically masculine characteristics such as superiority and aggression.
Advantage
Gender inequality incapacity is essential beyond its individual impacts on society. Gender discrimination leads to defining and maintaining expectations and prejudices impacting access to facilities, subsistence means, and agencies (Coy, 2016). For example, women’s education spending contributes to conclusions about women’s relative intelligence and capacities (Louderback & Sen Roy, 2017). This theory suggests that gender differences are an efficient way of separating labor and the social system. Pro-formal reasoning would conclude that high demand for female labor, along with decreasing gender educational differences, would bring about exponential pay equity.
Disadvantage
Gender disparities or salary gaps can slow economic growth due to demographic effects. Evans (2019) claims that wage disparities between men and women lead to a work gap, decreasing development directly due to depressed women’s participation and indirectly due to higher fertility and lower revenue. Gender pay disparities mean that gender gaps in job access will also reduce economic development (Louderback & Sen Roy, 2017). They would deprive nations of using relatively low-cost labor in an output growth strategy as a strategic edge.
Social Disorganization Theory
According to advocates of the social disorganization theory, crime and deviance represent factors that weaken local communities’ legitimacy and undermine the regulatory power of social values. Criminal activity has been attributed to disorganizing variables such as migration, marital instability, and cultural heterogeneity (Wickes, 2016). Furthermore, statistics indicate that rape rates are higher in places where the number of divorced and separated people is disproportionately high (Aranda, 2017). According to other reports, regional mobility is related to rape (Aranda, 2017). The higher instances of rape rates among migrants and victims of domestic abuse suggest that circumstances such as uprooting and breakup have the ability to loosen societal bonds and lead to disorder.
This approach is underpinned by the systemic model, in which the neighborhood community is viewed as a complex web of collaboration and relationship networks and formal interpretative relations in families and ongoing socialization practices. As Louderback & Sen Roy (2017) pointed out, the institutional and social disorder models share the view that systemic barriers impede the production of formal and informal ties that encourage the capacity to solve fundamental problems. In terms of community social power’s hierarchical networks, social structure and social disorganization are thus seen as opposite ends of the same spectrum (Louderback & Sen Roy, 2017). When expressed in this way, the concept of social disorganization is easily differentiated from the mechanisms that can lead to it, such as poverty and flexibility, as well as the potential for delinquent activity.
Advantage
The social disorder theory states that a person’s cultural and psychosocial circumstances are mainly accountable for a person’s behavior. At the heart of social disorder, the theory is the anticipation of criminal behavior. Wickes (2016) reported that at least three common barriers, physical slowdown, poverty, and a more racial and cultural mix, are seen in regions’ highest crime rates. Wickes (2016) argued that disability had not been induced individually but that it was a natural reaction to ordinary individuals’ abnormal circumstances. The theory of social disruption is widely used as a significant indicator of youth gang crime.
Disadvantages
Lack of social control research. In view of the simplistic nature of data analysis during the early 1900s, it is clear that scholars could not carry out sophisticated studies which would enable them to assess the assumptions of the theory of social disorder fully. Early Chicago school researchers put the theory to the test by examining the spatial pattern of crime to see whether it meets the theory’s criteria and then comparing district characteristics to crime rates (Louderback & Sen Roy, 2017). Studies indicated that the highest crime rate is for disadvantaged, transient, and racially diverse populations but could not define the frameworks for that interaction (Coy, 2016). This is partly questionable because it stopped scientists from excluding alternate theoretical explanations of the connection between poverty and crime, such as strain.
Structural design. Structural drawbacks, including demographic heterogeneity, residential volatility, and economic malaise, impede group cohesion through the restriction of informal social networks. They undermine the community’s capacity to take successful informal social control over the business within its borders (Wickes, 2016). Social disorder theory focuses on the complexities of crime places and how these contexts shape and affect individual actions and harmony and actions at the local level.
The Most Useful Theory
Social Disorganization Theory
People have shown that the social disorganization hypothesis is alive and well, and that it can explain macro-level disparities in crime rates, making it more useful than the gender inequity theory. Shaw and McKay’s model’s strength and generalizability are illustrated by the fact that it can explain crime and delinquency rates in societies other than the United States (Aranda, 2017). Nonetheless, their findings do not provide a conclusive test of the social-disorganization theory. In some instances, the proportion of variation explained in crime and delinquency was very small (Coy, 2016). Most notably, people agree that quantifying social disorganization at the group level is an essential first step in explicitly evaluating macro-social control theory.
A Policy That Will Help to Minimize Rape Crime
Specialized Services for Victim-Survivors
The provision of a full range of specialized services for victims and survivors is crucial in helping them and can contribute significantly to the prevention of rape crime. Specialized rape crisis centers have arisen, offering expert support to victims of rape as well as expert participation in policy development. Since intimate partners commit a large proportion of rape, specialized programs for domestic violence victims, such as refugees and shelters, are specific to rape (Coy, 2016). Furthermore, specialized programs have arisen within conventional health, humanitarian, and criminal justice services.
Typically, early advances take place in isolated institutions with mainstreaming following later. Finding the best connection between the developments of appropriate expertise may necessitate different entrepreneurial activities and maintain that expert resources are available to those in need. The connections may necessitate attention to healthcare systems, an ongoing problem in many policy fields involving gender issues, including gender-based violence towards women and thalassemia (Wickes, 2016). The position of the line dividing specialist and conventional services varies depending on the situation. The care and assistance for victims are provided through specialized programs on an ongoing basis, regular basis in some industries, while other instances require an extension of one’s daily duties to fulfill (Evans, 2019). This depends on how much the conventional service has been changed due to the integration of anti-rape policies.
Conclusion
In conclusion, without mediating relations, theories run the risk of being suspected of being conceptually incompatible with crime and, more importantly, traditional ecological experiments are consistent with almost any theoretical speculation. People expect that future studies will build on the current initiative by focusing on more specific critical aspects of social disorganization in communities. Strategic preparation and teamwork are also crucial in preventing rape and aiding rape victims and survivors. At these various levels, there is a need for more strategy formulation and collaboration and the implementation of more rape policies and action plans.
References
Aranda, K. (2017). Feminist theories and concepts in healthcare: an introduction for qualitative research. Macmillan International Higher Education.
Coy, M. (2016). Prostitution, harm and gender inequality: theory, research and policy. London, United Kingdom: Routledge
Evans, A. (2019). How cities erode gender inequality: A new theory and evidence from Cambodia. Gender & Society, 33(6), 961–984.
Louderback, E. R., & Sen Roy, S. (2017). Integrating social disorganization and routine activity theories and testing the effectiveness of neighborhood crime watch programs: A case study of Miami-Dade County, 2007–15. The British Journal of Criminology, 58(4), 968–992.
Wickes, R. (2016). Social disorganization theory: Its history and relevance to crime prevention. Preventing Crime and Violence, 57–66.