rape is a crime of such violence and that it is so rampant that
we must view it as an ongoing atrocity against women. All
women live in constant jeopardy, in a virtual state of siege.
That is, simply, the truth. I do however want to talk to you
explicitly about one particularly vicious form of rape which is
increasing rapidly in frequency. This is multiple rape— that is,
the rape of one woman by two or more men.
In Amir’s study of 646 rape cases in Philadelphia in 1958
and 1960, a full 43 percent of all rapes were multiple rapes
(16 percent pair rapes, 27 percent group rapes). 33 I want to
tell you about two multiple rapes in some detail. The first is
reported by Medea and Thompson in
five-year-old woman, mentally retarded, with a mental age of
eleven years, lived alone in an apartment in a university town.
She was befriended by some men from a campus fraternity.
These men took her to the fraternity house, whereupon she
was raped by approximately forty men. These men also tried
to force intercourse between her and a dog. These men also
put bottles and other objects up her vagina. Then, they took
her to a police station and charged her with prostitution.
Then, they offered to drop the charges against her if she was
institutionalized. She was institutionalized; she discovered that
she was pregnant; then, she had a complete emotional breakdown.
One man who had been a participant in the rape bragged
about it to another man. That man, who was horrified, told a
professor. A campus group confronted the fraternity. At first,
the accused men admitted that they had committed all the acts
charged, but they denied that it was rape since, they claimed,
the woman had consented to all of the sexual acts committed.
Subsequently, when the story was made public, these same
men denied the story completely.
A women’s group on campus demanded that the fraternity
be thrown off campus to demonstrate that the university did
not condone gang rape. No action was taken against the fraternity by university officials or by the police. 34
The second story that I want to tell was reported by Robert
Sam Anson in an article called “That Championship Season”
in
1974, Notre Dame University suspended for at least one year
six black football players for what the university called “a
serious violation of university regulations. ” An eighteen-year-
old white high school student, it turned out, had charged the
football players with gang rape.
The victim’s attorney, the county prosecutor, the local reporter assigned to cover the story, a trustee of the local newspaper—all were Notre Dame alumni, and all helped to cover up the rape charge.
Notre Dame University, according to Anson, has insisted
that no crime was committed. It was the consensus of university officials that the football players were just sowing their wild oats in an old-fashioned gang bang, and that the victim
was a willing participant. The football players were suspended
