Many people see children of rape as intrinsically defective—including, often, their mothers. Unlike other factions so perceived, this one has not coalesced into a thriving identity group; there is no obvious way to celebrate the part of oneself rejected by others. Even once a child knows his or her origins, he or she cannot easily locate others who share this identity. It is difficult to reckon with a visible disability and at least equally so to reckon with a defining difference that remains hidden. One of the few organizations founded to address this vacuum, Stigma Inc., took as its motto “Rape survivors are the victims . . . their children are the forgotten victims.”
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Historically, rape has been seen less as a violation of a woman than as a theft from a husband or father to whom that woman belonged, who suffered an insult and an economic loss (a woman’s marriageability spoiled, for example). Hammurabi’s Code described most rape victims as adulterers. A thousand years later, the Athenian state, prioritizing the protection of bloodlines, treated rape and adultery the same way; English law of the seventeenth century took a similar position.
Classical mythology abounds with rape, often by a licentious god. Zeus took Europa and Leda; Dionysus raped Aura; Poseidon, Aethra; Apollo, Euadne. It is noteworthy that every one of these rapes produces children, and that rather than being avatars of shame, they are half immortal. The rape of a vestal virgin by Mars produced Romulus and Remus, the twins who founded Rome. Romulus later organized the rape of the Sabine women to populate his new city. In the Renaissance, representations of that event often decorated marriage chests. Yet the hostility such children’s origins may inspire has also long been acknowledged. In ancient and medieval societies, women who bore children conceived in rape were permitted to let them die of exposure.
Misogyny is amply present in writings about rape throughout history. The great Roman physician Galen claimed that women could not conceive in rape—nor otherwise without an orgasm based in pleasure and consent. While Augustine promised women that “savage lust perpetuated against them will be punished,” he also noted that rape keeps women humble, “whether previously they were arrogant with regard to their virginity or overfond of praise, or whether they would have become proud had they not suffered violation.”
A woman in the American colonies could not make a claim of rape; her husband, her father, or, if she was a servant, her employer needed to present the cause to a magistrate. The understanding was that women were prone to bringing such charges to disguise illicit consensual sex. These women were considered guilty unless they could prove their innocence. In Puritan Massachusetts, a woman pregnant through rape was prosecuted for fornication. These habits of blaming the women began to change only with the social-justice movements of the early nineteenth century. The Kingston British Whig noted in 1835, “The bad character of a woman ought to be no reason that she should be without the protection of the law.” Rape of black women in the United States was not acknowledged as rape; you could not violate your own property, and children conceived through such rapes were themselves slaves. Black men accused of rape were frequently found guilty if not killed without trial; white men often made cash settlements with their white victims to avoid prosecution. In the 1800s, the courts’ primary concern was protecting white men who might be falsely accused. To prosecute for rape, a woman had to demonstrate that she had resisted, usually by showing evidence of bodily harm, and to somehow “prove” that the man had ejaculated inside her.
Rape remained underreported through the mid-twentieth century because women feared adverse consequences if they spoke out. One impregnated rape victim of the 1950s said, “If a certain male wanted to get out of being named the true father, he would get about five of his buddies to swear they had sex with the girl. Branded promiscuous, the female had little recourse against the fellow, and she already experienced shame galore for birthing a child out of marriage.” The rise of psychoanalysis did not help matters. Though Freud wrote little about rape, his followers saw the rapist as someone suffering a perverse, uncontrolled sexual appetite who fed into women’s “natural” masochism. As late as 1971, the criminologist Menachem Amir described how women have “a universal desire to be violently possessed and aggressively handled by men,” and concluded, “The victim is always the cause of the crime.”
Appalled, feminists of the 1970s began arguing that rape was an act of violence and aggression, not sexuality. Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 landmark book, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, maintained that rape had little to do with desire and everything to do with domination. She proposed that rape occurred much more widely than acknowledged, a result of the power differential between men and women, and she called for “gender free, non-activity-specific” laws that would purge rape of its sexual content to moot the idea that both parties were implicated.
American law had defined rape as “an act of sexual intercourse undertaken by a man with a woman, not his wife, against her will and by force.” Feminists attacked this definition, broadening it to include nonconsensual sex within relationships and marriages, extending it to include involuntary sexual contact other than penetrative penile-vaginal intercourse, removing the burden of proving that the encounter had been caused by irresistible force, and eliminating gender-specificity. The new view of rape encompassed sexual predation by a known assailant, and coerced contact even after consenting words had been spoken. Michel Foucault famously said of all sexual relations, “There is no difference, in principle, between sticking one’s fist into someone’s face or one’s penis into their sex.” A punch in the face is violence that employs the mechanisms of violence; rape is violence that tarnishes the apparatus of love. Rape violates the intimate, private self as well as the outer, social one. It is neither purely sexual nor purely violent; it is the humiliating expression of a power differential that aggressively unites these two motives and behaviors.
Both medical professionals and law enforcement officers are now widely trained to respond to evidence of rape. Legal definitions still vary from state to state and do not always accord with those used by the FBI and other federal agencies. Definitions vary even more widely internationally, and many countries classify forced sodomy as a much less serious crime than forced vaginal penetration. Because my focus is on women who bring up children conceived in rape, I did not speak to men, children, and postmenopausal women who have been raped, but no one is immune to rape’s humiliating expression of a power differential.
As other social-awareness movements have transformed the experience of rearing a child with a disability, so feminism has changed the experience of rearing a child conceived in rape. The idea of a “proud victim” would have seemed laughable only a few decades ago; like all injury and abnormality, to be raped was ignominious. Because the crime was so rarely acknowledged or discussed, it was seldom prosecuted. Feminist definitions of rape have sought to quash the suggestion of victim culpability. Terms such as sexual assault and criminal sexual conduct address the primacy of violence and change our understanding of rape from something a woman experiences to something a man does.
Despite these enormous strides, rape often remains invisible. Our warnings to our daughters caution them against getting into a car with a stranger or going home with a man they meet in a bar, but 80 percent of rapes are committed by someone the victim knows. More than half of rape victims in the United States are under eighteen, and nearly a quarter of them—an eighth of the total—are under twelve. Rape is often habitual in abusive relationships and violent marriages. Impoverished women who depend on men for survival feel less volition over their own bodies. The Centers for Disease Control have asserted that rape is “one of the most underreported crimes” and estimate that only 10 to 20 percent of sexual assaults are reported.
There is not much writing about keeping children of rape, and the books that do exist mainly address genocidal conflicts abroad or are packaged in antichoice invective. The women I interviewed were eager to tell their stories in t
he hope that doing so might help others. It was painfully apparent, though, that they did so at considerable cost. Many would agree to meet only in extremely public situations because they felt they could not trust me enough to be in a more secluded location together. Others insisted on extremely private locations because the subject was so loaded that they couldn’t bear to speak of it where someone might overhear them.
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Marina James assured me that her neighborhood library in Baltimore was a good, quiet spot to talk, but when we got there, it was closed. It was a raw March day, but Marina guided us to a bench in a public park, where other people could see us, but not hear us. At twenty-six, she punctuated her most shocking thoughts with the word obviously and seemed to believe that anyone else of even moderate intelligence would have made the same decisions she did.
Marina had gone to Antioch College in 2000. “A lot of their philosophy is striving for the best and doing good for others,” Marina explained. “These were always things that I held important.” After freshman year, she took time off to live in New York with a boyfriend, became pregnant, and had an abortion that destroyed the relationship. Then she returned to Antioch. At a campus party when she was twenty, the student DJ slipped a disabling sedative into her drink and then violently raped her. “It’s more of a physical memory than an intellectual memory,” she said. “I don’t have pictures in my head but I have feelings in my body.”
She didn’t press charges. “I know what defense attorneys do to rape victims,” she said. “I drank, I did drugs, I had a good time. What justice would I get? It seemed like so much grief for nothing.” When she talked about her experience to other women at the college, however, some confided that they’d been raped by the same man. None of them wanted to press charges, either, but they provided written statements that Marina presented to the dean, and the rapist was expelled. Because she didn’t go to the police, Marina feels tragically culpable for the rapes she imagines him to have committed since.
When Marina learned that she was pregnant, she assumed she would have another abortion. But in her third month, she changed her mind; she didn’t want to go through the process again. She would have the baby, then give it up for adoption. But as the months passed, she became disillusioned about adoption. She had used recreational drugs just before finding out that she was pregnant, and an adoption administrator told her not to say as much on the form because it might put off prospective parents. The deceit upset her. “The middleman was the only one benefiting, and all the people who had something at stake were being toyed with,” she said. “My child was going to be biracial, and all the families were white and liked the fact that I was a well-educated white girl. The construction of her racial identity was going to be important, and I didn’t think any of these people could help her with it.”
So Marina decided to keep the baby. “Now that I have Amula and I have been really successful at being her mom, obviously I know I made the right decision. But at the time, I didn’t know that. So it was torture.” Marina gave birth later that year and chose the name, derived from amulet, because she wanted the baby to be a sign of good luck and a protection against the evil that had produced her. Marina was paralyzed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), perhaps mixed with postpartum depression. “I felt like I was a different person, and I couldn’t even remember what the old person was,” she said.
Marina went on to graduate school in social work, bringing her daughter to classes, but began to have frequent nightmares and had difficulty eating as well as sleeping. Amula started day care and saw other children dropped off and picked up by their fathers. Before she was two, she was asking, “Why don’t I have a daddy?” It made Marina cry, and she didn’t want to cry in front of her daughter, so she started getting counseling. “But they kept wanting me to talk about the rape,” she said. “Everybody wants a play-by-play. I don’t want to keep reliving a half hour of my life: I have all this other life that I would rather live.”
At twenty-six, Marina is an idealist who lives to almost ostentatiously high standards, as if determined to outflank weakness and self-indulgence. She is attractive, poised, and somewhat severe. She talks about her own vulnerability easily, but she does not demonstrate it. It is hard to guess to what degree she was always like this, and in what measure being raped reshaped her. Like many of the women I met who had borne children through rape, Marina James sustained both revulsion at the origin of her pregnancy and profound joy in her child. “I thank God every day that I have my child. But I can’t ignore the fact that it’s a very painful thing, why she’s here.”
She didn’t tell her mother about the rape until after Amula was born. Nonetheless, she and Amula moved to Baltimore because Marina’s parents lived there and could help with child care; “That’s where Amula is right now, obviously,” she said. Marina’s older sister, Nina, moved in with Marina and Amula. “My sister was like a mom to me since my mom was so absent, and now I’m like a mom to my sister because she prefers to regress,” Marina explained. “I tell Amula, ‘You don’t have a dad, but we have Aunt Nini.’ A lot of my Antioch friends are gay, and so I tell her lots of kids have two mommies or two daddies. I try to be proactive about how I frame it.”
Marina eventually promised Amula that she would look for a daddy for her, but shows little interest in having a partner herself. “I don’t consider myself a sexual person,” she said. “I was before all this. I feel sad that Amula does not have a father—but not for me.” Of course Amula does have a father, in the biological sense, and Marina knows his name. “Protecting her from him is the best thing I could do for her. My friends keep saying, ‘You have to be able to forgive him in order to accept it and move on.’ I want to punch people when they say that.”
Although the rape and its aftermath tested Marina’s belief, she has increasingly turned to God in a quest for greater insight. She was Christian, but her childhood friends were all Jewish, and after she returned to Baltimore, she reconnected with them and began to convert. “Studying Judaism has enabled me to feel emotion, which I haven’t felt in years,” she said. “It’s enabled me to feel hope and to feel faith and it’s definitely helped me to feel better. It’s my way to not retreat from the world.”
As a social worker, Marina frequently has to grapple with stories of sexual violence. “My personal pain is just a ripple in this huge ocean of pain that women feel every day,” she said. Teaching other women about parenting “makes it even more meaningful for me to come home and give my kid a big hug and sit down and play with her on the floor—not just to enjoy it, but to be validated in knowing what a good job I am doing.”
Marina has told her boss and several colleagues about Amula’s origins. “People ask me and I don’t like to lie,” she said. “It makes people uncomfortable.” For someone who deplores lying, it’s all the more difficult to field Amula’s increasingly complex and urgent questions. Marina says she doesn’t feel ashamed, but remains concerned about how Amula would incorporate the rape into her own identity. “I just want her to know that she is always wanted, that I chose to keep her and feel that it was the right choice. Even when I was struggling every day with being a survivor, I never thought, ‘I wish I didn’t have this baby.’” When Marina is with Amula, she isn’t remembering the rape. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh, are your clothes clean for swimming tomorrow?’ I’m being a mom. It’s when I’m in bed at night that that stuff comes up.” Marina said she related to veterans returning from Iraq. “They’ve seen horrific things that they could never express. They come home and they don’t know how to use their bodies; they’re different. Nobody understands, and they return to a community that has all these expectations that no longer make sense. That is exactly how I feel.”
She surmises that having a baby soon after the rape may have curtailed her recovery. “I had to be a survivor and hit the ground running and take care of this kid,” she said. But she admitted that without Amula, her method of recovery would simply have bee
n to try to forget what had happened. “And then at some point later,” she said, “it would have exploded.” She worries that her bright, charming daughter might share personality traits with her rapist. “Half of her genes are evil,” Marina said. “I can do whatever I should as her mom to make her this loving, wonderful, caring person. But in her is the DNA of a person who is really sick, and is that DNA stronger than what I can do?”
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There is a war of statistics about the correlation of rape and pregnancy, and the confusion is only exacerbated by the adversarial agendas of the pro-choice and antiabortion movements. Some have argued that the biochemistry of fear promotes ovulation, concluding that one in ten coitally raped women gets pregnant; others have produced estimates as low as 3 percent. Women suffering ongoing abuse are particularly likely to conceive through that abuse, though violent abuse can cause damage, sometimes permanently, to a woman’s reproductive capacity. Of course, pregnancy does not ensue when the victim is not of reproductive age, is using oral birth control or IUDs, or is a man. It is also precluded by nonvaginal rape.
Studies have found that between twenty-five thousand and thirty-two thousand rape-related pregnancies occur each year in the United States. In a 1996 study of rape-related pregnancy, half of the subjects terminated their pregnancies; of the rest, two-thirds kept the child, one-fourth miscarried, and the rest gave the children up for adoption. Extrapolating from those figures, at least eight thousand women in this country keep rape-conceived children every year.
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