main body
Rape is a brutal and violent crime against women and a common violent crime. The research on rape in our country is mostly limited to the discussion of the subject and object of crime, subjective and objective elements and criminal responsibility theory, but there is no criminology research on the law of cases as the basis of these theories, and there is no large-scale empirical analysis on rape cases. In contrast, foreign scholars (represented by the United States) have done more research in this field. Part of the reason is that some scholars mistakenly believe that because there are no similar rape cases in the world, the law of rape cases does not exist; Part of the reason is that China's written law tradition has never collected and sorted out cases nationwide (even if there are official statistics, scholars often cannot know them because of various factors; Or this kind of statistics itself is not from the perspective of criminology, so it cannot be effectively used); Part of the reason lies in the unfamiliarity with sociological methods and the underdevelopment of statistical technology, which makes this huge work difficult to complete. As Marx said, many people easily agree with the laws existing in nature, but when they seek social laws in the face of complex social phenomena, they are easy to deny the existence of such laws. Marx's words warned us that as long as we explore a large number of rape cases, it is possible to discover the criminal law hidden behind. In this paper, 7 1 rape cases in 26 provincial administrative regions in China (the judgment time was 1994-2000) were taken as the research object, with a total of 149 victims and 108 perpetrators. After statistical analysis by SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Science), this paper tries to find out some inherent laws from many rape cases by combining the knowledge of criminal law and criminology. [1] Of course, in view of the limitations of the case range used by the author, the empirical analysis of this paper does not necessarily represent the scientific law of rape, so the research conclusions expressed are still necessary for further study.
I. Characteristics of rape victims
Feature refers to the distinctive signs and symbols that distinguish one thing from another. [2] The characteristics of rape victims refer to the remarkable characteristics of the victim group in rape cases that are different from the injuring group and other victim groups.
German-American criminologist von Henty1948 described the characteristics of victims from the perspective of their psychological state in his book Criminals and Their Victims. He divided the victims into six categories: victims of depression, victims of greed, victims of frivolity, victims of loneliness, victims of tyrants and victims of poverty. [3] In fact, the angle of describing the characteristics of the victim can be varied, and the reference variables can also be varied. Next, we will observe the characteristics of the victims in 7 1 case 149 from six aspects: age characteristics, marital status, occupation, education level, spatial distribution of victims, time of murder, defense ability of victims and psychological characteristics of victims. It is worth noting that the current criminal law of our country clearly stipulates that the object of rape is women, including adult women, underage women and young girls, married women (including their own legal wives) and unmarried women; Clearly ruled out the possibility of men as rape victims. Therefore, the author does not take gender characteristics as one of the parameters to examine the characteristics of rape victims. In 1997, Guo Jian 'an, a Chinese scholar, also made an investigation and study on the relevant characteristics of rape victims in his book "A Study of Crime Victims", so we will compare their conclusions with those in this paper, and whether they are consistent or different, it will promote our research (hereinafter referred to as "the investigation of 1997").
(1) Age characteristics of rape victims
During the investigation, we defined the victim's age (one year old) as seven years old: 14 years old (excluding this number, the same below) [4], 14 to 18 years old, 18 to 25 years old, 25 to 35 years old, and 35 to 45 years old. Through SPSS analysis, the author found that among rape victims, 1.4 years old accounted for1.8+0%; 14 to 18 years old18+0%; 18 to 25 years old11.4%; 6% people are between the ages of 26 and 35; 36 to 45 years old accounted for 2%; 3.4% are between 45 and 60 years old; 0% is over 60 years old. At the same time, because some cases did not reflect the specific age of the victims, we classified them as "young and middle-aged people with uncertain specific ages", accounting for 40.9%. Among them, the age distribution of young girls reflected in the case is: 87% is 10 to14; 65,438+03% were aged 5-9 years; 0% is under 5 years old. It can be seen that mature young girls are more vulnerable to sexual assault than other young girls. Rape victims in the age group of 65-438 accounted for 60.3% of the total number of victims, most of whom were rape victims, followed by minors (36.2%). This conclusion is consistent with the conclusion that most of the victims in the book Research on Crime Victims are young and middle-aged.
(2) Marital status of rape victims
Among the 149 rape victims investigated by the author, due to the defects of case records, the marital status of 38 victims is unclear, accounting for 25.5% of all rape victims. Among the effective11victims, the proportion of married victims is 20.7%; Unmarried accounted for 76.6%; Divorced or widowed accounted for 2.7%. The conclusion of "1997 survey" is that the proportion of married victims is19%; 78% are unmarried; Divorced or widowed accounts for 3%. [5] This shows that the victimization rate of divorced women and widowed women who are generally considered vulnerable to male aggression is far from as high as people usually think, and the unmarried are the most likely to be sexually assaulted. This conclusion is also consistent with the conclusion in the study of crime victims.
(3) the occupation and education level of rape victims
From the perspective of the victim's occupation, the proportion of employees in different occupations among rape victims is: students account for 4 1.6%, farmers account for 24.8%, service industry accounts for 6.9%, entertainment industry accounts for 6.9% (especially in song and dance halls and entertainment cities), employees account for 5.9%, unemployed people account for 5%, workers account for 3%, and other self-employed people account for 2%. Compared with the conclusion of "1997 survey", the proportion of student victims increased greatly (at that time, the proportion of student victims was second only to farmers and workers, accounting for 34.4% and 2 1.9% respectively). Farmers are still the victim group with more victims, while the proportion of workers as the victim group has been greatly reduced.
According to the education level of the victims, the proportion of the victims with different education levels in this crime is: 44.7% in primary school, 23.4% in high school, 19. 1% in junior high school, 8.5% below primary school (including illiteracy) and 4.3% above high school. Compared with the conclusion of "1997 survey", the proportion of victims with high school education (10% in that year) has been greatly improved, but on the whole, the proportion of victims with less than junior high school education is still much higher than that with higher high school education. This shows that people with low education are more vulnerable to sexual assault than those with high education.
(4) the victim's human defense ability
The victim's sexual defense ability refers to whether the victim has enough physical and psychological ability to distinguish sexual assault and show the ability to resist. According to the current criminal law of our country, young girls under the age of 14 and mental patients who have no ability to identify and control when they are infringed can be classified as asexual defense. From the perspective of whether the victim has sexual defense ability, it can be found that 77.9% of rape victims have sexual defense ability, while 22. 1% of victims have no sexual defense ability (including young girls 19.5% and mental patients 2.7%). The vast majority of rape victims have sexual defense.
(vi) Psychological characteristics of victims
According to the standard of the offender's responsibility ability, we found that 92.6% of the perpetrators have full responsibility ability, 5.6% of the perpetrators belong to the relative responsibility ability under 16 years old, and only 1.9% of the perpetrators belong to the mental disorder that limits their responsibility ability. This is basically consistent with the fact that rape is a violent crime, and the perpetrator needs to have certain physical advantages or sufficient conditions to intimidate the victim.
(5) Analyze the subjective characteristics of the perpetrators of rape cases.
The subjective characteristics of rape criminals mainly refer to the motives and psychology of the criminals. The perpetrators' motives for doing harm can be divided into four categories: the first one is to satisfy sexual desire, that is, the perpetrators only rape to satisfy their own sexual desire, accounting for 75.9%; The second is sexual desire for profit, that is, the perpetrator commits rape to satisfy his sexual desire while committing other criminal acts to obtain benefits. Typical examples are rape during burglary, robbery after rape or rape of the same victim after robbery, accounting for 20.4%; The third is revenge rape, that is, the perpetrator retaliates against the victim or his relatives and friends by means of rape, accounting for1.9%; The fourth is the emotional type, including the aggressive behavior of the love offender, the sexual abuse of the lover under 14 years old and the sexual abuse of the ex-wife by the divorced offender, accounting for 1.9%. It can be seen that most of the motives of rapists come from satisfying sexual desire.
The psychological injury of the perpetrator mainly analyzes the subjective characteristics of the perpetrator in rape cases from the perspective of whether the injury is premeditated or not. We can divide the perpetrator's psychology into four categories: the first category is that the object of premeditated injury is specific, that is, the perpetrator has intentionally injured a specific victim before committing rape, accounting for 52.8%; The second category is that the premeditated object is not specific, that is, the perpetrator has formed the intention of rape before committing the harmful act, but the harmful object is still uncertain, and the perpetrator is creating harmful conditions and waiting for the victim to appear, accounting for 18.5%. The third category is the specific object of temporary intention, that is, the perpetrator did not intend to commit rape at first, but was stimulated by the environment, other actors or victims in the process of committing other acts, and temporarily raped a specific victim. For example, visiting a neighbor's house and seeing the victim at home alone, intending to rape, this type accounts for 18.5%. The fourth category is temporary intentional but the object is not specific, that is, the perpetrator did not intend to commit rape at first, but raped the victim temporarily in the process of committing other acts, such as temporarily raping the victim after the robbery was completed, accounting for 10.2%. It can also be seen from the above classification that the proportion of premeditated rape cases is much larger than that of impromptu rape cases, about twice; The proportion of rape against a specific object is also much larger than that against an unspecified object, which is about twice.
Thirdly, analyze the interactive relationship between rape cases and victimization.
The interactive relationship between victims in rape cases refers to the interactive relationship between victims in the process of the emergence, progress and completion of rape cases and the judicial investigation of the perpetrators. As early as 1955, Henty, one of the founders of victimology, pointed out: "In a sense, the victim decided and shaped the criminal. Although the final result may be unilateral, until the last moment of the dramatic event, there was a profound interaction between the victim and the criminal, and the victim may have played a decisive role in the incident. " "There is indeed an interactive relationship between criminals and victims, which is a mutual inducement." His concept of interaction has been recognized by many people since it was put forward. In the following, the author will analyze the interactive relationship between the perpetrator and the victim in 7 1 case 108 149 from three aspects: interpersonal relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, conflict between the perpetrator and the victim, and responsibility of the victim.
(a) Interpersonal relationships between offenders and victims
The interpersonal relationship between the offender and the victim refers to the relationship that both the offender and the victim knew or didn't know before the victim was killed, and the specific types of the relationship between them.
According to the statistical results of SPSS, among the 108 perpetrators and 149 victims involved in 7 1 rape cases, 68.4% of the perpetrators and victims knew each other, 24% did not know each other at all, and 7.6% of the cases could not be judged due to the lack of case records. It is worth noting that the results of "1997 survey" also show that the understanding ratio between the offender and the victim is as high as 62.9%. [12] This type of rape crime, which is called acquaintance rape by western scholars, shows a high probability, breaking the version of the common "rape myth" in many people's ideas-for example, rapists and criminals are often strangers, disgusting perverts, and often hide in remote places when the wind is high in the dark of the month and rape their victims by physical coercion. In the previous discussion, we have seen that this is not the case. In acquaintance rape, the perpetrator may be someone the victim knows in social interaction or someone the victim is very familiar with. The former includes ordinary friends and people who know each other because of superstition and cult belief; The latter includes the victim's neighbors, colleagues and classmates, the victim's immediate family, the victim's ex-spouse and the victim's lover (or former lover). In all kinds of relationships, the ratio of rape of the victim is as follows: the ratio of the perpetrator and the victim as general friends is 38. 1%, the ratio of the perpetrator who thinks that the victim knows superstitious cults is 29.7%, the ratio of the perpetrator who is the victim's neighbor is 17.8%, and the ratio of the perpetrator who is the victim's colleague and classmate is 5. 1%. The victim's immediate family is 4.2%, the victim's ex-spouse is 2.5% and the victim's lover (or ex-lover) is 2.5%.
Combined with the types of interpersonal relationships between victims and the spatial distribution of victims, we also found that the incidence of acquaintance rape is the highest in urban areas, with 92.9% of rape cases in urban areas being acquaintance rape, while the incidence of acquaintance rape in rural areas and towns is higher than that of non-acquaintance rape (78.6% and 72.5% respectively), while the incidence of non-acquaintance rape in urban-rural fringe and suburbs is relatively high, with 75%. At the same time, the conclusion of a victim survey in Japan also shows that 50.2% of rape victims have certain interpersonal relationships, while 49.8% don't know them. [13] It can be seen that in the prevention of rape, women should be reminded to be on guard and find the perpetrators hidden around them.
(2) Interaction between the offender and the victim
The interaction between the perpetrator and the victim in rape cases can be manifested in two aspects: the victim's suppression and encouragement of the perpetrator's attack.
1, inhibition between the offender and the victim
The restraining effect between the offender and the victim can be divided into two types: the restraining effect of the offender on the victim and the restraining effect of the victim on the injurious behavior.
The restraining effect of the perpetrator on the victim means that the perpetrator obstructs the victim's resistance by means of violence against the victim, so that rape can be carried out smoothly. Because rape is a violent act committed by the perpetrator against the will of women, it is obvious that the perpetrator can restrain the victim's resistance, and the means used by the perpetrator can be violence, coercion, drug or narcotic use, superstition and heresy. Deceive or seduce people with asexual defense ability, etc. All these are a kind of inhibition to the victim's resistance to rape. It is worth noting that when the perpetrators use the above methods, they may cause the mentally sound victims to resist to varying degrees. However, when the perpetrators use superstitions and cults to force the victims to commit rape, 65,438+0,000% of the victims will not resist, and will continue to accept the murder and will not report the case to the judicial authorities. Although this kind of cases accounted for only two of the 7 1 cases investigated, the number of victims and the number of victims were very high: in one case, there was only one perpetrator, and the number of victims was 13, of which six were pregnant and gave birth, with an average of more than five victims per person; In another case, there were three perpetrators and 23 victims, each of whom was killed more than three times on average. It can be seen that in the prevention of rape, we should pay enough attention to the prevention of victims of such cases.
The restraining effect of victimization on the injurer refers to some kind of resistance behavior of the victim at the time of victimization, thus preventing the injurer from successfully carrying out the injurious behavior. According to statistics, when the victim resisted, 42.9% attempted rape, 14.3% the perpetrator stopped rape, and 42.9% the rape was completed. When the victim did not resist rape, 95. 1% of the rape was completed, and 4.9% of the rape was attempted (the attempted rape was due to the intervention of a third party or the incapacity of the perpetrator); The success rate of rape is 100%. It can be seen that the victim's persistent resistance to rape can effectively prevent the perpetrator from committing rape.
2. Victim's encouragement to the rapist.
The victim's encouragement to the perpetrator's rape behavior refers to the positive encouragement of the victim's behavior during and after his own victimization to the perpetrator's continued criminal behavior. There are two forms: the encouragement of the victim in the process of being killed and the encouragement after being killed.
The victim's encouragement to the perpetrator in the process of being victimized is manifested in the victim's behavior of not resisting or giving up resisting in the later stage when threatened by the perpetrator's rape, and the cooperative action in the process of being victimized, which plays a positive role in encouraging the perpetrator to continue to commit criminal acts. This has been discussed before, and the following will discuss in detail the encouraging effect of the victim's behavior on the offender after being killed.
The encouragement of the victim's behavior to the offender after the victim's death is mainly manifested in the encouragement and connivance of the victim not reporting the case to the offender. If we comprehensively observe the types of interpersonal relationships between victims and whether the victims report the case after being killed, we will find that 36.8% of the victims will report the case to the judicial organs, 12% of the immediate family members of the victims will report the case to the judicial organs, and nearly 46.2% of the acquaintance rape cases are detected by the judicial organs themselves. In contrast, after the victim was raped by an unknown person, 14.6% reported the case to the judicial authorities, 4.9% of the victim's immediate family members reported the case to the judicial authorities, and nearly 68.3% of such cases were detected by the judicial authorities themselves. This shows that more than half of the victims did not report to the judicial organs when they knew who the perpetrators were, and as many as 80% of the victims did not report to the judicial organs without knowing the identity of the perpetrators. It is conceivable that how many rape cases have failed to enter the criminal justice process and how many rape cases exist in our society. However, the victim's compromise on his own victimization does not necessarily bring happiness in his later life-nearly half of the victims did not stop sexually assaulting women because of a successful victimization. If the victim does not use legal weapons to bring the criminal to justice after the first victim, there is a nearly 50% possibility that he may be victimized again or other women may be victimized. (This point has been discussed in the last article when discussing the behavioral characteristics of the perpetrator's persistent harm, so I won't repeat it here. For example, in the Mudanjiang case of 1993, [14] during the three years from 1990 to 1993, you used the same method to commit crimes in various districts of Mudanjiang city for three consecutive months, that is, rape first and then rob the victim's property on the spot, or ask the victim to deliver the money the next day. The first 30 victims didn't report the case because they were afraid of retaliation, or being talked about, or afraid of family breakdown, or sexual loneliness, and voluntarily accepted such sexual assault. The behavior of the first 30 victims led to Youmou's fear of being arrested from the beginning, and then he was fearless. It was not until the third1victim was raped that he did not send money the next day as required but called the police, which led to Youmou's arrest and ended this crazy behavior. The victim of this rape case did not report the case for judicial protection for various reasons, which actually protected the perpetrator to a certain extent, encouraged the perpetrator to continue the infringement, and made other women suffer, thus objectively becoming the "accomplice" of other women.
(iii) Responsibility of victims
Benjamin Mendelssohn, an Israeli jurist, first mentioned the responsibility of victims. He published an article entitled "Rape in Criminology" in 1940, and discussed the possibility of resisting rape according to the victim's attitude and the anatomical principle of female reproductive organs. He believes that in the process of rape, criminals can only use one hand, one chest and one foot to eliminate the resistance of the victim, so it is very difficult to realize the attempt of rape. The main reason why rapists can eliminate resistance and achieve rape is not only the physical contrast between the perpetrator and the victim, but also the unconscious state, fear and other biological reactions of the victim, and even the sexual passion and indulgent living environment of the victim, which all affect the resistance intensity of the victim. Therefore, rape victims are responsible for the occurrence of rape. American scholar M Amir once pointed out in the book Types of Rape: "In a sense, the victim is the cause of the crime", "If the victim is not fully responsible for the cause that later became an unfortunate result, she is at least a supplementary factor."
The author believes that the victim's responsibility refers to the objective positive or negative role played by the victim in the occurrence of rape or the consequences of the victim, as well as his subjective psychological state. If the victim does not play any positive or negative role in the occurrence of rape or the consequences of the victim, and there is no fault subjectively, the victim is considered to have no responsibility. On the other hand, the victim should bear different degrees of responsibility for his own murder. The significance of studying the victim's responsibility is not to condemn the victim who was deeply hurt by rape morally or legally, but to reveal the type of victim's responsibility and its relationship with the victim's result, to confirm and evaluate the danger and risk of the victim from the victim's point of view, so as to improve the victim's own awareness of prevention and prevent the occurrence and strong harmful consequences of rape from the victim's point of view.
The author divides the victim's responsibility into four categories: no responsibility, slight responsibility, general responsibility and serious responsibility. The statistical results show that 16.8% of the victims have no responsibility, 30.4% have slight responsibility, 25.7% have general responsibility and 27% have serious responsibility.
In the first category, the victim's lack of responsibility means that the victim has not played any positive or negative role in the occurrence of rape or the consequences of the victim, and he is subjectively not at fault. For example, young girls and mental patients are not responsible for rape.
Secondly, the victim's slight responsibility means that the occurrence and success of rape mainly depends on the perpetrator or other external objective conditions, and the victim is negligent in preventing his own murder. The victim's slight liability can be divided into two types: being in danger alone and being careless. The former means that the victim enters a dangerous environment alone and is in a helpless state, which leads to vulnerability. For example, walking alone on a quiet road in the middle of the night and being raped by a rapist waiting for an opportunity is 75.5%. The latter refers to the victim's own murder due to lack of vigilance and carelessness. For example, the victim lacked vigilance and was raped by someone who followed him to his home, accounting for 24.4%.
Third, the victim's general responsibility refers to the victim's failure to fulfill the necessary duty of care to prevent rape or mitigate the consequences of rape. It can be said that the victim's behavior has helped his own murder or the aggravation of the consequences. It can be divided into the following five categories: 1, negligent behavior, that is, because of the victim's negligent behavior, he is in a weak position or loses some resistance ability. For example, take the initiative to reach an isolated environment with criminals, or drink or take drugs with criminals to make yourself unconscious. The proportion of this type is 34.2%. 2. Compromise without resistance means that the victim gives up resistance because of the intimidation of the perpetrator before the rape officially begins. The proportion of this type is 34.2%. Being cheated because of greed means that the victim relaxed his vigilance and took the initiative to enter the fragile environment, leading to his own murder. For example, listen to the lie that the abuser helped him find a job, and follow the abuser to the abuser's home to be raped. The proportion of this type is 15.8%. 4. Pre-acquiescence behavior was upgraded. In other words, due to the connivance and acquiescence of the victim to some deviant behaviors of the perpetrator, the deviant behavior of the perpetrator escalated to rape and was killed. The proportion of this type is 10.5%. 5. Taking risks alone without resisting is because the victim compromises without resisting when entering a dangerous environment. The proportion of this type is 5.3%.
Fourth, the victim bears great responsibility, that is, the victim is fully capable of preventing and stopping the occurrence and success of rape, and it is the victim's behavior that leads to his own murder or re-murder. It can be divided into two categories: cognitive errors of victims and fear of reporting crimes. The former means that the victim has a wrong understanding of rape, which leads to her being raped. If the victim believes in cult teachings and mistakenly thinks that he can be raped without any harm, but he is raped on his own initiative (see [1997] Liu Di Zi ChuNo. 1 14), the proportion is 92.5%. In the latter case, when there is a certain identity relationship between the victim and the perpetrator, such as lineal relatives, the victim will not report the rape of the perpetrator, but after the first injury is completed, the victim will compromise not to report or seek help from others, which will lead to the perpetrator killing innocent people. The proportion of this type is 7.5%.
Four. Conclusion-Supplementary explanation of survey data
Because rape is a highly secret crime, some rape cases have been hidden for a long time before committing the crime (according to statistics, nearly 42% of the cases were committed one year later), and some victims did not report the crime after being victimized. Rape cases that enter the judicial process are only part of it. For example, 1967 A victim survey in the United States shows that the actual number of rape cases is 3.5 times that of official reports [15]. Therefore, we may only reflect the relationship between the traveler and the victim in the rape cases that have been decided, but not necessarily in all the rape cases that have happened. But it is more important for us to find out the possible phenomena behind these data through data comparison, which may be important or worthy of attention in our future crime prevention work.
First of all, we should see the possible problems after the same investigation conclusion. For example, this paper and the survey of 1997 show that "farmers are the largest group of perpetrators, and the proportion of civil servants as perpetrators is 0; People with low education are more likely to commit rape than those with high education. " What needs to be asked here is whether there will be rape by civil servants and the victim will not report it; Will there be people with high education who commit rape, because the means are clever and difficult to be found, or the victims who know him are unwilling to report the case for the future or other interests of the perpetrators, and so on.
Secondly, we should compare the survey results and find new problems. For example, this paper and the survey of 1997 show that the high incidence of rape cases in China is in rural areas, with counties and towns ranking second and towns the least; The most vulnerable place for victims is in their own homes, and more than 60% of rape cases occur at home. According to the United States Unified Crime Report (UCR), the rape rate in the western part of the United States is the highest, with big cities higher than small and medium-sized cities and rural areas. Crimes mostly occur at night, and rape cases mostly occur in cars, streets and parks; 13' s completed rape and14' s attempted rape occurred at home. [16] Here, after considering the existence of rape code, can you trace back the law that urbanization and modernization affect the prone locations of rape crimes? With the acceleration of urbanization, the decrease of normal communication between men and women of school age and the rapid development of online dating, will cities become high-risk areas for rape cases? With the popularity of cars as an extension of private hidden space, will cars become a prone place for rape cases in China in the future? Wait a minute. These problems urge us to think more about what more effective prevention and control measures will be taken for future rape crimes.