Are All Men Potential Rapists?

Rape has been in the news this week, with a female TV presenter suggesting that there are ‘levels’ of rape. Opinion has also been divided as to whether a male professional footballer ought to be permitted to play for a club again now that he has been released from prison on licence, having served a term for rape.

These cases have brought back to mind the assertion that ‘all men are potential rapists’. My reactions to this statement are, initially, what you might expect them to be: offence and denial. I am married with four children, two of whom are now young women and I view rape as being totally and inexcusably abhorrent. There are, to my mind, no ‘levels’ of rape. There might be rape and other accompanying crimes, but rape is rape is rape.

I could also reject the premise that all men are potential rapists on the grounds of the inescapable fact that some men, because of age, infirmity or impairment are incapable of rape. I might also object that even if the remaining men could physically commit the crime of rape that says nothing more than all people, physically capable of the act, could commit murder or theft or any other number of offences. The point is whether or not they are morally and psychologically capable of the act.

That is why, initially, I am offended at the thought that I could be considered capable of being a rapist and that is why I leap to my own defence.

To do so, however, is to miss the real point of what is being said when some people (mostly women) state that all men are potential rapists.

In the first instance, it ignores the appalling history of (mostly) male sexual violence perpetrated (mostly) against women. While I might jump on my moral high horse against the thought that I could be viewed as a potential rapist, why, given that history of male sexual violence, should I think that anyone else ought to give me a dispensation?

More pertinently, perhaps, is the fact that in the not so recent past all men (and women) in our society were told that by virtue of being married, a man had a legal right to have sex with his wife whether or not she consented. Just how many ‘decent’ men, who would never have seen themselves as rapists, in effect, raped their wives? How often, through economic, verbal or physical threat has enforced sex taken place within stable relationships? How many men in war-torn societies have acted ‘out of character’ once the normative laws of ‘civilisation’ were removed?

So, when I hear the assertion, ‘all men are potential rapists’, maybe I ought to be less ready to leap to my own defence….