Rape

Joanna Bourke

In America, someone is sexually assaulted every two-and-a-half minutes. Now more than ever, a comprehensive reevaluation of sexual violence is urgently necessary. Award-winning author and historian Joanna Bourke delivers this timely investigation of rape, a crime that is increasingly difficult to define, yet devastating in its impact." "She draws from the work of criminologists, sociologists, and psychologists to examine the motivations driving perpetrators of sex crimes, insisting that "rapists are not born; they become." The rapist, not the victim, is the target of Bourke's unflinching analysis, for the perpetrator himself, she asserts, can only be reformed once he is humanized. Though indebted to a growing body of feminist analyses, she radically departs from this vein of literature in order to place the rapist in his (or her) political-cultural context.