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To adequately study and understand the responses of rape victims, it is crucial that we consider rape as a crime of violence and not a sexual act. Most women, particularly victims of rape, have accepted the violent nature of the crime of rape, but many men still perceive rape as a sexual act and consequently have difficulty in properly assessing victim reactions. Rape, like other violent crimes where there is prolonged contact with the criminal, is essentially an interpersonal act. In order to fully understand the victim's responses, we must first study the criminal's goals and his behavior.
Generally criminals involved in violent crime demonstrate the following pattern. (1) Through terrorization, the criminal attempts to obtain the immediate compliance of the victim. (2) The criminal, in order to preserve his anonymity, tries to have minimum contact with the victim. (3) The criminal sometimes renders the victim physically helpless before or after the crime to insure escape with the proceeds of the crime.
The street crime of mugging classically follows this pattern. Muggers approach the victim from the back, threaten, grab, and run. In interviewing muggers to understand why some victims are beaten after they have given the criminal their money, some muggers said it was an expression of their frustration at the slowness of the victim's compliancy. They felt this slowness endangered them. Others said they committed the additional violence to prevent any possibility of pursuit or to prevent the victim crying for help and thus interfering with their escape.
There are violent crimes that involve prolonged contact with the victim, with possible compromise to the criminal's identity. These are the crimes of rape, robbery, kidnapping, and hostage taking. While robbery has similar victim responses as those seen in rape, the crimes of kidnapping and hostage taking appear to have somewhat different dynamics. In those crimes the victim is used as leverage to obtain something from