| This paper critically assesses the main social policy responses to preventing rape that have developed over the last three decades of feminist struggle to make sexual violence a public matter of legitimate concern to the work of the state. It considers the preventative potential of legal measures, anti-violence campaigns waged by feminist and men's groups in the US and Australia, public education campaigns in US and Canadian Schools and Universities, and public awareness campaigns sponsored by the state. We argue that sexual violence is not amenable to quick fix strategies that place responsibility for prevention entirely on individual men or women. While we recognise that responsibilising victims and individualising offenders is consistent with wider global shifts in social policy calling upon individuals to manage their own risk, we argue that the increasing reliance on such neo-liberal social policy is especially problematic in preventing rape. The paper suggests ways to resist this which place greater emphasis on the promotion of sexual ethics; the eroticisation of consent; the reinvention of the norms of romance to include both these, and the complete separation of the psycho-social-symbolic connections between sex and violence. |
Updated 05/20/2006