Tracing the Life of a Crime Category

Abstract

This article traces the shifting meaning of “date rape” in US newspapers across a fourteen-year period. A crime category created by a niche feminist press, “date rape” originally referred to a form of intimate-partner violence, and has, more latterly, come to refer predominantly to an assault that occurs after a victim has had a drug, such as Rohypnol, surreptitiously slipped into her drink. Employing quantitative content analysis to explicate this shift, the article considers possible explanations for the changing meaning of “date rape,” including the applicability of the risk thesis and criminological theory on the de-politicisation of crime. Finally, I suggest that a feminist perspective allows us to recognise that “date rape” has been transformed from an issue of female disempowerment into a nebulous threat of limited ideological significance.

Keywords:

• “date rape”
• Rohypnol
• drink-spiking
• media
• crime category

Notes

1. I used the online database Lexis Nexis to carry out the analysis.

2. The sample was made up articles on “date rape” in five national and fourteen local newspapers. The national newspapers were the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, USA Today, and Examiner. The local newspapers were The Oregonian, Chicago Sun-Times, St Petersberg Times, The Boston Herald, The Post Standard (NY), The Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, The Advocate, The Charleston Gazette, Chattanooga Times, Palm Beach Post, and Tampa Tribune.

3. I decided to focus on this fourteen-year timeframe because it allows us to trace the major shift in the crime category's development. The notion that “date rape” refers primarily to drug-facilitated sexual assault emerges in the mid-1990s and is still predominant today (see the Introduction to this article). I therefore decided that taking the analysis beyond 1998 was unnecessary.

4. I was interested in articles that cited specific cases of “date rape”—these included reports on storylines in television dramas, cursory reports on police enquiries, and full testimonial accounts.

5. See, for example, St Petersburg Times (1991a, p. 20A) and Washington Post (1991, p. A3).

6. To be clear, three-quarters of newspaper articles in the sample mentioned the drugging of victims during the third timeframe. Specific drugs, like Rohypnol, were mentioned in some cases, but on many occasions reports did not specify the drug used or implicated.

7. A number of newspaper articles directly use this metaphor. The Miami Herald, for example, reports that “dropping a pill in a victim's drink is just as nefarious as putting a knife to the victim's throat” (1996a, p. 1A).

8. See also the result of police and science studies on drug-facilitated sexual assault: most samples, taken from women who claim to have been victims of drink-spiking, do not contain any traces of drugs commonly implicated in “date rape” cases (see Mahmoud A. ElSohly & S.J. Salamone 1999; David Gee, Phil Owen, Iain McLean, Kate Brentnall & Cath Thundercloud 2006; Michael Scott-Ham & Fiona Burton 2005).

9. Tyson's lawyers famously used the “jerk defence”: a defence that is based on the argument that the female victim was conscious that the alleged perpetrator was sexually aggressive and chauvinistic, and that she therefore should have been prepared for his sexual advances, and protected herself accordingly if they were unwelcome.