Is Rape Worse Than Murder?
Content warning: rape, murder, language that decentralizes victims’ experiences, comparative philosophy
It sounds like a question asked to shock and alarm, not to stimulate productive philosophical discussion, so I only want to proceed after fully acknowledging the emotional weight attached to everything involved. Not just rape and murder itself, but even the concept of ranking acts of violence by severity — and the implication that whatever isn’t worst is, comparatively, good. I will begin by assuming that neither rape nor murder are okay, and that the severity of any act of violence is not affected by the relative severity of any other act of violence. And I want to also underscore that I do have a purpose in pursuing this line of questioning. It isn’t gratuitous shock-mongering, and it’s not just to make people squirm. If you’re not emotionally prepared to take this question seriously, I don’t want you to continue reading. My goal isn’t to disturb anyone or to make light of anyone’s trauma. It’s to ask a serious moral question, and hopefully come to some useful conclusions that I can apply to relevant social, political, and legal concerns.
I was raised as a girl, and I don’t know what the typical experience was for boys in my culture. But when I was a child and first encountered the concept of rape, it was presented to me as worse than murder. It was whispered about among the other girls at slumber parties as an almost supernatural event, like a curse: if you were unlucky or made certain mistakes, you could get raped, and it would destroy your life. You would be forever afraid of it happening again. You would lose the status of “virgin,” which would be enough to eliminate most potential future relationships. The worst thing that could happen was if you got pregnant due to rape. If you did, then you could be forced to become the ultimate symbol of evil: a mother who hates her child. The child would then carry your curse to the next generation. Alternatively, you’d be forced to become another shameful creature: a woman who has had an abortion. I remember rape being described, multiple times, as a “fate worse than death.”
I would love to say that this was simply childish superstition that we all grew out of once we’d had some decent sex ed and lived through some real adult hardships, but it seems to me that the prevalent attitude among adults I encounter is very similar: rape as the ultimate evil, shrouded in fear and disgust and revulsion, and rapists as the only unforgiveable criminals. So I want to reiterate: rape is bad. But this pervasive, seemingly universal belief that rape is the worst act of violence imaginable makes me feel really hesitant to say that for me, if I were given a clear, conscious choice… I would rather be raped than murdered. For a few reasons, the main one being that it’s possible to recover from a rape.
And I know I’m not alone in that. Imagine the kind of rape we’ve all been told to fear: you’re walking alone at night. A masked figure with a weapon appears out of nowhere and backs you into a dark alley. Brandishing the weapon, he threatens to kill you unless you do what he says, and then orders you to take off your clothes. Shaking with fear and with no way out, you do what he says.
It’s such a common storyline, I could draw it up in my imagination without even stopping to stoke my creative engines. One of the most widely recognizable forms of rape involves coercion by threat of murder. By no means are all rapes coerced in this manner, and I don’t want to imply that rape with a deadly weapon is somehow more severe. But it does illustrate my point: it is conceivable that a person could choose to submit to rape to avoid being murdered. In fact, it is encouraged. In my early teens, in a public school, a teacher taught me and the other girls that if we are raped, we should not fight back, because we might end up getting killed. And yet, I was more often told that a rape victim must fight back, or else she is presumed to have been willing.
I want to explore this contradiction, because I think the dissonance between these two coexistent attitudes is at the heart of a lot of public conflict and strife about sexual consent and rape culture.
For instance, I have seen people claim that rape culture can’t be a major part of our society because rape is considered so severe as to exceed murder as most evil act imaginable. They point to the systematic demonization of rapists, forced to walk forever under a mark more glaring than Cain’s. It’s held as common knowledge that rapists are especially reviled in prison populations, pariahs even among the hardened criminals. How, then, could we seriously say that rape is commonly excused and even encouraged in our society?
And that’s why I think it’s important to question the assumption that rape is simply the worst crime ever: if we take for granted that everyone agrees on that, then we are assuming our society contains only one culture and one consistent moral scale, which is false. Because rape IS commonly excused and encouraged in our society. James Bond, one of our favorite action heroes, violently forces sex on more than one female lead, and is praised for his sexiness and masculine dominance. Rape by a spouse was legal in the United States until less than fifty years ago, and in a few states until 1993. Rape happens at parties in front of cheering crowds, taking video recordings and passing them along on social media. Rape threats are dropped casually on a daily basis to public figures who are told they’re being too sensitive if they complain.
And this banal treatment of rape is not just the result of society’s recent moral decline due to the sexual revolution, feminism, the gay rights movement, drugs and allowing kids to talk back to their parents. It’s not new to euro-American culture. In our ancient myths (the same Greek and Roman stories I was taught in middle school, the same year I started getting sex ed), rape appears to just be something men did when the mood overtook them or if it was socially convenient to do so — just like in the action movies. The foundational stories of Rome told of an entire generation of a city’s women being forcibly kidnapped and raped by the men of another city, who went on to found the nation on which, I was taught, the government of my own nation was based. Forced sex is the unspoken result of arranged marriage, on which hinged the plot of virtually every medieval fairy tale, including those adapted to fabulously profitable children’s media in the past century. If we say “it was a different time then, women just didn’t have a choice and that was normal,” then we’re forced to admit that if so, rape as we understand it today is a relatively recent invention, far newer than the moral or legal codes we’ve been living by and basing our opinions and policies on. The Bible forbids murder. The Bible does not forbid rape as we understand it today. Rape was seen as sinful mainly because it was adulterous; the remedy was to force the rapist and the victim to marry, so that the rape could continue with the community’s blessing.
Rape culture is both sides of the tension, not just one. When we are pinched between rape as reviled and rape as routine, we feel powerless to take meaningful action; no matter how we fight back, we risk turning our backs against one of these enforcers. If we choose to fight the banality of it by treating all rapes as inexcusable, and hold every one of us accountable for every breach of consent, we run up against the inevitable truth that to do so would mean branding as evildoers a huge segment of the population for the sin of doing exactly what they’d been brought up to do. If we choose to fight the stigma by ending sex offender registries and emphasizing efforts to rehabilitate rapists and help victims keep their dignity, we risk trivializing the trauma and excusing the guilty. What most of us fail to recognize is that we can and should do both, because rape culture is both sides of the tension.
But none of that has really answered my initial question. Which is really worse? Rape or murder?
We really have to ask two separate questions. One is: which is the worst to experience? The other is: which is the worst to commit? Whether these two questions are seen as intrinsically connected could depend on your moral philosophy. A utilitarian philosopher might see them as linked, as what makes it a thing bad to do is the bad outcome it causes; in other worse, a rapist is bad only to the extent than the victim experienced the rape as bad. Utilitarianism is a compelling philosophical approach for anyone seeking to dismantle moral structures steeped in tradition, orthodoxy and dogma such as the cult of virginity, but I think it’s an overly simplistic approach to the human problem of morality. It would do our moral selves a disservice to choose our philosophical approach simply in terms of political expedience, and I think the utilitarian approach is damaging to our humanity.
Personally I think morality isn’t just about doing good for its own sake; it’s for preserving our position in relation to the people we care about, and our relationships with them — i.e., not betraying our friends and family for personal gain. It’s about preserving the quality of the community and social environment we depend on — i.e., keeping your neighborhood clean and helping others because you’d like to live in a world where people have what they need. It’s also about being able to live with yourself afterward — as Halle Berry said in Cloud Atlas, “You have to do whatever you can’t not do.” Regret and remorse are real emotions felt in the years after one has committed a terrible act, which can be as traumatic to the perpetrator as it was to the victim, and the associations just as shameful if not moreso.
I approach this subject not just as a person who was raised from childhood to fear and prepare for the threat of rape. I also do so as a person who remembers learning, partway through a sex act, that my partner was not willing to participate. Yes, I did ask for consent multiple times throughout, and their response each time had been to say, smoothly and confidently, “yes.” They hid their discomfort for fear of disappointing me. We stopped at my insistence because I felt more dread than excitement, mostly because I had noticed that my partner was showing no signs of pleasure or arousal. Then I learned that my partner hadn’t wanted to do it. Persistent communication problems contributed to our relationship ending soon after, but I have never stopped feeling shame for having come so close to committing rape — by some definitions, I did more than “come close”. My subconscious mind added “I am a rapist” to the many thoughts it keeps on hand to provoke self-loathing during times of depression and despair. I am no longer invested in my former partner’s well-being; we have not been in contact for years. However, I am invested in what happened that night, and my own complicity in creating the situation. I have to live with that shame, and I have brought it into every one of my sexual relationships since. I realize that I am capable of empathizing with a repentant rapist.
But now that I’ve spared a thought for the poor rapist’s sad fate, I can return to the much more comfortable place of empathizing with the victim. Is it worse to be raped or to be murdered? As someone who has gone through life fearing both in various circumstances for various reasons, I can say for myself that I would rather be raped than murdered. I suspect that many people would agree. At least they would still be alive, and if we’re searching for blessings in the darkest hours, I think we can count merely being alive as one of the greatest. We don’t generally say of murder victims, “at least they weren’t raped.” But we do say of rape victims, “at least they weren’t killed.” In fact, shortly after writing this sentence, I was at a party where someone said these exact words of a person who had been kidnapped and brutally raped many times. Sometimes there is truth in platitude, at least in what we assume to be of comfort. We assume that it is worse to be murdered. It’s a knee-jerk response to horror that may reveal more about our priorities than any coldly intellectual debate ever could.
Which brings me to another platitude sometimes unfurled in the aftermath of a rape, where applicable: “at least you didn’t get pregnant.” Remember, one aspect of the terrible stigma I learned about as a child was the specter of pregnancy as a result of rape. That single motherhood is so heavily stigmatized is one of the most baffling injustices I encountered in discovering the patriarchal nature of my culture. That single mothers, especially teenagers, are generally presumed sexually irresponsible — though it takes just one sex act, which may not even be consensual — always confused me. But then, stigma is usually dreadfully irrational, and theories abound for this particular association and its function in controlling women’s sexual behavior.
But I think this may be part of the key to rape’s gendered associations in our current political climate, and ultimately why it feels so alien to contemporary moral theory. Rape happens to people regardless of gender, and can be perpetrated by people regardless of gender; the fact that men may rape more than women may have more to do with the power differential than any innately masculine or feminine trait. But throughout history, the heaviest burden of rape’s consequences have been born by people with uteruses, who may carry and parent their rapists’ offspring. And until recently, people with uteruses were almost universally understood in my culture — euro-American culture — as women. Cis men experience the trauma and pain when they are raped, and bear the emotional burden of those memories and the stigma, but they do not risk the physical, social, spiritual, and economic burden of pregnancy and parenthood as a result of rape. This may be why rape is seen as less bad when the victim is perceived as a sexually active adult. Her identity as “virgin” is not at stake, and the importance of virginity to a woman’s social and moral status is still waning in the eyes of society.
Rape of men, though stigmatized for its own reasons, does not carry the same millennia-old cultural stigma that rape of women does, and that stigma often seems to overshadow the actual individual experience of rape, especially in the minds of those who have not experienced it directly.
This may be why rape is pervasively seen as a women’s issue and a feminist issue, even though it affects men as well. And for centuries the philosophers who have been defining and analyzing and prescribing our moral scales and standards have been men. No wonder we are so confused about exactly how bad rape is and why, and what we should do about it.
But the stigma is there, and I think it’s driving one side of the contradiction I’ve been exploring here: the side that holds rape as an ultimate evil that can never be fully forgiven or recovered from, a crime worse than murder and a fate worse than death. If we could alleviate the suffering of rape victims, and make the rehabilitation of rapists a more realistic possibility, by easing or erasing the social stigma surrounding rape, wouldn’t that be worth trying? Wouldn’t a morality centered on alleviating pain and preventing further harm be open to loosening its grip on this particular understanding of relative badness?
What if, instead of being compared with murder, rape was compared with being severely beaten: a painful and traumatic violation of bodily autonomy, punishable by law and treatable with physical and psychiatric therapy?
It’s a counterintuitive approach, I know, but one thing I know about trauma is that you can’t heal without accepting what has happened and believing that you can tolerate the reality of it. Sometimes people rape each other. This is reality. As a community, we can deal with that either by screaming and vilifying and living in terror or by trying our honest best to figure out what the crux of the problem is, and directing our response there.
To that end, I encourage you to listen to both survivors and perpetrators, take their stories seriously even when they don’t match your expectations, and consider a revolutionary new way of looking at the world.
