liens - GID

withholding ‘chop’ money; 1 displeasing jokes and innuendos meant to
offend a person’s sensibilities; or for that matter any behaviour purported
to cause loss of face and feeling of inferiority. See also Brown et al.
2006 for the WHO definition of sexual violence.
Some definitions of sexual violence imply an intention to hurt the victim,
or even to humiliate; Davis (1984: 109) implies when he remarks
that ‘There will doubtless be some rapes as long as there are people
who want to humiliate others. The forced intimacy of rape is just too
obvious a means of humiliation to go unused.’ Michalski (2005:617)
cites Gelles’s (1997:14) definition of violence as "an act carried out with
the intention or perceived intention of causing physical pain or injury
to another person.
It seems that an express intention to injure the victim need not be palpable
in all cases; in predatory sexual violence the aggressor’s hedonic
gain or sexual pleasure rather than the victim’s pain is the motive. In
fact Davis also gives the impression that some people rape others for
the fun of committing a serious or special crime, an argument that, in
his view, supports not according rape greater criminal significance than
it deserves. Admittedly, the non-sadistic rapist may be motivated by immediate
or future sexual gratification. 2 The culture of South African
gang rape would seem of course to suggest sadism, an intention to humiliate,
punish, take a woman down the pedestal, or just to exhibit male
power over women as a means to define a person’s maleness or even as
a rite of initiation into a gang (see Wood: 2005).
In focusing on rape as an aspect of sexual violence in the literature, a
comment on terminology seems in order. Davis (1984: 102) refer to
changes of nomenclature involving the term rape and remarks that
terms like ‘sexual battery’, ‘sexual assault’, ‘forcible sexual intercourse’,
are becoming more current while ‘Rape’ is fast becoming a term of the
past, even if rape is not itself becoming a crime of the past. This seems
to go well with his thesis that rape is simple of aggravated battery or assault.
He maintains sub-classifications of rape: date rape, rape by
1
In the Ghanaian context where one spouse is usually the principal breadwinner, he
or she provides money to carry out shopping for the kitchen. Usually husbands have
a duty to provide their wives with regular ‘chop’ monies.
2
It is not unusual for a boy whose girl friend seems indifferent to be advised by peers
to have intercourse with her as a way of forcing her to be committed. Rape in this
context is devoid of sexual lust.
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