Formulating Rape: The Discursive Construction of Victims and Villains

Previous psychological research involving women who have been raped is criticized for its focus on psychopathology, its use of traditional methodologies, its limited conception of the person, and its reliance on dichotomous categories. A social constructionist, discourse analytic approach is offered as an alternative. Eight women who had been raped by dates or acquaintances volunteered for open-ended, unstructured interviews. Their accounts had two major features: the difficulty of naming the experience rape and the importance of the men's accounts in the women's efforts to make sense of their experience. Our analyses identify the complex discourse strategies that are actively used to formulate experience and to negotiate victim/non-victim identities for the women themselves and villain/non-villain identities for the men who raped them. We discuss the importance of formulating rape and the connections among the discourse used by women who are raped, by rapists and by researchers.