Rape: Offenders and Their Victims

Rape is a subject more apt to provoke emotion or cynicism than careful research. However, John Macdonald, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado and psychiatrist to the district courts of Colorado, has done a great deal of research and presented it in this interesting volume. He has interviewed rapists and their victims, has reviewed the literature, and evaluated the available statistics. He discusses the many circumstances under which rape may occur and gives verbatim accounts of the experiences of the girls and sometimes of their attackers. Incidentally, not all the victims can be called girls. He mentions one case of rape of an 85-year-old woman. He shows that in some instances victims provoked the attack or at least contributed to it by their unwise behavior. In other instances they were purely innocent victims. They were of all races, the majority single but some married, most of lower