Defining Rape

Janice Raymond’s (Commentary, Dec. 11) equation of the rape of a 12-year-old girl on Okinawa with the sex business which has traditionally sprung up around military bases filled with young single males is a distortion of the clear meaning of words which, if not linguistic rape, is a form of extreme contextual abuse.

Rape means the forcible use of someone else’s body for sexual purposes by means of superior force or threat of force in the face of a clear unwillingness on the part of the victim to voluntarily participate. It is a crime of violence.

The sex-for-sale business may indeed be reprehensible, even demeaning, but I find it hard to fit Heidi Fleiss and her high-priced purveyors of sex into the category of victims of rape. The brothels Raymond reports being built in a Hungarian town to serve American troops in transit will likely be staffed by eager professionals.

The infamous Japanese policy of forcing women from occupied lands to serve as virtual sex slaves for Japanese troops was a form of collective rape, but Raymond’s wild tale of Japanese recruitment of “tens of thousands of Japanese women” to perform the same duties for American troops flies in the face of history. In 1945 Gen. Douglas MacArthur made rape a capital crime and banned visits to brothels. In succeeding years these rigid rules were relaxed, and the Japanese sex industry flourished, but the Japanese, who knew how their troops had behaved as occupiers, were astonished at the restraint and discipline of American soldiers. They bought sex--they didn’t steal it.

Rape is one thing, and prostitution another, and our language has always made a clear distinction between them.

RABBI GILBERT KOLLIN

Pasadena