A chara, – Jim Beresford’s castigation of the shortcomings in the Ryan report (“Ryan taboo on warped sexual training of Brothers a cop-out”, Opinion, June 18th) made for compelling reading. Over the course of his article, he decries the commission’s failure to consider the reality of sadomasochistic sexuality, ritualised in the formation of Christian Brother novices, as a motivation for the appalling sexual violence committed against the boys of Artane, noting that “the authors of the Ryan report don’t even hint that there could have been a sexual motivation for such violence”. The low priority accorded by the commission to exploration of this phenomenon as a cause of abuse does, indeed, give cause for wonder.
One is inclined to conclude that rape is, by its nature, a crime which begins and ends in the sphere of sexuality – and that this would have been an obvious starting point for the commission’s search for answers.
Sociological inquiries by academics and human rights activists, however, suggest otherwise – in the case of all-male penal institutions, at least.
Studies of institutionalised male rape by Wikberg and Rideau (1992) and Knowles (1999) assert that “rape in prison is rarely a sexual act, but one of violence, politics and acting out of power roles”.
Mr Beresford points to the “celibate, sex-starved” disposition of the abusing Brothers as an obvious indicator of their propensity to rape and sexually assault. Yet the findings of academic research, counter-intuitive though they might be, present an alternative explanation for these offences.
No Way Out,the 2001 Human Rights Watch report on male rape in US prisons, refers to a consensus of "prison experts, academic commentators, and prisoners themselves [who] generally concur that sexual deprivation is not the main source of the phenomenon. Instead, in the prison context, where power and hierarchy are key, rape is an expression of power. It unequivocally establishes the aggressor's dominance, affirming his masculinity, strength, and control at the expense of the victim's." Rape in such institutions, according to these studies, is primarily a crime of power, rather than sex; an exercise in domination rather than gratification, inflicted by the strong upon the weak.
The position adopted by the Ryan report reflects this prevailing discourse. Its failure to consider the obvious question of how the sexual formation of the abusers and their masochistic approach to the human body might have led to their later crimes is indeed difficult to reconcile with the commission’s statutory mandate to determine “the causes, nature (and) circumstances . . . of such abuse”. Instead, this analysis has been left to the media and to passionate, articulate voices such as Mr Beresford to carry out.
I write as a recent graduate in sociology with some limited knowledge of the conventional patterns of interpretation in research to this area.
The “political” explanation for rape favoured by the Ryan report finds precedent in a number of similar reports and academic studies. This does not by any means excuse the oversight, but perhaps it may help explain it. – Is mise,