Defending Date Rape
Abstract
Date rape has been battered in the media recently. One critic, Berkeley social welfare professor Neil Gilbert, proclaimed that “radical feminists have distorted the definition of rape and created a bogus epidemic”(Hendrix, 1991). His thoughts echo criticisms first raised by journalist Stephanie Gutmann in Playboy magazine (October 1990). Both critics focused their attacks on my national survey of college students (Koss, Gidycz, & Wisniewski, 1987), perhaps because it has been widely disseminated in the popular press to document the scope of acquaintance rape. Their assertions cannot be ignored because they support a clear-cut agenda: to reduce public support for the appropriations directed at rape crisis services and education/prevention as proposed in the Violence Against Women Act.