from Hypatia Volume 19, Number 3

Excerpt from

“It Can Happen to You”: Rape Prevention in the Age of Risk Management

Rachel Hall

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This essay provides a critical analysis of rape prevention since the 1980s. I argue that we must challenge rape prevention's habitual reinforcement of the notion that fear is a woman's best line of defense. I suggest changes that must be made in the anti-rape movement if we are to move past fear. Ultimately, I raise the question of what, if not vague threats and scare tactics, constitutes prevention.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the paternalistic myth of women's vulnerability donned the neoliberal cloak of risk management. It was a move befitting the new rationality of government emerging in the United States and other postindustrial nations at the time. The “new space of risk,” as Robert Castel calls it, describes the takeover of the risk management mindset in social administration (Castel 1991, 281).1 Governmental solutions imagined from within the new space of risk work neither through repression nor through welfare interventionism. Rather, they shift the appropriate site for social intervention from dangerousness to risk (1991, 282). As a result, responsibility for a wide range of social, health, and environmental problems gets personalized. The method of risk assessment can be and has been applied to almost every aspect of modern life, from drug use to unwanted pregnancy, from violent crime to child maladies preventable with vaccination, and from car accidents to chemical spills. Translated into the language of risk, these wide-ranging problems become like so many accidents that the individual should try to avoid.

Castel's analysis of the new space of risk is useful for understanding rape prevention in the wake of the feminist antirape movement. He describes a rationality of government that belongs to the larger project of neoliberalism (shrinking government in terms of social services while expanding its law and order functions) against which feminist activists in the movement must struggle. Once the notion of risk becomes autonomous from that of danger, it is possible to dissociate the practice of caring from the administration of care. In Castel's words: “A risk does not arise from the presence of particular precise danger embodied in a concrete individual or group. It is the effect of a combination of abstract factors which render more or less probable the occurrence of undesirable modes of behavior” (1991, 287). As a result, care for a dangerous person or the individual in danger becomes preventative education for populations thought to be “at risk.”

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