Rape and the Devalued Victim

Numerous jurisdictions have made changes in their rape statutes in recent years. Five modifications that have commonly appeared in the amended rape legislations are abolition of capital punishment as a sanction for rape, lowered sentence structure, a graduated continuum of offenses and penalties for rape, the reformulation of rape statutes to a sex-neutral definition of participants, and a change in terminology away from rape to such nomenclature as "criminal sexual conduct." While the intent of the legal reforms was to insure fairness, we contend that the unintended effect of many of these changes is to trivialize the offense of rape and to devalue the victim.