Gray rape

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Gray rape, also spelled as grey rape, is a colloquial description of sexual intercourse for which consent is dubious, ambiguous or inadequately established and does not meet the legal definition of rape.[1][2][3] The term was popularized by Laura Sessions Stepp in her viral 2007 Cosmopolitan article "A New Kind of Date Rape",[4] which says gray rape is "somewhere between consent and denial and is even more confusing than date rape because often both parties are unsure of who wanted what".[5] The term "gray rape" has been criticized. Lisa Jervis, founder of Bitch magazine, argued that gray rape and date rape "are the same thing" and that the popularization of the gray rape concept constituted a backlash against women's sexual empowerment and risked rolling back the gains women had made in having rape taken seriously.[6]

Former chief of sex crimes for the Manhattan district attorney's office, Linda Fairstein, states that while "in the criminal justice system there's no such thing as gray rape, [it] is not a new term and not a new experience. For journalists, it may be, but for those of us who had worked in advocacy or law enforcement, this description of something being in a gray area has been around all the time."[2] ConsentEd, a Canadian nonprofit sexual education foundation, dismisses the idea of gray rape, stating that in rape, perpetrators know exactly what they are doing; rape is not an accident.[7]

  1. ^ Shira Tarrant (12 May 2009). Men and Feminism: Seal Studies. Seal Press. p. 105. ISBN 978-1-58005-258-0.
  2. ^ a b Chan, Sewell (2007-10-10). "'Gray Rape': A New Form of Date Rape?". The New York Times City Room. Retrieved 2016-07-22.
  3. ^ Thompson, Rachel (24 January 2018). "We urgently need to talk about the grey areas of bad sexual encounters". mashable.com. Mashable. Retrieved 2 June 2018.
  4. ^ Smith, Erika W. "What Do We Mean By "Grey Rape"?". www.refinery29.com. Retrieved 2020-09-01.
  5. ^ Laura Sessions Stepp (2007-09-11). "A New Kind of Date Rape". Cosmopolitan. Retrieved 2016-07-22.
  6. ^ Friedman, Jaclyn (2008). Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape. Seal Press. pp. 163–169. ISBN 978-1580052573.
  7. ^ "Sexual Violence Myths: Grey Rape". consented.ca. Archived from the original on 2018-09-29. Retrieved 2016-07-22.