Rape Work: Victims, Gender, and Emotions in Organization and Community Context

Rape Work: Victims, Gender, and Emotions in Organization and Community Context, by Patricia Yancey Martin. New York, NY: Routledge, 2005. 280pp. $39.95 paper. ISBN: 0415927757.

When second wave feminists began to form rape task forces and hotlines in the early 1970s, they initiated an innovation with lasting effects on how sexual assault is seen and handled in the U.S. Rape crisis centers emerged as a new type of organization engaged in a variety of activities, from assisting individual victims to political work toward changing society. Feminists remained involved in the movement and the distinctive organizations it spawned, but rape work expanded to include responsibilities by law enforcement, prosecutors, and hospitals. Patricia Yancey Martin's in-depth organizational study of rape work offers a comprehensive view of where more than 30 years of activity around rape has taken us. There is good news and bad news.

Rape Work offers a complex study of people who have responsibility (sometimes reluctantly) for processing cases of rape, and asks how responsive they are to rape victims. Martin and various colleagues conducted multiple waves of research from the early 1980s through the 1990s. Using a range of methodologies-interviews, field work, mailed questionnaires, network analysis, community responsiveness measures-has yielded a thorough picture of the organizations and the work they do. Her basic thesis is "that organizational conditions...