To call it ‘rape’ is to debauch the language

In Manchester, a friend at university there tells me, a new word has entered smart parlance among the young. The word is ‘raped’.

The expression is moderately strong, and casual. It is a way of saying that one has in some way been done over, done for, or done in. ‘I was completely raped,’ a cool young Mancunian might remark, emerging from an examination in which the questions had proved impossible; or on discovering that something he had just bought was on sale much more cheaply elsewhere.

My friend added that some women were complaining that to use a word like this so lightly was offensive, as if rape could ever be equated with everyday problems or setbacks.

I see their point. My friend and I were talking about this not long after the newspapers had reported that in England and Wales alone, between 61,000 and 89,000 women a year are raped, according to a Home Office crime survey. One in 20 women – some three quarters of a million – said they had been raped at least once since they were 16. The survey had found that current partners were responsible for 45 per cent of rapes. Strangers accounted for 8 per cent. Women were most at risk from their partners, former partners, men they are dating and acquaintances.

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At this point the reader pauses worriedly. In the old-fashioned (you could call it ‘classical’) idea of rape, the assailant is unknown, or almost unknown, to her victim. This, I suppose, is the image of a stranger assaulting you in the dark: one of the most frightening images of all. But of the offences included in the Home Office survey’s tally, 92 per cent were not of this kind. Nearly half (45 per cent) involved current partners.