Feminist reframing of rape invalidates earlier authoritarianism measures that used its sentencing.

Evidence

Since the time of Sales’s research, however, the influence of the women’s movement (in particular Brownmiller’s, 1975, landmark argument) has changed popular and judicial views of rape in ways that may now make Sales’s measure invalid. First of all, rape is now more often understood to be a crime of violence rather than a crime of sex. Second, rape is more widely understood to be a serious crime that should be reported (by the victim), prosecuted (by law enforcement agencies), and punished (by the judicial system), rather than an unimportant offense brought on in part by the victim herself. These changes are arguably the result of increased feminist consciousness rather than increased authoritarianism, but the newer views might well have the same effect, increasing average sentences for rape. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 803

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my published piece on moral panics over ‘immodest’ dress — both show shifting social-construction of offenses driving legal severity independent of underlying ‘deviant’ behavior. — connects to: Revised authoritarianism measures diluted the construct’s link to genocide. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 457
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely subtle methodological point: a social movement can change the very meaning of a crime so that its punishment no longer indexes the psychological trait it once did — the measure’s construct validity itself is historically contingent.