Violence against

J. M. Coetzee's brutal novel Disgrace questions popular understandings of criminality and victimhood by establishing parallels between its various characters and their actions. Through close reading of Coetzee's descriptions of protagonist David Lurie's behaviors and attitudes towards women, non-human animals, and people of color compared with descriptions of the mysterious trio of men who rape Lurie's daughter and coldly kill the dogs in her kennels, I argue that the line Disgrace draws between Lurie and these men is deliberately flimsy, ultimately all but disappearing if we look closely enough at their behaviors and descriptions rather than their justifications. I also argue that the novel's perpetrators rely upon archetypical "rapist" and "criminal" constructs, resulting in an inability for them to ever accurately address their own crimes, despite Coetzee's descriptive parallels. Ultimately, I read Disgrace as suggesting that there can be no resolution for violence so long as these mythical archetypes persist.

Women have recurrently faced the adaptive problem of rape over evolutionary history. Little research has investigated the potential evolved psychological mechanisms for rape avoidance that women may possess. Here I review evolutionary perspectives on rape avoidance. I follow this review with the results of two studies conducted to design a measure of women's rape avoidance, known as the Rape Avoidance Inventory (RAI). Study 1A included 99 women who self-reported acts they do or might do specifically to avoid being raped. Study 1B included 144 women who filled out a preliminary inventory of rape avoidance behaviors. I used their responses to construct the RAI. In Study 3, I develop and test a number of hypotheses derived from evolutionary psychological theory, using data derived from the sample of women in Study 1B. I conclude by discussing limitations and possible future directions for rape avoidance research.