Book Reviews: Rape Work: Victims, Gender, and Emotions in Organization and Community Context. By Patricia Yancey Martin. New York: Routledge, 2005, 280 pp., $29.95 (paper)

Abstract

Why is it so difficult for rape victims to obtain justice? Patricia Yancey Martin's book provides clear, sociological answers to this question and suggests avenues for creating communities that are more responsive to rape victims.The review of this book originates from an Author-Meets-Critics panel at the 2006 Southern Sociological Society annual meeting. Rape Work represents more than 20 years of research by Martin. She and her colleagues conducted hundreds of interviews with rape workers in law enforcement organizations, prosecution offices, rape crisis centers (RCCs), and hospitals and with judges and defense attorneys. Most of the research was done in Florida in the eighties and nineties. Besides voluminous qualitative evidence, she has compiled rape statistics from community, state, and national sources and developed indices to handle these quantitative data.To study the organizational culture of various occupations that respond to rape victims and process rape cases, Martin develops a series of frames that characterize the ways that workers in each institution interpret, justify, and communicate their activities and treatment of victims. This adaptation of Goffman's frame analysis allows her to examine how organizations provide their workers with institutional, interorganizational, and internal frames and activities that workers then use to make sense of, act on, and ultimately socially construct rape victims. In her chapter on the legal institution, for example, Martin offers 30 frames, each introduced by a "motto," including "rape cases are hard to win." Workers use this organizational frame to legitimate the institution's "collaboration" with rapists. Relying on such a frame results in cases being dropped if a victim is "too emotional" or "too unemotional" or when a victim has used drugs, dressed provocatively, or done sex work. In addition to the expected frames Martin identifies for RCCs (e.g., "We protect victims from 'the system'") she identifies frames that help us see RCCs as subtle yet powerful forces in communities. RCC workers often give public acknowledgment to police, sheriffs, hospitals, or courts, "let[ting] them take credit" for work that often originates and is staffed from RCCs.