Whips, Restraints, and Consenting Victims: New Ideas for Teaching Crime Victims and Victimology

(Oh, and a review of bondage books, too)

Connie Hassett-Walker, Ph.D.

I have been a tenure track, then tenured, professor of criminal justice since the fall of 2007 and taught the department’s undergraduate crime victims course for about as long. While not a required course in our department’s major, it is an important elective that is regularly featured among the semester’s course offerings. If you have ever taught crime victims, you are familiar with the material which may follow a similar progression: definition of victimology; the rediscovery era of the 1970s and growth of the field since; theories and measures of; interactions with various segments of the justice system; a range of special issues (e.g., children, IPV, rape, hate crimes, school shootings, elder abuse, stalking); and directions for the future, particularly giving victims a voice via restorative justice programs. Your mileage may vary, of course.

A variety of texts on victims and victimology are available. To date, I have mainly used Andrew Karmen’s Crime Victims: An introduction to Victimology and Burgess, Regehr and Roberts’ Victimology: Theories and Applications. I also supplement with scholarly articles to incorporate less-covered-in-the-textbook subjects like the cycle of violence (e.g., Widom [1989] and Widom & Maxfield [1994]), repeat victimization, and offenders-as-victims à la hospital injury data.

Last summer, I happened across Camille Paglia’s (2013) review of several books stemming from ethnographic researchers submerging themselves in the bondage-discipline-sadomasoschism (BDSM) lifestyle. My interest piqued, I first read Staci Newmahr’s (2011) Playing on the Edge, followed by Margot Weiss’ (2011) Techniques of Pleasure. I began reading without any thought of covering the material in the victims course. Dr. Newmahr – going by the name Dakota – immersed herself in the BDSM community in a city she refers to as Caeden. She employed the anthropological tradition of data gathering; that is, observations, interviews, and lots and lots of note-taking. Her dissertation first, and then Playing, ultimately evolved from this effort. Dr. Newmahr details her experiences and observations of (often but not always) public, not-strictly sexual “play” encounters that involve an agreed upon, consensual power imbalance between two mostly clothed people who are typically friends or companions. (The people Weiss met were naked more.) Early on in Playing, Newmahr describes a scene at a club where an innocuous question about keeping shoelaces tied leads to her on stage bound up in rope (“the particular appeal of bondage still eluded me”). Newmahr notes that what she saw and experienced differed greatly from the public perception of what BDSM is. Based on the descriptions in Playing, BDSM activities in Caeden seem more like the movie Fight Club than Fifty Shades of Gray.

Dr. Weiss similarly immersed herself in San Francisco Bay Area’s BDMS life for several years. She worked for the Society of Janus, a BDSM educational organization. Weiss attended workshops, events, parties, and even a slave auction. (“I was excited when I was invited to the ’Byzantine Bazaar and Slave Auction’… I learned that the event would feature the chance to buy whips, floggers, canes, and other BDSM toys before a benefit auction….”) A benefit slave auction in modern day San Francisco – who knew?

Both books are thoughtful, scholarly reads, although I confess to enjoying the first-hand accounts of experiences in clubs and interactions with participants more than, for example, discussions about U.S. consumerism fueling BDSM (Weiss, 2011). This was intended to be pleasure reading, after all. Early on in the first chapter, Dr. Newmahr writes about a joke that a fellow club-goer told her: “Dakota, do you know why Jesus died on the cross… He forgot his safe word.” BDSM humor.

So how is any of this relevant to a crime victims course? I teach one class on BDSM – entitled “Victims or Not? The Curious Case of BDSM” – towards the end of the semester. I begin with the introduction of terms learned earlier in the course: shared responsibility, the controversial idea that some victims play a role in their victimization; the related notions of victim facilitation, precipitation and provocation; and the voluntary victim. Then students read a short passage from Playing that describes private and riskier “edge play” between Newmahr and a friend. While the author was never in any real danger of being seriously harmed – her edge play partner held the dull edge of a knife to her throat – the scene was scary enough to cause her to seemingly faint at the end. (She never elaborates on what happened after the fainting, although one can assume everything ended up okay since she lived to write the book.) After reading the passage, students ponder and discuss the following questions: (1) Is this type of ‘play’ dangerous? Why or why not? (2) Is Dakota (Staci) a victim? (3) If yes, why? Which typology or typologies could she fit with? (4) If no, why is she not a victim?

Other factors make the topic of BDSM relevant, if in a minor way, to the study of criminal justice. Newmahr notes that the lifestyle “remains a mostly underground activity” and that a police raid in 2000 in Massachusetts resulted in arrests and assault charges, “despite the fact that no alleged victims pressed charges.” BDSM participants often prefer to remain under the radar out of fear that public knowledge of what they do could damage their reputations and threaten the custody of their children. Newmahr also touches on getting the approval of her university’s institutional review board, which went smoothly despite her not being able to specify her sample size or length of study. She assembled a dissertation committee that included a faculty member who was willing to participate “as long as I don’t have to look at pictures.”

In a section entitled “The Political and Social Effects of BDSM,” Weiss (2011) discusses the connection of types of “play” scenes (e.g., the slave auction mentioned earlier) to real-world events. While critics of interactions like these would argue that BDSM replicates and “is simply the same as the violence it mimes,” Weiss notes that proponents feel that BDSM is performance rather than real; consented to between the participants; and “transgressive of normative vanilla sexuality and gender.” Some scenes and participants may showcase submissive women and dominant men, but the “social trauma” of sexism did not originate with the BDSM community. It stems from long standing social hierarchies within the larger society, Weiss notes. Newmahr also touches on sexism and feminism, writing that prior to her ethnography she lurked around online discussion boards (e.g., “Submissive Women and Dominant Men”). She was particularly interested in the submissive women who identified as feminists. “They discussed whether… it was possible to reconcile submission with feminist. They debated whether the attempt to make such a reconciliation was in itself feminist or anti-feminist” (Newmahr, 2011).

Weiss (2011) describes a workshop she attended, “Interrogation Scenes,” during which the leader – a woman named Domina – showed a copy of the CIA’s KUBARK manual “while giving advice from its pages: the best way to stage an arrest, different kinds of sensory deprivation, how to create conditions of heightened suggestibility. It was 2002, and I had not yet heard of the manual…. [I]n the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib controversy… torture… I now know much more about KUBARK and its place in U.S. imperial histories” (Weiss, 2011). The lecture was followed by a demonstration involving a dominant man and submissive woman, with Domina providing tips. Scenes like these, Weiss writes, “replay hierarchies based on gender, class, race, or age (often called ‘cultural trauma play’), use social or historical structures of exploitation as fodder for SM eroticization.” Even so, Weiss admits to becoming angry during the scene. “I wanted to stand up and yell at [the dominant] to get off [the submissive]… to leave her alone.” This reviewer also felt annoyed by this passage. Eroticizing torture techniques? Torture is a topic covered in a variety of criminal justice courses, and never in a sexy context. Didn’t Zero Dark Thirty show the world the nastiness, painfulness, and ugliness of torture? Weiss observes the simulation of torture with consenting participants – indeed, they ran to the stage – where no one was in any real danger, and therein lies the difference. Consent and a safe word. The CIA torture victims had neither.

In closing, while a whole course on BDSM seems more appropriate to other social science fields (e.g., sociology, anthropology) than criminal justice, this reviewer might suggest including a class on it within a victims course. Playing on the Edge and Techniques of Pleasure are both worth the purchase, and may spark ideas for innovations in a crime victims or other criminal justice course. Or not. In any case, they make the mind run.

References

Burgess, A.W., Regehr, C. & Roberts, A.R. (2013). Victimology: Theories and Applications. 2nd Edition. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Karmen, A. (2013). Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology. 8th Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Newmahr, S. (2011). Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk and Intimacy. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

Paglia, C. (2013). Scholars in Bondage: Dogma Dominates Study of Kink. The Chronicle Review, May 13. Downloadable at http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-in-Bondage/139251/.

Weiss, M. (2011). Techniques of pleasure: BDSM and the circuits of sexuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Widom, C.S. (1989). Child Abuse, Neglect, and Violent Criminal Behavior. Criminology, 27(2), 251-271.

Widom, C.S. & Maxfield, M. (1994). An Update on the “Cycle of Violence.” National Institute of Justice Research in Brief. February. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice. Downloadable at https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/184894.pdf.