Thinking sexual difference through the law of rape

2013 marks 10 years since the Sexual Offences Act 2003 was passed.
That Act made significant changes to the law of rape which appear now to have
made very little difference to reporting, prosecution or conviction rates. This article
argues that the Act has failed against its own measures because it remains enmeshed
within a conceptual framework of sexual indifference in which woman continues to
be constructed as man’s (defective) other. This construction both constricts the
frame in which women’s sexuality can be thought and distorts the harm of rape for
women. It also continues woman’s historic alienation from her own nature and
denies her entitlement to a becoming in line with her own sexuate identity. Using
Luce Irigaray’s critical and constructive frameworks, the article seeks to imagine
how law might ‘cognise’ sexual difference and thus take the preliminary steps to a
juridical environment in which women can more adequately understand and articulate
the harm of rape.