The meaning of sex can defer depending on a person’s view of the world and different circumstances. A secular person and a religious person have different views on the meaning of sex. Yet, Archard discusses, sex is important to all people across cultural, historical periods, and social groups; sex is not just important or meaningful in a “spatial” mode of interest. When a person is forced into an action of meaning, like when a victim is forced into sex by an offender (rape), the victim goes through many psychological and physical changes that greatly affects the person. For this research, the Department of Justice’s definition on rape will be the definition referred to every time rape is used: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the …show more content…
During the acute phase, the victim may go through “physical trauma, skeletal muscle tension, gastrointestinal irritability, and genitourinary disturbance.” Also, during the physical phase they may experience “…emotional reactions. These range from fear, humiliation, and embarrassment to anger, desire for revenge, and self blame.” There is a theme of fear, humiliation, and self blame within these studies. These reactions can lead to a changed belief on the act of sex. The long-term reactions, as described by Cwik, include the victim beginning “to reorganize her lifestyle, even though mild to moderate levels of the symptoms from the acute phase may still continue. One-way rape victims may reorganize their lives is through a change in residence in order to achieve a feeling of safety and to return to a sense of normalcy.” Even with this reorganization, “it may take years for victims to recover, and some victims may never regain their previous level of functioning.” As seen in the Cwik study, rape victims have a hard time of living life how they did before and feeling safe in their environment. The change in how they view their surroundings and themselves after the incident can last for years and can greatly affect how they view sex, the act that was forced upon them. The act of sex was not something was in any way a unifier. It cased the victim to feel that they needed to separate themselves completely from not only the offender but the environment as well. The rape was not a unifier; it formed