THE NEW BEDFORD RAPE TRIAL

...These calls were broadcast, indicating "a widespread outpouring of anti-Portuguese feeling" and "demanding that all Portuguese be shipped back to Europe" (New York Times, February 6, 1984...

...The jury was instructed to find the defendants guilty if sexual penetration was deemed to have taken place without the victim's consent...

...it left the public wondering about the bizarre community response...

...Feminists have challenged traditional notions of sexual consent in recent years, arguing that there is never a sexually provocative act on a woman's part that warrants penetration without her full consent...

...The Portuguese have a political tradition of arbitrary and authoritarian government, controlled by the landed upper class and industrialists...

...If the brutality of the Big Dan's rape was not unique, neither was the trial a precedent-breaking event...

...Half the jurors had Portuguese surnames (Boston Globe, February 22, 23, 1984...

...The jury was instructed to find the defendants guilty if the prosecution proved sexual activity had occurred without the woman's consent...

...Obedience to family authority is not only viewed in the Portuguese community as morally right in an increasingly permissive society, but as a survival strategy in a community of disappearing jobs and declining wages...

...209 Portuguese wives and mothers often work full time in the declining garment shops and wire plants of Fall River and New Bedford, perform virtually all the housework and child care, and dutifully hand over their weekly earnings to their husbands...

...Further, the courts became alerted to the potential hazards of public hysteria in swaying the outcome of the trial...

...The same reporter saw the selection process as representing "a cross section of citizens . . . " (Boston Globe, February 8, 1984...

...Many have arrived in this country with as little as four years of schooling, and they now live here among their relatives and work in declining manufacturing industries...

...The gap between mainstream American values and those of the Portuguese immigrants is wider than it has ever been between immigrants and the larger society...

...Many Portuguese became active in the men's defense, seeing the arrests and trials as expressions of discrimination against their entire community...

...The stance of the Portuguese community cannot be understood simply by reference to a generic "Latin machismo...

...Nor were the verdicts a result of ethnic prejudice...

...In this case, the jury found the men guilty because they saw evidence of rape...

...Darlene Wheeler of the New Bedford Coalition Against Sexist Violence, a local feminist group, expressed the confusion of those outside the immigrant community when she told the Boston Globe (March 19, 1984), There is a feeling that the verdict is on them as a community and they seem to have failed to separate their ethnic background from the charges...

...Yet these events were not picked up by the national media...

...She brazenly walked into a bar and flirted with the men...

...The immigrants who supported the accused simply could not believe that the men's actions justified such serious punishment...

...The final juries included 22 men and 10 women...

...Two separate trials were held to ensure that the defendants would not incriminate each other by their testimony...

...The verdicts show that the belief in a woman's right to say "no" is no longer limited to a small coterie of feminists...

...Jury selection was undertaken in ways to make sure the defendants would be tried by an unbiased cross section of public opinion...

...The district attorney, the prosecutor, and the victim were all of Portuguese descent...

...Was it the particularly brutal nature of this rape—the collaboration of six men, while others looked on cheering...

...As the new immigrants saw it, the victim, a woman of Portuguese descent, must have known the standards of behavior...

...Contemporary observers are amazed at the women's apparent docility and submissiveness...

...Many reported rapes are gang rapes...

...Legally this may become a quagmire...

...a society that often fails to recognize how the insularity of the Portuguese community also serves as a strategy for upward mobility, which has been used by generations of working-class immigrants...

...See Rita Moniz, "The Portuguese of New Bedford, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island: A Comparative Microanalysis of Political Attitudes and Behavior" (unpublished Ph.D...

...This ultimately generated concerns about whether "underdogs" get a fair shake...

...The defendants were working-class and unemployed immigrants, themselves potential victims, The protests provoked a latent fear that the arrests and trial, while taking place in support of women's rights, might also express social prejudice against working-class, immigrant men...

...Ironically, this traditionally apolitical community was galvanized into what it saw as political action in its own defense...

...Between 40 and 60 percent of the population in New Bedford, a town of 98,000, are of Portuguese descent...

...Others worried that future immigration of family members from the Azores might be jeopardized...

...The trial was broadcast live on cable TV, thrusting this relatively obscure ethnic group into the national spotlight...

...The Portuguese are aware that economic 211 scarcity can tear families apart—as it has apparently done in America's black community...

...Indeed, if anything could be designed to cast the Portuguese community in a bad light, it was this apparently bizarre protest...

...As they saw it, the larger society was trashing their values in the name of a new immorality...

...but few capture so much public attention...

...Subsequently, every effort was made to ensure that verdicts would not be made in a lynch-mob atmosphere...

...Women work in garment shops while the men become fishermen (a traditional occupation in the Azores), or construction or factory workers...

...Why did this event, which took place in an obscure New England working-class community, capture the attention of the media and become a national scandal...

...In the months of February, March, and April 1984, when the New Bedford trial took place, the Boston Globe alone reported three other comparable assaults for which men had been arrested...

...Why did the Portuguese community find itself in the unenviable position of upholding its moral legitimacy by appearing to defend rape...

...Or because it was a precedent-breaking conviction...

...She was on welfare—bad enough in itself...

...They have lost sight of what the crime was...

...It was an earlier trial, several years before, that had provided the landmark case in which rapists were finally convicted after years of tacitly being excused...

...In fact, the trial obscured the male-female issue...

...The Big Dan's trial, however, was not merely about the abuse of masculine power...

...Hearing that the accused could be deported if convicted, some became nervous about their own chances for citizenship...

...Unfortunately, rapes like this one are not as unusual as one might think...

...No doubt, dramatic sexual violence is often seen as newsworthy...

...With more wageearners, and members whose activities and earnings remain in the family realm, families are able to buy homes and generate savings...

...Given this serious attempt to keep public hysteria from influencing the outcome, it seems to me that justice was done...

...Not only did it raise questions about definitions of women's "consent" in a sexual act...

...For most of them, wages are low and unemployment is high...

...Consent" is the key word...

...The Americans," in doing so, were committing the final outrage...

...They see the liberal, feminist social-welfare establishment as encouraging licentious behavior that thwarts the family's authority...

...At that time, three physicians were convicted of raping a nurse...

...To this end two groups were formed in the Portuguese community to organize around the defense of the accused and to monitor expressions of prejudice during the trial...

...Marriages of immigrant daughters to Azorean men are still arranged by the parents, and unmarried daughters are carefully chaperoned...

...Many saw the public notoriety brought on by the trial as a threat to their political status in America...

...Some of the immigrants interviewed by the media said that the daily proceedings had become "a spectacle," a public "indictment of the entire community" (New York Times, March 17, 1984...

...This conviction demonstrated that the abuse of masculine power could no longer be tolerated with impunity...

...Today the town evokes instant recognition, especially after one journalist needlessly called it "the Portuguese gang-rape capital of the country" (Hustler Magazine, cited in the Boston Globe, October 16, 1984...

...One evening in March 1983, after giving her three-year-old daughter a birthday party, a New Bedford, Massachusetts woman left her two children with their father and walked to a neighborhood bar to buy cigarettes...

...The community's defense riveted the public's attention on the Portuguese...

...Given the "new rules" (and there is no doubt that there are now new rules), consent cannot be assumed even if there is evidence that a woman behaved seductively...

...After the first of the two "guilty" verdicts, they organized a demonstration of 15,000 to declare the innocence of the convicted men...

...Others in the bar observed what happened, and allegedly encouraged the rapists in their sexual assault...

...This intense clash of values largely explains the new immigrants' response to the rape...

...The victim escaped, reported the events to the police, and identified her assailants...

...The uncle of Virgilio Medeiros, one of the two men eventually acquitted, said of the accused, "From what I heard, it didn't seem like such a big crime" (Boston Globe, March 23, 1984...

...There is no doubt that the law needs to respect the cultural difference of immigrants—but not in the case of violence against women...

...Apparently no one interfered or called the police...

...Inevitably, there is resistance and rebellion 210 among the children of today's Portuguese immigrants...

...Yet fathers try to insulate family members from the more liberal values of the larger society, a society that, it's important to note, often has little respect for immigrant factory workers...

...Portuguese fathers see no problem in removing reluctant daughters from high school once they turn 16, and sending them to work to help provide for the family...

...In a culture that distances itself from political authority, fathers and husbands embody almost total authority at home, controlling both the labor and virtue of women and children...

...Teachers and social workers, many themselves children and grandchildren of earlier Portuguese settlers, often see the values of new immigrant families as anachronistic...

...As a defense against the capricious wielding of power in the Azores, they tend to be extremely apolitical and family-oriented.* In the U.S., they remain fearful and mistrustful of government...

...Because of feminists' efforts, the state today will intervene in family life to protect women...

...The medical community disowned the perpetrators, underscoring the brutality of what they did...

...Yet the episode made a national event out of the latent hostility that exists in southeastern Massachusetts toward the new Portuguese immigrants...

...But if the verdicts and the sentencing were a feminist victory, the events surrounding the trial also raised the specter of ethnic prejudice, complicating what was initially a simpler question of male violence against a woman...

...dissertation, Dept...

...The case became a national story, not only because of its sensationalism, its brutality, or its defense of women's rights, but because it evoked some profound and unarticulated social questions about the conflicting claims of class, ethnicity, and gender in our society...

...A year later, six men had been arrested and were brought to trial for aggravated rape, a crime that carries with it a maximum sentence of life imprisonment...

...Although the Portuguese share a macho ethic with other Latin cultures, their fierce family loyalty and strict patriarchal attitudes resemble the values of the Sicilian peasants who came to America in the early 1900s rather than those of contemporary Hispanic immigrants...

...The reportage was seen as an added insult, offering the country a view of Portuguese immigrants as condoning rape...

...Because the immigrants believe so strongly in the double standard, they were unable to see that the state was attempting to enforce a more progressive definition of social justice for women...

...But by living openly in sin with the father of the children, she was also a "welfare cheat...

...These radio programs heightened tensions between the "natives" and the Portuguese immigrants in New Bedford...

...Until the Big Dan's trial, few Americans knew of the large 208 Portuguese community in New Bedford...

...I am not convinced that the New Bedford rape trial made its way into the New York Times simply as a result of its unique brutality...

...The men got a fair trial...

...Recent immigrants see the efforts of "Americans," including those of Portuguese descent, as attempts to denigrate their culture...

...Since the 1960s, when immigration laws were changed to permit the entry of more Portuguese, these communities have incorporated thousands of newcomers, largely landless peasants from the Azores...

...While the Committee for Justice could find no evidence of anti-Portuguese prejudice in the courtroom, the Portuguese community nevertheless continued to publicly support the accused...

...A Boston Globe article describing the process of jury selection cited the defense attorney's claim that this was "one of the most exhaustive searches for a jury in Massachusetts history" (Boston Globe, February 9, 1984...

...According to her story, she bought the cigarettes, had a drink, and was chatting with another woman, when a group of men threw her on a pool table and collaborated in raping her...

...Their trial, known as the "Big Dan's" rape trial, gained national attention...

...Portuguese immigrants see the agents of the larger society as entirely too permissive...

...This hits hard at the ethos of the new Portuguese immigrants...

...Finally, why did so many in the Portuguese community (including women and church leaders) vigorously support their accused countrymen—even after four were found guilty...

...The fact that more men are now sent to jail for sexual assaults represents a fundamental challenge to male supremacy in the family...

...It evoked the memory of countless bogus Southern trials in which accusations of rape against black men have resulted in lynchings...

...Nor can her sexual reputation be used as evidence of tacit sexual compliance...

...The Portuguese, men and women alike, saw the victim as a "slut and a whore," someone who "got everything that was coming to her...

...The ground rules enforced by the court recognized as legitimate contemporary femi207 nists' claims that rape occurs whenever a woman withholds her full consent from sexual activity...

...The prosecution of the six men was a message that the larger society can and will impose "establishment" standards of sexual morality on the Portuguese immigrants, and that they can be judged by standards that are inimical to them...

...IA/ hat sparked the claim by recent Portuguese immigrants that justice could not be done here in court was a series of hostile phone calls made by "natives" to a local radio talk show...

...As the immigrants saw the issue, by arresting and prosecuting the six men, the courts were insisting with the force of law that there was no longer any difference between a good woman and a whore...

...The Portuguese are typically two-wage families...

...The double standard, however, has been with us for thousands of years, and the new morality indeed will have to be enforced for a time before it can begin to take hold...

...yet given my own feminist sympathies (and without wanting to get into legal debate here), such an approach seems a good rule of thumb to follow in rape trials, and it does not mean that verdicts will be a response to feminist "hysteria...

...The trial itself was certainly a victory for women...

...The Committee for Justice reported that it was generally satisfied that justice was being done in the courtroom, though both the Committee for Justice and the Portuguese-American Defense League were critical of the press...

...of Political Science, Brown University, 1979...

...Southeastern Massachusetts towns have been the home of Portuguese immigrants for more than 100 years...

...212...

...And the sharp distinction between "good" women and "bad" women has eroded...

...As this local conflict captured the attention of the media, national publicity intensified the local conflict...

...Many of the jurors were workingclass...

...Today women have better labor-market opportunities than ever before, and are encouraged, by the wider community, to get an education and be independent...

...Yet she violated the tenets of decency while the American courts punished the men who were just playing by the rules...