Bloomsbury to publish Greer's controversial rape essay

Bloomsbury will publish Germaine Greer's controversial essay On Rape in September.

The independent publisher will release it as a hardback priced £12.99, a few days after Melbourne University Publishing (MUP), which bought it earlier this year.

Bloomsbury publishing director Michael Fishwick bought UK and Irish rights for an undisclosed sum from MUP. In Australia and New Zealand, the book will be published by MUP on 1st September, while Bloomsbury will publish on 6th September.

In the title, Greer writes that "centuries of writing and thinking about rape—as inflicted by men on women—have got us nowhere".

"Bestial or banal, a proven rape may carry a prison sentence of many years, even life, but very few rapes ever find their way into a court of law," she said. "The prosecution of a selected minority of cases seldom results in a conviction. The crucial issue is that of consent, which is thought by some to be easy to establish and by others as impossible."

"Rape statistics remain intractable. Again and again crime surveys tell us that one woman in five will experience sexual violence. Despite all efforts to root sexual assault out of workplaces and colleges, predatory individuals still inflict lasting damage with apparent impunity. The only result of desperate attempts to apportion blame and enact chastisement has been an erosion of the civil rights of the accused.

"Sexual assault does not diminish; relations between the sexes do not improve; litigation balloons. There has to be a better way," writes Greer.

News of the book was first reported by the Sydney Morning Herald in January as part of an interview exposing Greer's controversial views criticising what she called the "whingeing" #MeToo movement, two months before the MUT announcement was made.

Greer’s comments about rape have been criticised, with Everyday Sexism Project founder Laura Bates writing in May in the Guardian that it was “damaging and dangerous to suggest that rape is not a violent crime with a devastating long-term impact for many survivors.”