A common response against victim blaming is “Why not teach men not to rape?”
I don’t think you can.
Can you teach a murderer not to murder? You can try, but they aren’t going to listen. You can try to teach a thief not to steal, but if they want to do it they will. The solution that might be most effective is educating men as to what does, and does not, constitute consent, which I guess could be construed as “teaching men not to rape” but as for the mugger waiting in a dark alley or drunken men at parties waiting to prey on passed out girls, they’re lost causes.
The thing to do is to prosecute the hell out of them and send them to jail and actually do it rather than a slap on the wrist, and for everyone else, be equipped with means of self defense (pepper spray, knife, self-defense mechanisms).
Instead, let’s work on reforming the justice system so that they take victims seriously, and put the rapist right in jail where they belong.
The immense majority of men do not rape, you know… are you a guy with lots of rape fantasies, by chance? (I’m hoping they’re fantasies) You remind me of those people who make lots of noise about “fighting homosexuality’s temptations”, temptations which for the immense majority of the population do not exist.
I’m not saying all men rape or that only men rape.
But the common feminist argument is “Don’t tell women how to not be raped, teach men how not to rape” as if it is possible to teach men not to rape and then suddenly no one is ever raped.
It won’t mean that nobody is ever raped. But there is a lot of cultural baggage (sometimes referred to as “rape culture”) that tells men that a woman’s consent isn’t always necessary. There are jokes about passed-out drunk girls in movies, there’s the whole “she’s asking for it” business about short skirts, there’s the “stalk her until she loves you” story routine, and so on. A lot of guys who commit date rape have used all these cultural bits to rationalize their actions to the extent that they don’t even admit to themselves that they’ve committed rape.
The education idea is to remove the support for such rationalizations. Make it starkly clear–in a way that it really should be now but isn’t always–that there’s no cultural support for rape, that raping a drunk woman is still rape, that treating “no” as “maybe” is still rape, and so on. Attach that word “rape” to such actions, and more guys will recoil from them.
That’s the plan, and it seems pretty reasonable to me.
Of course it’s not possible to prevent all people from raping. And yes, of course people in certain circumstances and societies become rapists who would not become rapists in other circumstances.
If the argument is, “would better education produce a 100% desirable result”? The answer is going to be no, almost 100% of the time for any subject matter.
But a lack of 100% efficacy doesn’t alone mean we shouldn’t attempt it.
Yes, it is possible, though it’s not as simple as “anti-rape lessons.” It’s a cultural change that has to be made, and the results will take time to appear.
I think that certain types of rapists are mentally deranged and therefore could not be reasoned with. From what I gather the majority of rapes are not this type (I could be wrong) and are more along the lines of date rape or getting a women incapacitated via drugs/alcohol. I think these types of rapists could be reasoned with. It should be looked at as morally despicable to take advantage of someone who is near comatose and pounded into everyone’s head that this is unacceptable.
Where is the “Yes, for another reason” option?
Reasoning with someone is not the only way to teach someone something.
I taught my dog not to get in the trash. I doubt that he has the slightest idea why even now.
Also on that lesson plan has to be the notion that it’s okay for women to like sex, and that we do, in fact, like sex, and that if you don’t “take advantage” of tonight’s opportunity to get laid, it won’t be your last chance ever. That’s the disturbing refrain I hear from our home grown SDMB date rapists - this idea that if he believes her no to be a no, some *really *tragic thing might happen - he might not get laid tonight! :eek:
This predator/prey metaphor we’ve got for gender relations around sex is pretty horrifying, if you think about it. Letting it be known that women do like sex and encouraging women to be *vocal *about wanting sex (when they do want sex) is very important if we’re going to convince men that silence does not equal consent. Only consent equals consent.
Yes, I think it’s *possible *to create a new taboo - a real taboo - against rape, just like we’ve done about having sex with your sister. But we’re not there yet, and it’s something that’s going to have to be installed from birth, not starting at college age. All we can do at college age and older is try to educate and prevail on intellectual and legal grounds.
I don’t know. I’d say almost all people in America know it is wrong to rape yet it still happens. By the same token, most theives know it is wrong to steal but do so anyway. I think you can teach right and wrong but actions can be seperate from that knowledge.
If it’s established that they aren’t going to listen because they are a murderer, then prosecution won’t decrease cases, it will just punish those found guilty. It will deter many of those who exist in the grey area, though, so assuming they have any cognitive ability, they’ll understand authority and discipline. This means they can be taught.
Getting back to the topic, not all cultures/societies have the same definition of rape. For this to be true, there has to be learned behavior, it’s not just innate impulse.
That’s pretty much what is being discussed. It’s about giving people a better idea of what consent really is and what’s a good attitude toward having sex with somebody else.
Comparisons between rape and murder or theft aren’t really apt because the main issue here is consent. There’s no communication issue with murder or theft. Like I was saying in another thread, I think we can treat it as a given that some rapists are irredeemably horrible and won’t benefit from education on the subject - but I have a great deal of trouble believing that’s anywhere near all of them.
And guess what? Focusing on “the mugger waiting in a dark alley” misses the point. Most rapes are not committed by strangers in the dark. The “guy waiting for a girl who is passed out drunk” thing is probably more common, but with rape (as with sexual abuse, for that matter) the criminal is more likely to be someone the victim knows. So the focus shouldn’t be on random psychopaths who can’t be reached. There is no crime that you can prevent 100% of the time. That doesn’t mean you can’t deter it.
As always, it’s not one or the other. There’s crime prevention and there’s prosecution. If you don’t think what you are doing is rape, you’re not going to fear prosecution.
Good ideas, but they don’t always help. And again, that only comes into play in certain situations.
Yes, but we all spend time with our children telling them not to steal. I would wager that such instruction lowers the frequency of theft. By the same token, I do think we could reduce the number of date rapes and similar crimes through education and cultural shifts. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if the rate of such crimes has gone done considerably in last 50 years.
I imagine there is some kind of continuum - the extremes of which are occupied by people who a)would never wish to violate another person, and b)don’t understand or give a shit about how their actions or desires affect anyone else.
I don’t believe you probably can educate or condition the people at the extremes, but it seems reasonable that there must be some group in the middle (who may or may not commit an act of violation) who would be amenable to change - if not actual change of desire or motive, change of behaviour.
Humans are animals; animals exhibit all kinds of abhorrent behavior - killing the young of others; displays of power and dominance that lead to (biological) humiliation, injury and death. Can any animal behavior like this be fully suppressed?
Our culture can reinforce a non-rape set of values more strongly, and should. But it feels like we can improve it a bit, on a relative basis, not eliminate it.
I wonder what would happen to our animal wiring if we set the goal of fully eliminating it? Sounds like A Clockwork Orange - suppressing animal behaviors leads to other consequences.
Why is this said in every thread about rape? Of course rape is often about wanting sex. And it’s not hard to keep up, that’s been common knowledge for years. The thing about it just being about power was just a short-lived thing that some people believed. It’s really obvious, for example, that most date rapists would still be interested if their dates consented. For them, rape is a second resort.
If you can find anytime on this board where I have ever said that rape isn’t about sex, I’ll send you a cookie. MOST rape is about sex, at least in part. Date rape and acquaintance rape and familial rape and statutory rape are almost always entirely about sex.
The canard of “rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power,” only applies to a minority of stranger and soldier rapes, and I’m not even convinced it’s true about them. There are many ways to express power, and only one of them incorporates sex. My feminist grandmothers may have said rape isn’t about sex because they were primarily concerned with forcible stranger rape. Rape counselors sometimes say that because they too buy into the notion that Good Girls don’t have sex, so telling rape victims they’re the victims of a misuse of power, not sex, may help them let themselves off the hook for having had (very non-consensual) sex and allow them to remain Good Girls. But I don’t think they are correct, and I haven’t since I was able to think critically for myself on the subject and realize what a load of narrow minded bullshit that reasoning is.