Legally justified homicides are not murder. Murder is a legal term, meaning an unlawful killing. You might want to argue about 1st vs 2nd vs 3rd degree murder.
But I would put rape on par with torture, and depending on the degree of torture maybe even below it on the evil scale.
The way I see it is that rape is just a further degree of sexual assault. Supposing a man forces himself on a woman but doesn’t actually penetrate her. Is the assault suddenly magnitudes worse once he penetrates her? If he assaults her to the point of torture, is that a lesser crime than a penetration?
To me, the degree of physical and psychological harm is the determining factor. And there are things besides rape than can cause more of both.
I would not agree with that as a blanket statement.
Yes, but this is subject to a jury’s verdict. If I believed the jury got it wrong, it nevertheless results that the accused, who committed a justified (to my mind) homicide is, in fact, a murderer. To me, the person would certainly not be worse than a rapist.
More common are homicides with mitigating circumstances that don’t rise to level of justification, like the Jerome Ersland case. Such homicides can also be morally “better” than a rape.
Maybe a more valid statement would be “rapists are worse than murderers, in some cases”. You just can’t think of a justification for rape that doesn’t boil down to the perpetrator is just an evil fucker like you can for murder.
In general, I’d rather be raped than murdered, given no other options.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a Christian.
I just think it’s interesting that here we are, moralizing on the Dope about two different crimes and trying to decide which is worse, when the Christian bible makes it clear. There are no commandments with regard to rape. According the Christian scriptures, you may as well rape at will because there’s nothing in there about that, but murder is specifically set apart as a crime. Even though there’s plenty of both in that bible.
Upshot: If god commands you to do something, it’s okay. Even if god said “Do not kill!” But then later, “Oh, but kill this dude, kthxbai.”
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I always figured the whole “rape is worse than death” thing is a throwback to the days when rape was considered a property crime against men.
An unmarried young woman in a family often held value in a family, both in terms of honor and finances. A rape victim, however, would be considered unsuitable for marriage and become a burden to the family. So, for the family at least, it would be better to lose a daughter than to have a childless woman to support indefinitely.
Anyway, I’m always a little offended by that line of thought. Yes, rape is terrible. But yeah, no, my life is pretty damn important.
Well, there is the argument that a rape victim goes on suffering while a murder victim is just dead.
And I think that a lot of the extreme attitude* towards rape is due to decades of the women’s right movement pushing back against the indifference & victim blaming that was the historical norm. Which doesn’t contradict your point by the way; the thing about the property rights model of rape is that it generally only produces outrage when other men rape “your woman” and not just any woman. Which is when men from cultures like that often have little trouble raping other women themselves.
*I can’t think of the proper term; I want to say ‘demonization’, but that doesn’t sound right when applied to something that really is evil.
That is my post you’re quoting so I felt I should respond.
My reasoning is that rape is like torture, and as a civil society, we cannot condone torture as a means of punishment. That doesn’t mean its not fun to imagine it happening to bad people, but I would never, ever do anything to legalize or justify it in our society. Too often would it be abused, and that’s not paranoia, there are instances of it happening just from a few years ago. The possibility, even tiny, of it being used on the wrong person would be horrific.
Personally though, I would say yes, rape is worse, but with caveats.
I am an atheist so to me, death isn’t some hugely negative thing to be avoided and feared at all costs. Death, the state of being dead, is neutral to me. It is not a negative. Contrast that with dying, which is bad because you’re alive and around to suffer it.
Since most people consider rape bad, and because of the ability of the victim to suffer from it, I would agree. Rape is bad partly because you’re around to feel it. But if you’re dead? You can’t “feel” death. Its nothing, its the end, its ceasing to exist. So if you’re suddenly struck dead then its completely irrelevant to you because you’re not around to be all sad over your death. Thus, rape is worse. Torture is worse. Death is kind of just there.
Yet everyone doesn’t think like me, so the laws now are what they are partly because most people can and will move on from torture, from rape. Given the possibility of happiness post-rape, and the inability to do so with death, we consider death, the finality of it all, to be much worse. I wouldn’t be opposed to punishing rapists as if they killed someone though
And to add to what I said earlier, I can think of much worse acts against me, even as man, than rape. Like having your hands cut off or your eyes gouged out. Rape is a horrible crime, but let’s not get carried away.
While I can understand the concept put forth by people talking about the attitude of a rapist vs. a murderer, I also think it’s comparing apples and oranges. You might understand a murderer who finds his wife in bed with another man, flips out, and kills them both. You might have some understanding for someone who is seriously mentally ill and kills because of that. You’re probably not going to have any sort of understanding of someone who mugs someone and then kills them so there isn’t a witness or maybe someone who murders just because they’re sadists or whatever.
By the same token, we can break rape into those sorts of categories. I can have an understanding for someone who is accused of rape, but maybe she gave consent at the time but changed her story when family and friends became aware of the situation. Maybe he’s charged with rape because he’s 19 and she’s 16. Is it not possible someone could be mentally ill in such a way that they might rape someone for the same sorts of reasons they might kill someone in their illness? It’s quite a bit different from a man grabbing a woman in a dark alley, holding a knife to her throat, and having his way with her.
So, it’s just not a fair comparison to say a murder in the heat of passion is more understandable than a brutal rape. If we’re going to compare to a rapist who brags about it and posts pictures of it, they ought to be compared to a murderer who brags about it and posts pictures. To that end, there just isn’t a contest, I give you the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs, who attacked people completely at random, and brutally tortured and mutilated them to death on video camera, laughing and having a grand old time as they did it. Or I give you one of these school shootings like in Newtown or Virginia Tech.
Really, when you’re comparing brutal, unrepentent rapists to brutal, unrepentent murderers, you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel of human filth, and I’m not really sure what purpose it serves to try to decide that one is in real meaningful way a less disgusting human being. Even though I personally hold murder to be the highest crime and potentially punishable by death and not for rape, either criminal who would have such disregard for society as a whole and basic human rights as to think such depraved acts are the sorts of things one should be proud of are equally repulsive as. Really, such people are capable of doing just about anything society finds so morally reprehensible, the only difference is what they actually did.
That doesn’t quite match up. False accusations are possible with any crime. And don’t I think anyone is talking about statutory rape anymore then they are talking about negligent homicide. We are comparing someone who actually intentionally killed another human being to someone who actually forced someone to have sex with them. The mindsets are not the same.
Here is how I would put it: Who would you be willing to place more trust in: someone who killed someone in a moment of rage (unpremeditated murder), or someone who raped someone in a moment of moment of lust (again unpremeditated).
For the victim, murder is probably worse in most cases. But some people never truly get over rape and spend their life wishing they were dead, so I don’t think this question has a one size fits all answer.
Whichever is worse for the victim I couldn’t say, but the perpetrators of both are equally evil in my eyes. Both rape and murder involve actively choosing to take a human being’s personhood from them, to violate their most sacred rights irreversibly. I can’t even think of words that encompass the horror I feel thinking about what it must be like inside the head of someone who could do those things. I definitely think rape should be punishable by death (though only when 100% proven, obviously). Since death is pretty much the worst punishment we can dole out (short of getting creative but illegal), it doesn’t really matter which is worse - they both deserve death, even if some people think one deserves death more than the other.
There was a woman, not far from where I live, who got 30 years for raping a HS boy. I wouldn’t consider her a heinous person. A dummy, maybe. The target of a miscarriage of justice. But not heinous.
