Sorry to hear that. Best wishes for a complete recovery.
It’s your own fault, you know. What have I told you about eating red meat?
Heh. Surprisingly (or not), some people (my mother for one), have expressed things pretty close to that.
I’m just a little touchier than usual because of it, I guess.
OMG, Alice, are you serious? Fuck, I am SO sorry. I honestly thought you were being fecetious. 
Sadly, yes. I had thought about posting a MPSIMS thread about it but wound up dumping it here instead. Crap. Now I’ve hijacked my own thread.
Um, can we get back to how prisoner6655321 is dumb?
Jesus, alice, I’m really sorry.
Okay, back on topic-the majority of rapes that take place are ones where the victim KNOWS her attacker. Yes, there are things people do that are stupid that put themselves in danger-like I wouldn’t go to various areas all alone after dark. That’s just common sense.
However, even if someone did so, all she’s guilty of is BAD JUDGEMENT, or being naive. Whereas a lot of ultra-conservative religious fundies will actively say the woman brought it on herself. I’m gonna go and page Lissla Lissar, she and I ran up against a group like that once.
Everything wrong? You mean breaking a law? How can I live in freedom, come and go when I please and where I please, as long as it is legal, and still be considered “wrong”?
I am not wrong in wanting to be able to go for a walk after midnight when the city is quiet and the fumes from traffic have lifted. I am not wrong in believing that my freedom never prevokes a crime. It’s right there in the opening of the Declaration of Independence in the part about Liberty. There is no footnote about daylight and good neighborhoods.
I have a right not to be raped and not to be blamed at all for crimes committed against me.
And just for the record, when an attempt was made, I was inside a building with people in adjacent rooms. It wasn’t late at night. It was early in the evening. The lights were on; he turned them off. I was wearing a dress that came down to my ankles. And there wasn’t lust in his eyes; it was pure maliciousness.
Geez, the next thing you know, y’all will be blaming teachers who get beaten up when they teach in tough schools.
I just thought I’d throw a stat or something in here…
(http://www.icasa.org/statsFacts.asp?parentid=532)
meaning the woman was targeted by her rapist, not because she was wearing a hoochie skirt (she could have been), but because the rapist KNEW HER, had probably talked to her and targeted her.
A small number of rapes are committed by random strangers who see a woman alone in a bad part of town in a miniskirt and decide to go for it. Does this mean women should hang out in bad parts of town, on their own, in miniskirts. Uh, no.
But it also shows that rather than dressing sexy, actually meeting new people is probably a much bigger risk to being raped.
I’m just wondering who all of you are arguing so vehemently with.
No-one is saying that women who get raped ought to be blamed for it; no-one is saying that women don’t have the right to not be victims.
The factors brought up here have all been mentioned before - as a matter of fact, by me, in my reply earlier in this thread to Bippy:
Once again, there is a distinction between moral blame and causation. I actually think that everyone here is in this thread is on the same page - we just have different ways of expressing it.
Well, just so we can be clear then. A woman in a miniskirt not only isn’t morally responsible for her rape, nor did she cause it. The man who attacked her did.
Right? That’s what we’re all saying, right? We all agree?
Absolutely.
That’s because that wasn’t my claim.
What I was getting at was, robbery has material goods as its object. Rape has a human body as its object. It’s possible to rob someone without making any physical contact with them. It’s possible to steal something when there’s no one around at all.
Rape has a person’s body as an object. You can’t rape someone without touching them, and that person can fight back or get away. It takes time, during which someone else might observe and intervene. There are men who choose not to rape a particular person for those reasons. Therefore, I find your robbery analogy flawed.
(I was once in a situation where I could have been raped, but I yelled bloody murder and attracted a hell of a lot of attention. Believe me, it would have happened, but I think the guy was counting on my being too intimidated to protest. I wasn’t, so he had to stop.)
alice, sorry to hear your bad news.
Of course she isn’t morally responsible and of course she didn’t “cause” it. The man who did the raping is responsible and he caused it.
It is also true that the way a woman is dressed may in some cases have been one of the factors that went into the rapist’s choice of victim. It is thus a risk factor.
I explained my position on this in the quote I reproduced above.
Some factors which go into a rapist’s choice of victim are not things that the victim may take any measures to prevent. The victim cannot determine her own relatives, for example; or whether, as a result of poverty, she lives in a seedy and dangerous part of town.
She can, however, take measures for her own safety in other ways - choice of dress depending on the risk, choice of activity in accordance with the risk.
I think this is the nub of the argument. We are all confusing proximate cause and causation generally.
Here is a definition of “proximate cause”:
Now, this is a definition from the law of negligence which deals with accidents, and we are talking about a criminal act - rape is intentional - but bear with me.
In this case, everyone agrees that the proximate cause of rape is the rapist. It is his intention, and that alone, which causes the crime to be committed.
However, that is the end of the “chain of causation”, not the beginning. Like the ball rolling down the hill in the example above, certain choices a woman makes may “lead the ball to the stranger’s hand”.
Some are obviously not ones which can be predicted in advance by the woman. For example, if a woman decides to stay indoors and a rapist breaks into her house, that cannot be known in advance. How could a woman know that staying indoors would lead to being attacked?
On the other hand, some choices clearly increase the risk. Deciding to dress sexy and wander back alleys in a rough part of town, for example.
Nevertheless, these choices and events are at the beginning of the “chain of causation”. The proximate cause is always the rapist in every case. In the example quoted above, he is the one who “picks up the ball and breaks the window with it”.
Making risk-increasing choices simply “puts the ball closer to his hand”.
Does that make sense?
And date rape? When a man rapes his girlfirend, wife or date because she said yes but then changed her mind to no? Sure, the guy has no right to go ahead with the sex act when the woman says no, but do you really think in these cases that it’s not about sex?
Thank you Alice.
This is exactly the sort of logic that groups like the Taliban employ to oppress women.
We are so seductive (unless of course, we’re draped head to toe) that men, are incapable of not raping us.
And yes, this attitude is highly insulting to men too.
You know, I’ve spent days on beaches where women were skantily clad or even topless and not one man was so overpowered by his ‘natural’ urges that he had to throw one to the sand and rape her.
I thought prisoner was a she.
Daniel
Yes. I really think it’s not about sex. I think it’s about physically expressing frustration and anger and an inability to deal with those strong emotions in any other way.
No angry response here, Maureen. What you said is exactly correct. Well stated.
If this is true, why not express this frustration as ‘normal’ violence (assault)? Why the added violation if sexual release is not part of the rapists’ motivation?
I agree with your other points, but I do tend to think that acquaintance rape, especially between peers (excluding family, minors, etc.) is a different animal than other forms of rape in terms of motivation. I think that there is a definite sexual component there, and a lot less off the ‘power’ angle than you’d think.
And yes, I agree with the OP as well- prisoner was way out of line, especially given the minor status of the victim. But that only serves to underline his/her assholishness- the crime is still heinous no matter the age of the victim.
Stonebow, if the male in question did not have rape in mind from the second he met his date, then I would probably be able to agree with you. And while I’m sure it happens that some guys just don’t stop when they’re asked to, that’s not really the definition of “date rape.”