How Leviticus of him.
Of course. You have never heard of the phrase “he said/she said”? One person says it was consensual sex, the other person says it was not. The one who says it was not should not get to put the other one in prison (or get them expelled from school) on her say-so alone.
It’s no different from other scenarios not involving rape. Let’s say I have an acquaintance over and we’re smoking a bowl. It’s Friday night and I just cashed my paycheck, so when I paid the weed dealer this acquaintance saw that I had a bunch of cash in my wallet. After the weed dealer leaves, the acquaintance pulls out a gun or knife and robs me of my cash.
I call the cops, they question him, and he says he came over and hung out, but no robbery occurred. He has no idea why I made up this crazy story.
Do you think he should be convicted solely on my testimony? I certainly don’t, although it would obviously be frustrating, maddening, to be in that situation.
To live in a free society with civil liberties and the right to privacy means sometimes (maybe even a lot of times) the guilty go unpunished. I prefer that over one where one person’s word can send another to prison, or one with cameras watching all of us all the time.
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Juries get to decide that, thankfully, not you. If they believe the accuser, and disbelieve the accused, then they can find the accused guilty.
Considering you also seem to oppose investigating rape claims for fear of harming the accused, is there any other crime you can think of where your default stance is to believe the accused over the accuser?
In the American justice system, if there are two people who testify about a crime, the victim and the alleged perpetrator, that does not lead to an automatic “reasonable doubt” and therefore not guilty verdict.
Instead, the finder of fact is allowed to weigh the testimony of both people. If they think the victim’s testimony is credible, and the defendant’s testimony is a self-serving lie, they are entitled to believe the victim and find the defendant guilty.
Yes, even though the defendant swears he didn’t do it.
How about all other crimes?
And I don’t oppose investigating rape claims. But as someone suggested, how about not setting up anonymous tiplines, and how about starting an investigation with a discreet questioning of the accused, so you can see if there’s any basis for going further?
And in Tom’s case, where they already ignored both those suggestions, how about once they learned he had an airtight alibi, they go around and tell the people in his dorm that this was so? Or at the very least, give him some kind of fucking official document testifying to this fact?
That may be so, although I haven’t heard about a lot of convictions on this basis alone. But I’m allowed to think it shouldn’t be so. Even eyewitness testimony is notoriously suspect (Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts | Scientific American); why on Earth should “beyond reasonable doubt” come down to “I have an inchoate feeling she’s telling the truth and he’s not” or (even worse) “I just believe all women who allege rape, by default, except perhaps if they are proven to be lying” (reversing the burden of proof). If the latter is a reasonable standard, why even bother with a trial? You can just do a kangaroo court proceeding like in the Hulu adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale”.
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Nice strawman.
The jury absolutely should not just assume that the supposed victim is telling the truth. They are entitled to hear the testimony given and weigh the evidence, even if that means believing one person is telling the truth and another is lying.
You can hear someone testify that they didn’t commit the crime, and decide that there is no reasonable doubt that their denial is a lie. That’s a power juries have in America. The mere fact of testifying “Nuh-uh” is not in itself enough to establish reasonable doubt. The jury has to actually evaluate the testimony.
Where is the strawman?
You have added “weigh the evidence” to “hear the testimony given”, when I made it clear I was talking about convicting based on testimony ALONE, plus the lack of counterevidence like my friend Tom being hundreds of miles away on the night in question.
You also don’t have to have a jury decide your fate. My friend’s brother was tried for murder because a baby died when his girlfriend was babysitting and he was there visiting her. He was one of the only Latinos in a very white and conservative town in the South, and there was sensational coverage in the media; so he didn’t think he could get a fair hearing from a local jury. So he opted for a bench trial and indeed was acquitted (I think it was highly suspect of the prosecutor to even try the case, and it bankrupted his family even though he at least won his freedom.)
And even in a jury trial, a judge can set aside a guilty verdict (though not the reverse), although if they did so in a rape case they’d have quite the Twitter mob howling for their scalp.
But fundamentally, I don’t know why you keep raising “is” when I am talking about “ought”. This tangent came about because someone raised the raw deal black defendants get in our criminal justice system, and I agreed but said it’s also trending that way for rape cases. Would you respond to the original person complaining about black defendants getting railroaded by pointing out what “is” rather than keeping it on the terms of what “ought” to be?
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Your friend was not convicted. He was questioned. Was he questioned by cops, whose techniques are roundly considered to be why rape victims don’t come forward, in a way that upset him? I can believe it. But as near as I can tell, he came through it fine. I wish, if your account is true, that he had mental health resources made available to him (guess what, in US colleges, we do this for both accuser AND accused).
I am frankly scared at the at the qualifying and hedging you are doing to resist the notion that rape is a real issue. Consider that the ‘rules’ as you see them are relics of a time when women weren’t allowed to enjoy sex, let alone sex outside of marriage. You don’t have to drug (and pushing alcoholic ‘punch’ qualifies) to get laid.
Boys, if a girl plays ‘hard to get,’ walk away. It’s really easy. And the reason why enthusiastic consent is trending as a concept is that it’s the approach that results in the least amount of harm, even if it means someone ends the night frustrated. ‘No means No’ is no longer the standard because people decided the way to avoid getting a no was to drug, trick, or coerce their victim into it. Please do even the most basic research on why we ended up where we are.
Also, full disclosure, I was pretty close to being **SLackerInc’s **level of clueless once upon a time. But as a man whose done this work for the past few years…let’s say my eyes are open as to what women deal with routinely. And of course, the caveat here is that I have seen these incidents across race, gender, and sexuality pairings, so please excuse the general, binary language.
Your view of what “ought” to be means that if a man and a woman are alone together in a room, and he grabs her and rapes her, he gets an automatic “not guilty” just by saying “Hey, it was consensual”. Automatic reasonable doubt, right?
I don’t think that’s a very reasonable standard. The jury–or finder of fact, I was using jury as shorthand for finder of fact–is entitled to listen to her story about how he raped her, and his story about “Nuh-uh, the bitch wanted it”, and make their own determination if his testimony raises reasonable doubt.
It might. It might not. But it’s up to the finder of fact.
The problem with your paradigm (and that’s a collective “your”) is that it puts, as I said, “best practices” (or what might be called “gentlemanly” behavior) in a box at one end of the spectrum and labels everything outside that box as a violent crime.
My STRONG belief (not cluelessness, a strong and well-thought-out opinion that differs from yours, thankyouveryfuckingmuch) is that there is a part of the spectrum where you treat people kindly and fairly, use empathy, apply the Golden Rule, etc. Then there is a LONG stretch of spectrum along which may lie insensitivity, duplicity, caddishness, emotional cruelty, and loutishness…but it’s a LONG way down that spectrum before you get to a crime. You can be a “bad guy” and leave a lot of pain in your wake and be completely within your legal rights.
Take whatsisname from “Master of None” as an example. Assuming the description of the evening is accurate, he acted very badly, and the whole thing is a very poor reflection on his character. I had always really liked him, and now I’m very disappointed in him.
But on feminist Twitter, they were calling this “rape”, and that’s absurd (even leaving aside my issue with the fact that the specific term “rape” has been muddled into referring to any type of sexual assault). He’s an entitled jerk, but not a criminal.
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Speaking of science fiction, it seems that the incorporated poster wants to make “The Handmaid’s tale” a reality. 
It is a bit better when he thinks in a future like “The machine stops”. But just as bad when thinking that IQ is destiny. *
- Based on a recent discussion about what will happen when the machines take over peacefully, and very likely on looking at other “science fiction” books like “The bell curve”.
I agree. And no court of law, and no college administration, would find him guilty of such. Good thing we don’t have to worry abut every single opinion voiced over Twitter, right?
I am being charitable in calling your views clueless, as it frees me from having to relegate you to being evil. I am pretty much fed up with people longing for the halcyon days of yore, especially when virtually every critique of modern life they hold is of the advances that disadvantage assholes.
You speak of your wide spectrum of civil and legal behavior, and I agree, generally. So, once upon a time, wives had no right to refuse sexual access to their husband; marital rape was not recognized. Now, it is. Are you upset about that, as well?
What does “feminist twitter” mean? A single person on twitter? A million? Because I read lots of feminist articles/blogs/tweets/etc., and I can’t recall a single prominent feminist calling it rape. Someone out there in the internets probably did, just by random chance alone. I’ve heard about all this supposed lumping in various jerky behavior with harassment/assault/rape (or harassment as assault and assault as rape) but I’ve barely, if ever, seen it. What I’ve seen is people making nuanced and reasonable criticisms of all types of bad behavior from famous people, like Al Franken and Aziz Ansari and others who are not accused of rape, and none or barely none that equates them with rapists like Cosby and Weinstein.
I prefer one where rapists don’t get to walk away laughing, as they *frequently *do today. If that means some rare false accusations, I can live with that.
It’s a question of scale - hundreds of millions, at least, of rape victims vs thousands, at most, of falsely accused.
Just want to point out that the topic did not naturally change. SlackerInc pulled out this entirely irrelevant anecdote about some guy accused of rape, with no connection whatsoever to the topic beforehand.
Not that I mind too much, because, even with that ridiculous topic change, SlackerInc still wound up twisting himself in so many knots that he wound up saying that rape should generally not be punished. Most rapes do not have a third party witness.
His arguments are so ridiculous he’s saying things he doesn’t even believe. I don’t know why you guys are even pretending like there’s anything else to say at this point. If he believed what he said, then someone could rape one of his kids, and if no one saw him do it, he’d be fine with that rapist still moving around.
I don’t really see a lot of difference in what he said and the ridiculousness of the paper towel tube incident.
Is it your dishonesty that’s showing, or just a distinct lack of perspicacity? Because while I’ve said plenty that’s controversial, and will continue to do so, there’s nothing I’ve said that remotely justifies this claim. For chrissakes, I’m married to a feminist who is the only one in her family (including numerous cousins her age and younger) to keep her own name—and not in that halfass way where she appends mine to hers. The kids even take her last name! (I grew up in a feminist household with a hyphenated name and found it unwieldy and unsustainable for future generations.)
I don’t even like porn with hair-pulling in it, or certainly not with the man’s hand on the woman’s throat (which seems to be getting increasingly common, alas).
It’s disingenuous to act as though opinions expressed by large numbers of influential people on Twitter have no impact.
No. It should be no more legal for a husband to rape his wife than to beat her. But I would issue a “slippery slope” caveat. I often walk by my wife, in the kitchen or wherever, and give her ass a squeeze. If I did that to a stranger, or a friendly acquaintance, it would be sexual assault, and rightly so. But I would hope we never get to a point where this would be prosecuted when a husband does it.
Of course, it’s hard to imagine a wife calling the cops on her husband for this. But maybe she just discovered, unbeknownst to him, that he has been having an affair—and she wants to get him back on her way out.
Of course, if a guy pulls this on his technically-still-wife at the meeting to sign divorce papers, or when picking up the kids for visitation, that’s another matter.
Do you disagree with any of that?
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For those of you pooh-poohing what “a few people” are saying on Twitter, or wondering what I even mean by “feminist Twitter”, this tweet (by someone I have never even heard of) got 139,000 likes:
This despite the fact that she only has 27,000 followers!
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I didn’t see BigT’s comment until now. It’s not true that I raised this issue out of nowhere, but I don’t have it in me to go back and provide the “tick tock”.
Go ahead and start a separate Pit thread if you want, T: it’s a good and important topic to discuss.
And I do believe everything I say. There are a lot of things that could happen to my kids that would enrage me, and I’d have a hard time being dispassionate. That’s why we don’t leave it to families of victims to investigate, prosecute, and punish crimes. It’s amazing that I would even have to explain this to you.
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Well, not my problem that you seem to show all how you can wilfully miss a smilie to ignore that it was a joke, with a side of sarcasm and exageration. I would think it is more dishonest to ignore a joke just to climb to your cross even higher.