Okay.
Situation 1: Rape.
Man tells woman he’ll kill her if she doesn’t have sex with him in order to get her to have sex with him.
Situation 2: Not Rape.
Man tells woman he is a race car driver in order to get her to agree to have sex.
I think this situation is closer to situation 1 as there is the fear of death involved.
Maybe. In Colorado, the first definition of sexual assault is:
I think in the case we’re discussing, that would apply (in short, what he said was, you’re going to die if you don’t have sex with me). In your example, not really. It’s dishonest, and morally lacking, but I don’t think it’s sexual assault in a legal sense.
Far from it. Using Colorado law again as an example, we find:
as compared to
(in short, it’s a misdemeanor if it’s statutory, and a higher grade of felony if you use weapons, cause serious injury, or involve more people.)
Re. the rap sheet - fair enough - UK law is far less indicative AFAIK.
Hey, no worries. Since I know next to nothing about UK law, I’ll leave that for someone more knowledgeable. If it’s the case the they aren’t very differentiated, then I’ll agree that change is needed, but I still feel that it’s appropriate to have some sort of penalty for a “bad touch,” as it were.
I’d have to agree that this is rape because there was the false threat of death.
If a man held a woman at gunpoint with an unloaded or fake gun, and made her give him sexual favors, it’s rape.
This situation is much less violent, and she shouldn’t have believed him, but she was still given a threat to her life.
Simply lying about your personal situation (I’m rich, baby! I’m the CEO!), isn’t rape, because the partner wasn’t coerced. It is highly immoral, however.
I think that you could argue that lying about one’s personal situation is coercion of a sort, though compel might be more apt in this case. All the same, I think I’m in the minority on this one, and I’m not sure that I really want to go start a GD thread on it. So for now, I’ll stick with saying that just lying to get sex isn’t sexual assault in a legal sense, and leave it at that.
It was definitely rape, because of the threat of death.
We need to have a very plain and simple sex abuse law against any man lying, or misrepresenting himself, just to get into womens pants. Using fraud to commit a sex act, should be treated under the law, for what it is, a sex crime.
Dubay walked up to his victim, now 29, and told her he had supernatural powers and that she would die in nine days.
It’s hard for me to see how this could fit into the definition of rape in countries that have modern education. The story would be considered preposterous.
If in Trinidad such things are commonly believed in, perhaps it could be considered rape by deception. But apparently two juries so far haven’t seen it that way.
We’ve discussed similar stuff before. See Could this be considered a form of rape?
Interestingly, we covered something like this in my torts class, albeit from the question of a civil violation, not criminal. Judge Posner gave some interesting analysis on consent using two examples:
A) Man hires prostitute; pays with $100 bill that he knows is counterfeit.
B) Doctor has sex with patient under pretense of rendering medical treatment
He says that the first is fraud, but not a battery. The woman wants to have sex; she just wants to get paid for it. In the second, the woman doesn’t want sex, she wants medical treatment.
The question is, what situations does B cover? Rape while under anesthesia, certainly. But what about the therapist who tells his patient that her relationship problems are caused by unreleased sexual tension, which she can cure by having sex with him? She wants medical treatment, but she understands that she is having sex.
Anyway, in this case, I say it is rape. If a man poisons a woman, and then says he’ll only give her the antidote if she has sex with him, that’s rape. If he makes her believe that he has poisoned her (although he hasn’t), it’s still rape. This is pretty much what the guy has done here.
“If you don’t have sex with me something will kill you in 9 days.”
How is that different from:
“If you don’t have sex with me I will kill you in 9 days”?
The woman consented to sex because the man made her fear for her life. The law doesn’t care whether the gun was empty or not.
Devil’s advocate:
He claimed that if she didn’t have sex with him she would die in 9 days.
She had sex with him.
She didn’t die.
Prove that he lied.
Good point. The authorities seem educated enough to know it’s horsecrap, but apparently believe the general public is not. Presumably the folks on the juries were split between those who know better and think she should have known better, those who know better but didn’t expect her to, and perhaps those who don’t know better and believe him.
Unless she’s mentally deficient, I think it comes down to whether she’s expected to see it as a scam. In the U.S., I would expect any adult to know better than to even begin to believe the kind of line she was fed. In Trinidad, it may well be different, but obviously some adults know better.
Had it just been that, there would have been no case against him, the woman would have wandered off thinking “ohh goody I aint gonna die”
But he also took her jewelry to be “cleansed” and failed to return it. So if half of his story was crap, why should we believe the other half, he has already proved he cant be trusted by failing to return the jewelry.
Silly boy, he might have been onto a good thing otherwise… :rolleyes:
Not rape in Scotland. Rape here is sexual intercourse without the consent of the woman. (The definition is a little more complicated, but I am focusing on the “consent” element for this discussion)
There need not be force.
If deception was involved but the sex was still consensual, it is not rape.
And I cannot pass up the opportunity to mention the old joke - It was rape! The cheque bounced…
This makes we wonder, are there stricter laws against violating the mentally impared? I know in the US drunks are protected, but what about people with low intelligence? It doesn’t seem right that you would only be protected from your own stupidity if you had control over it.
The famous three words: “I love you” have probably been used more than any other to get someone into bed. A lot of times, the person didn’t ACTUALLY love the other person, and just wanted to get into her pants. How do you prove fraud?
Am I the only one who mis-read the guy’s name as Dubya?
If the woman isn’t mentally retarded, I have to say not rape. Fraud, yes, but not rape.
It’s more like telling a woman you are the boss of a gang, and unless she sleeps with you Bad Things Will Happen.
I disagree, since apparently the guy didn’t tell she had used some sorcery on her, but that she was the victim of some sorcery, and that he was going to help her out.
Well…That’s how I understood the story, but rereading the OP, it’s not clearly stated if he said he had used sorcery on her which would result in her dying soon or if he said she was the victim of someone else (or of a devil) and that she needed help.