Ok, and then I can assume that everyone else is also using the exact same source for their definitions?
Statutory rape means an illegal sexual relationship with someone below the age of consent. It means that the underage person consented, but that consent was nullified by statute (law).
Forcible rape means using physical force to perform a sex act with someone who has not given consent, or (to some extent) using physical, emotional or verbal force to obtain consent unfairly and illegally.
For example, having sex with a consenting underage girl is statutory rape, but forcing an underage girl to consent to sex by threatening to kill her is forcible rape.
You can’t rape the willing. Except by legally defining a consensual act as “rape”, and that’s purely arbitrary, so no, rape is not rape, not when you drag purely legal definitions of the term into it.
And if you want to claim that it’s rape because the law says it is, then you are justifying the old misogynist laws that claimed that a husband can’t rape his wife.
They sound like fine definitions to me.
Will you now stop using the term “rape” and start using the term “statutory rape” when it comes to the cases being discussed here?
Sure, if you like. But what’s the difference? That’s an honest question.
I was going to ask why you wanted him or her to stop using rape, but then I figured it out so will explain it for his or her benefit: when you use the term rape to refer to statuory rape, you are insulting real rape victims by equating what happened to them with pretty trivial stuff like this.
No, that is NOT an honest question, because you’ve already been told the answer.
One, forcible rape, is objectively rape. The other, statutory rape is only “rape” because the law says so.
Edit : And what River Hister says too. “Statutory rape” should not be called rape; the name should be changed to something more honest, and something that trivializes REAL rape less.
They shoulda just called it “statutory nookie”.
I don’t mean the difference between the definition of the two types of rape, I mean why is it important that I explicitly use the term “statutory rape” over the term “rape”. I’m not trying to be difficult and I’m more than willing to use the desired term, I’m just wondering why it is so important in this thread, when, ultimately, with regard to the original subject matter, what is being discussed is the sexual violation of one person by another. Is it just that the term “statutory rape” is more accurate than “rape”?
Yes. They are two different crimes entirely.
Really? You don’t think there’s any difference at all between having consensual sex with someone below the age of consent, and holding a woman down and forcing yourself on her? If you met a girl on the day before her eighteenth birthday, and she wants to have sex with you, do you really think there’s a qualitative moral difference in the act if you wait 24 hours or not? There’s a legal difference, sure, and I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be, but there’s a huge gap between having consensual sex with a teenager, having forcible sex with an adult, and having any kind of sex with a pre-pubescent child. The latter two are never, under any circumstances, acceptable. But the former is basically a necessary legal fiction. Everyone matures at a different rate. Some people are, in fact, capable of making informed decisions about their sex lives at the age of fourteen. Some people aren’t capable of doing that at forty. Age of consent laws are an attempt to strike a legislative balance between protecting people whose physical maturity has outstripped their mental maturity, and allowing adults to do what they want with their own bodies. The arbitrary nature of these laws is obvious just by looking at the patchwork of consent laws within our own borders, where the age of consent ranges from 18 to 14, often with different ages for girls than for boys within the same state. (Interestingly, in those states, the age of consent for girls is always lower than it is for boys.)
Now, these laws are important, and I’m not saying we should just let people break them willynilly, but there is room for debate over where the line should be drawn, and it’s not necessarily the death knell for civilization if the line is drawn somewhere South of eighteen. Acting like there’s no difference between a guy who wants to have entirely consensual sex with what he believes to be a fourteen year old girl, and someone who snatches a woman off the street and keeps her locked in a closet does nothing to help sober study of the issue. It’s just panicked fear-mongering, and is ultimatly more harmful than any of these poor schlubs who have been suckered in by Chris Hanson and his arboreal police force.
Because it isn’t violation. The other person consented and wanted it, but the law said “No.”. There are no feelings of violation on the part of the ‘statutory victim’. Obviously I’m generalizing a bit here, but the point is they wanted to have sex at the time. The victim’s desires are not being subverted or violated.
Not really, no, ultimately.
While you raise excellent points and point out grey areas that do exist, my personal sentiment is that those areas have evaporated when we are down around the 14 year old mark.
Wow. Ignorance: 1. Reason: zip.
Your “personal sentiment” doesn’t change the fact that there’s an objective difference between using force, and between consensual sex by someone who consents, but the law chooses to pretend otherwise.
So, your position is that South Carolina and the entire nation of Canada have legalized rape?
I get that there are huge practical differences between s-rape and f-rape, but to me there is no difference in the sense that a violation has occurred. Upthread the point was made that in s-rape there is no violation. I disagree with that. A person can be violated and not know it or feel it.
In what sense, then have they been violated?