Did half the town Rape this girl?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
201

Seriously, this shit again? I’ve said this before, but the funny thing about sexual assault is how many people don’t need a metaphor to understand it, they can just recferencel personal experience, or that of a close female friend or family member. It’s so simple, they don’t even need to compare being born with a vagina or having breasts to carrying money or wearing jewelry or driving a fancy car through the ghetto.

And besides, in most cases the scenario is closer to having a piggybank in your childhood bedroom, carrying a purse while on a date or having a joint bank account with your boyfriend or spouse.

Anyway, this thread has gotten surreal. While I agree that the Times article’s quotes showed the neighborhood citizens in a bad light, quotes are selected. Not everything’s taken down, not everything goes in the finished article. The bit about her clothing was absolutely useless and added nothing, unless you really needed to know that she was brutally raped, had been rumored to be ‘in a relationship’ (getting raped) by a teenager, and didn’t don a burqa. As someone else pointed out, if people knew so much about what was going on, they knew she was 11. Doesn’t matter if she was wearing pinafores or booty shorts, but if some 11- or 12-year-old reads that articles, that’s not the message they’ll get, and if it’s something they already believe or are told, it will reinforce their skewed view (not that the myth that revealing clothes make men rape women isn’t already aliveand well).

Yes! Tell 11-year-olds not to hang out with older boys or men in their 20s, or let them touch them in their ‘private place,’ or threaten to kill her before a gang rape. But anyone on here who seriously thinks that was the problem – that her kind, loving parents, friendly local police force and close-knit community cared for her in every way but forgot that little bit of advice – is a damned fool.

202

Au-contraire…I would suggest that someone, either in the family or very close to it has been teaching this little girl a shitload about life.

Unfortunately, not quite the right lessons. :frowning:

203

There’s so much wrong here…

204

How would that have stopped her from being gang raped?

205

I have made it clear, multiple times, that it wouldn’t have. You can’t prevent every rape, that’s the point! What you can do is mitigate the chance of it happening, and if (or in this case, WHEN) that fails the best thing you can do is report it. It would not have prevented the rape of this girl, but it could prevent subsequent rapes of her by these people (such as if she had reported the 19 year old to begin with), or rapes of other girls by the same perpetrators. I thought I made it clear that I was talking about things she could have done AFTER the fact, not to prevent the rape altogether.

Like I said in my first post: We can teach little girls things to mitigate the chances of them getting raped, but that will not always work because of situations like violent gang rape. What we CAN do however, is ALSO instruct them how to react to it, how to deal with the aftermath, that IF it happens you should inform the police because not only will it increase the chances (CHANCES, not "make a certainty) of the perpetrators getting caught and being unable to harm you again, it also increases the chances of the world becoming a safer place for other little girls. You can only control yourself, there are things you can do to lower your chance of getting raped however slightly, and if you find yourself getting raped one day because the dice landed the wrong way, you can use it to help make the world a better place for yourself and others in the future. I’m not saying it’s this girl’s fault if these people hadn’t gotten caught and had raped another little girl, I’m saying that teaching little girls these things can lower the chances of rape for everyone.

206

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but not everybody lives in the fantasy land that you do.

Gee, do you think it might be a tad more complicated than that, in the real world? You know, where women and girls do in fact do all the right things, still get raped, still get called liars, and turn up as the stars of some loser’s plaint of, “I was falsely accused!”

Find yourself getting raped, huh? By what? Shitty passive voice sentences that desperately try to conceal that men are raping women and girls?

And if you have to say, “I’m not saying she asked for it,” before going on to say, “But she really did all this stuff wrong,” then the only person you’re fooling is yourself. The only thing more passive aggressive is ‘Just sayin’.’

Just sayin’ and all.

207

Healthy two-parent families? Stop pimping conservative crap.

No one has said ‘boys will be boys.’ But I have repeatedly pointed out that rape is what the rapist does. It is not the act of the victim. How does one catch rapists? By studying them. But what’s going on here? Blaming the victim.

208

So men are provoked beyond reason by those slutty bitches doing slutty things like wearing fuck me clothes and passing out in dark alleys.

is English a language you aspire to? Because no one who either speaks and reads English accurately could say the things you claim I said about victims, and no one who’s not vile could blame victims the way you do.

209

Absolutely—What a tragedy it would be if more children were raised in a stable, loving home with both a mother and a father acting as role models, providing guidance and care.

The horror…

210

It’s certainly more complicated in the real world. I’m relaxing the problem, it’s a perfectly valid problem solving technique. You can’t take into account every factor, that way lies madness. Shitty stuff happens, people might not believe her, but if you’re looking for a maximum expected good, you should perform the action that has the highest chance of getting you there. Is there a chance that the police will laugh at you and then tell the rapist and he’ll come to your house and kill you for tattling? Yes. But if you don’t report it the chances of them getting caught and you being safe plummet. It’s all about maximizing expected outcome, and just riding the middle road can sometimes be worse than taking the action that can result in the most good, but possibly, on rare occasions, have negative side effects.

First off, the passive voice is underrated and I fail to see what my writing style has to do with anything. Second off, I’m not concealing anything, men rape women (women rape men, men rape men, women rape women, men rape girls, etc). The point I’m trying to get across is that in any system that contains a factor you completely have no influence over, that factor may as well be random. Yes, in reality the man made a choice to rape the woman, but in the woman’s personal “world,” as an agent she didn’t have any control over the circumstance so talking about the man’s choice like the girl can control it is futile. It basically IS random chance FROM THE LOCAL PERSPECTIVE OF THE AGENT (girl) IN QUESTION. The girl can’t control how the boy was raised, it’s completely irrelevant to talk about in this instance, from her local perspective she was the victim of a chance, a whim, a quirk in statistics in which another agent enacted a negative action against her with seemingly no rhyme or reason. I’m not saying it WAS random chance, just that from the perspective the most important agent in this scenario, it may as well have been.

Like I said, she did something wrong, but it’s not her fault. I never said she asked for anything, where are you even getting that? Her parents and teachers bear a small weight of responsibility for any repeated occurrences because they didn’t teach her to get a responsible third party involved, just like the third party would bear a brunt of responsibility because they didn’t investigate the situation thoroughly enough if they dismissed her. I will, bluntly, state: She did something wrong, but the level of wrongness we’re talking about is asking “what’s 5 times 5” and she says “2” because nobody ever taught her what multiplication is. On a test, it’s still a wrong answer, but it’s her instructor’s fault for not teaching her the information. And the case where she calls a responsible third party and they blow her off is if she answered “25” on the test and the teacher still marked her off just 'cause. She is in no way AT FAULT, her nurturers just failed to instill in her the action that can foreseeably increase the expected chance of her reaching a more positive state in a shorter amount of time.

211

Are you always this monumentally thick? Do you have an intellectual disability? Is there something in your make-up that prevents you from understanding simple arguments presented in a simple way? I’m finding it hard to believe you really are this stupid, but anyway, it seems that this thread has become pretty pointless since your arrival margin.
[This thread has been stupided by the STUPIDIST]

212

This girl already knew that her choices were to get in the car, or get beaten. She knew that if she told, she’d get beaten or killed. She knew that her assailants were far more likely to be believed. She knew that her assailants were well connected, and they would be able to arrange for her beatings even if they were all in jail. Her chances of getting a beating, or multiple beatings, were almost assured if she reported this.

She survived. She made the correct choices. She’s only 11. Most ADULTS in this sort of situation would find it hard to report this gang rape, and you’re expecting this little girl to be braver and stronger than adults.

213

Just because something leads to an immediate negative doesn’t mean it can’t eventually be a net positive. In fact, her getting beaten may have been good in the long run, because then she could have put more thugs in jail, in addition to adding “hiring mercenaries to beat a little girl” onto the rapist’s charges.

Survival doesn’t always entail the correct choice. It depends on how you assign value to each possible outcome, yes the possibility of death is a large negative weight, but the possibility of safety is also a large positive weight. You can’t always KNOW it will end in death, you consider it as a possibility. It’s not the wrong choice if it ends in death, you could have made the right choice but the state tree happened to take the incorrect turn. Even if there’s one really bad outcome, a few good outcomes, and then a host of bad outcomes, it’s still a likelihood that even the average of the outcomes’ weights have higher values than the guaranteed bad outcome from not reporting. If you took the path with the higher weight, it was rational, at each choice you have to consider the likelihood and weigh everything. If it ends in death, it’s not necessarily the wrong choice, it just means that another “random” uncontrollable outcome happened.

It’s like the red car problem, a person can research two cars, understand that the red car is much safer (less chance of mechanical failure) than the blue car is, but while on his way to the dealership, get into a horrible accident with someone driving that same model of red car. Most humans have been shown that in cases like this, they will go with the blue car despite the fact that the red car is statistically more likely to be safer. In this case the aversion to death is clouding the judgement of the good, or “bad but better than continuous rape” scenarios that can occur. Telling somebody may lead to the most tragic outcome, but it’s also more likely than not telling to eventually lead to an outcome at least better than continuous unreported rape.

You can’t just look one step ahead and say “she likely would have been beaten.” Even if that’s true, it’s not the end of it, more can happen. Even one non-fatal beating could in the long run be a positive weight since her rapists are in prison and even though she suffered more bad situations eventually she may be safe because of reporting the assailants, it also would get more concrete info on the rapists, since obvious visible bruises are harder to deny than rape charges. The possibilities of taking action contain many possible good scenarios that sitting by don’t. If you just sit by, you’re relegating your situation to only improve by chance, if you report it you give yourself the chance for a worse future, but also open up the possibilities for non-random improvement. I’d say that in almost all cases the chances of things getting better if you take action are much better than the minuscule chance of some random person knowing something is wrong.

[

Yes. Just because adults find things difficult doesn’t mean that we can’t condition children to make those decisions from birth. It won’t always work, but if you truly condition them correctly I think a child who is raised to think that way will find it easier to do than an adult who wasn’t raised that way.

214

This thread has provoked huge emotion; the people arguing past each other might even find themselves in agreement if they calmed down.

No one here is defending rape. I’d have no objection if rapists were tortured hideously before put to death.

But it’s also a fact that some children’s life-styles place them at higher risk than others. We do not live in a perfect world. “The world is beautiful” and “The world is dangerous” are both important lessons; a parent is faced with a dilemma to strike the right balance.

(Minor nit: can D the C produce a cite for the absurd claim that prostitution is defined as voluntary? One frequently hears of “forced prostitution”; is that an oxymoron? :dubious: )

215

I suppose he means that a prostitute, even one being forced into that occupation, is still consenting to sex with clients. A prostitute forced into a sexual act is being raped, and not practicing prostitution.

And yes, there is too much emotion here, as there inevitably is in every discussion about rape.

216

Most of the discussion is rational and looking to provide possible solutions to what was an horrendous crime against the very humanity of the little girl involved.

Unfortunately the minority are behaving like shrieking harpies, picking individual posted words to rail against, not engaging in any legitimate discourse, and making themselves look like fools and/or trolls.

Meh, just another day on the SDMB I guess. :smiley:

217

So we should look at being raped- or the raping of our daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers, as some kind of character building learning experience?

218

So you are quantifying how much a fourth grader did to “cause” men to gang rape her. That’s sick. The Chinese will now say that Chairman Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong. I’m sure the families of the people he killed appreciate having an exact number on that.

If they hadn’t have raped her, they’d have raped some other little girl. There will always be relatively unsupervised kids somewhere. If there really are no kids like that in their community, they will find a teenager with normal teen freedoms. The gang rape of a teen is pretty much equally as horrific. So even if this girl had been capable of doing enough “right” to prevent these men from raping her, all you’d be doing is substituting one victim for another. On the grand scale, this is not a gain at all.

219

Completely pointless aside:

Why does everyone keep referring to her as a fourth grader? Mine were nine in fourth grade and at 11 will be in sixth grade.

Sorry. Just stood out.

220

Avoiding the guests at your First Communion party who wish to offer a congratulatory handshake is NOT the same as escaping gang rape at age eleven.