Whether a particular person is drugged and raped isn’t a matter of probability, nor a matter of whether the victim does or does not consent. It is a matter of whether that person was given drugs and raped or not, and has nothing to do with his/her character.
What you seem to be getting at is whether a virgin or a slut is more likely to lie about whether sexual relations are consensual. Depends on the circumstances of each particular case, not general probability.
(bolding mine) Of course that matters. It is what we are trying to determine.
And I absolutely agree with your second point: it does depend on the circumstances of each particular case. But one of those circumstances that an independent person uses to gauge who is telling the truth is certainly the purported victim’s propensity to engage in consensual sexual relations. You seem to be focused on the question “Did a rape occur during the act in question?” without considering the observe question of “Did consensual sexual relations occur during the act in question?” The second question answers the first.
If she engages in consensual sexual relations to a degree more or less than a typical member of society, then that is relevant, probative evidence.
We use this type of evidence all of the time. If your liquor cabinet is raided and there are only two possible suspects, which one is more likely: your alcoholic brother in law, or the teetotaling neighbor? Your argument seems to be that the alcoholic could be in a period of sobriety, and that the neighbor could have decided to take a drink.
Yes, those are certainly possibilities, and those prior character traits, standing alone, are not determinate of anything, but they are relevant.
So anyway, where did you get your law degree from?
Thanks in advance.
No, the reputation of the victim has nothing to do with consent. Rape Shield Laws: Can a Victim's Sexual History Be Used a Defense Evidence? | CriminalDefenseLawyer.com
Most states have laws that prohibit reputation of the victim from coming in because it simply isn’t enlightening on the matter in any logical respect.
That you went swimming on hundreds of occasions has nothing to do with your consent to be waterboarded. Rape and sex are completely different. I get it that in your view that is wrong, but your position really only has the support of people who hate women and like rape.
Seconded.
He’s in good company with Hillary Clinton.
It’s clear from earlier comments you’ve made that it really, really bothers you when women make broad generalizations about the character of all men.
It really, really bothers some people when you make broad generalizations about the character of all women.
Are you intentionally trying to hurt others, or is that just collateral damage for whatever axe you’re grinding? It’s not that I don’t understand axe-grinding - or hypocrisy, for that matter. What I fail to understand is why you think comments like this serve your agenda or do anything other than alienate people who might otherwise hear you. If you think we don’t all see you emoting in lieu of reason, you’re wrong. You’re about as raw as it gets. Every time I see you post shit like this, it hurts twice. Once for you and once for me.
Beware of certainty. It is deceptively comfortable but its tendency is toward entropy. In the long run being sure of yourself is the emotional equivalent of sitting on your ass in your favorite recliner and then dying a prolonged, painful death full of years of sickness all because you picked the cozy route. Yes, those boys in the Inquisition were onto something. The Comfy Chair is a fiendish punishment indeed.
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas, if you swing that way.
jtgain et al, that a woman is a prostitute does not tell us how often she withholds consent from attempts to have sex with her. The fact that she has consented many times doesn’t tell us how often she doesn’t consent.
Since we don’t know how often she withholds consent, we don’t have a way to assign a probability (again, assuming “she’s a prostitute” is literally the only thing we know about her, per your hypothesis) to the proposition “the next time someone attempts to have sex with her, she will not consent.”
Since we can’t assign a probability to that proposition, we can’t compare that probability to the analogous probability concerning the non-prostitute. But your argument requires that such a comparison of probabilities be made.
That’s not the right metaphor.
The metaphor is “if someone forced someone else to drink a fifth of Scotch, would the allcoholic or the abstainer be more likely to be the victim?”
(shrug) The job of a public defender is often (usually?) defending the guilty. All God’s children deserve a competent defense, which is why we have created the post. Snarking on her for doing her job is silly.
Do you see what you (and implicitly your side) are doing there? You are assuming that there was forced drinking and that there was a “victim.” You cannot do that when you are attempting to discern if those things actually happened. That is overfitting.
We absolutely can assign a probability to that. If a certain person consents 99% of the time, we can assume with 99% probability she will consent to the next. If a certain person consents 70%, 50%, 10% or 0%, we can assume those probabilities as well.
Consent is the inverse of “withholds consent”. Add them together; the probabilities equal 1.
Correlation is not causation. The prostitute argument is exceedingly uneducated and the opposite of smart. It is just stupid. And you can’t fix stupid, especially if it is willfully stupid.
Rape Shield Laws were not enacted because of relevance but because of a powerful political group. Past sexual behavior is relevant to a rape case just as past domestic violence is relevant in a murder case.
Your analogy to swimming and waterboarding is so absurd as to illustrate the desperate lengths your side reaches to maintain your untenable position. I very much dislike rape and love women. I’m just trying to make sure that people accused of rape get their fair shake before they get a Scarlet R on their chest.
Think about it. That would work if rape accusations were evenly and randomly distributed across sexual encounter. If each time you had sex, you rolled a couple dice and if it came up as “11” you filed a rape claim, then you’d expect the veracity of that claim to be statistically related to how often the person has consensual sex.
But rape accusations are not randomly distributed across sexual encounters. They are ONLY done either by people who got raped, or people who are making a false accusation-- and your likelihood of being a rape victim or a destructive liar are not really tied to your consensual sex life at all.
Ok. But yours doesn’t fit either. A person who is addicted to alcohol has a reason to drink someone else’s alcohol and then lie about-- They get free alcohol that way. A teetotaler doesn’t have that motivation because they don’t want the free alcohol.
A person who has a lot of sex may have more motivation to have sex, but that doesn’t mean they have more motivation to lie about it. What would they get out of lying about it? There is no connection between “I like sex” and “I would like to see my partner is jail on false charges.”
Likewise, an abstainer may be less likely to have consensual sex, but they don’t inherently have less motivation to make a false accusation. I don’t know what is wrong with people who make false accusations, but I see no reason to believe that level of malice has any connection to how often you bang.
But the hypothesis (which, again, is just “that she’s a prostitute”) doesn’t tell us how often she consents. Rather, it tells us that she has had a lot of consensual sexual encounters*. It does not tell us the ratio of those encounters to those instances in which she did not consent to an attempt to have sex with her. But we must know that ratio in order to have a basis for giving a probability to the proposition “the next sexual encounter will be one she consented to.”
You seem to be illegitimately drawing conclusions about frequency from premises about simple quantity.
From “X has happened many times” it does not generally follow that “the ratio of X-events to Y-events is high.”
I could understand what you mean by “overfitting” if people were asking you to limit yourself to “sexual acts which are rapes.” But “sexual acts where rape is claimed” is not an overfitting in any sense I can imagine, since “a rape is claimed” leaves open the credibility of the accuser and doesn’t decide beforehand whether what we are trying to prove is true or not. In the scenario, no one disputes that “a rape is claimed.”
John buys things a lot – let’s say he typically makes one non-grocery purchase a day.
David rarely buys things – let’s say he typically makes one non-grocery purchase a month.
One day, both John and David report that a laptop was delivered to their house, and on investigation, both discovered that $600 is missing from their bank account.
Both say this happened without their permission.
Are you arguing that it is more likely that John is lying than that David is lying?
Exactly.
Someone with good methodology needs to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the separate and unconnected events related to each set of incidents in order to make any meaningful statement about either set of incidents. One has nothing the fuck to do with the other unless a connection is found. And statistically speaking, nothing can be said without a much larger random sample with double blind studies about the incidents.