If you read the original thread, because the women willingly went to his hotel room, and never explicitly said “no”, that made it all okay.
I’m honestly trying to imagine someone saying this about my abuser and it makes me see red. I’m sure it’s not all well and fine for the unwilling men he groped.
Y’know, the various threadlines on different misbehaving figures are spilling over one another by now. This is becoming like the shooting threads that eventually all devolve into omnibus gun control arguments.
Yes, that is true. Those are statements made by judges. I don’t have to read them again because I put them there. Pointing that out and throwing in an emoticon doesn’t really make your point clear, though, unfortunately. Maybe I’m slow to catch on, but I don’t see where you’re blasting a hole in half of my feminist understanding of the finer points of trial methods. In the world I live in, judges make decisions based on what the parties to the case have said. Could you tell me - is that true in the real world, too?
If you don’t mind explaining: how is it that there are so many examples of judges blaming victims in their official capacity presiding over cases, and letting offenders off the hook, if 1. defendants in these cases never make victim-blaming arguments because 2. victim-blaming arguments would always result in negative outcomes for them?
I have a hard time differentiating sometimes between a victim and someone who had a bad life experience. Lots of young men did some bad things and lots of young women experienced some bad behavior from young men. Most of these young men learned from their mistakes and grew up to be responsible adults. Most of these young women learned a lesson as well and moved on. At what point does a person become a predator and another person become a victim. When I was a kid people just moved on past about 90% of this stuff. I was molested as a kid, I learned who to avoid being alone with. It disturbed me some but I was able to sort through it and move on, part of growing up. I doubt there is a solid line we can draw that separates these things, there seems to be a large gray area that people are now trying to turn into a solid line.
Part of the issue is that a single act can be highly damaging or just an unpleasant experience depending on the individual in question, their circumstances and how others respond. There are three significant predictive factors of trauma: the severity of the trauma, the amount of social support someone receives in the aftermath, and the presence of other adverse life experiences at the time of the trauma. You will notice only one of those things centers on how bad something might look to an outside observer. You quickly moved on from your molestation, mine will haunt me for the rest of my life. Does that make me weaker than you? Am I complaining about nothing? Of course not. There are a range of other factors you have no clue about, and frankly probably could not imagine, that went into making that experience the special kind of hell it was.
If I were sexually assaulted later in life, it would be ten times worse due to my previous experience, and my reaction at the time would be shaped by that experience too. I’ve since been in situations where I was at risk of assault and I knew it, but could only freeze up and say nothing. Takei’s victim was pretty upset by the experience and felt betrayed by someone he admired, but it doesn’t sound like his world was shattered, and he just wanted an apology.
I say two factors should go into deciding how bad something is: the impact on the victim, and the law. Intent is also somewhat relevant, at least in determining a person’s character, but a lack of intent of an act doesn’t make the act less bad for the victim.
I don’t have time to teach criminal procedure and evidence, but very briefly;
In my experience what is reported in newspapers rarely if ever bears much resemblance to what actually happened. A trial has a voluminous record. Many of these things are quoted without context. And saying something is “victim blaming” is an opinion, not a fact. Judges are bound by the record before them.
If for instance, the record establishes that the victim has treated the perpetrator badly, then the judge is bound to state that. It may well have no bearing on the culpability of the perpetrator (and usually does not), but when a decision has been reached, it must consider the transaction in its entirety. That is true whether the charge is one of rape, murder, theft or tax evasion.
(Intent is also often relevant on the “law” side.) Right, someone’s words/actions can be wrong and do harm even in the absence of evil intent, and then the test is how are you willing to make amends for the harm.
Of course at that point we wind up in a separate debate as to whether it takes making amends to the satisfaction of the injured party, or of public opinion (and even public opinion trying to tell the injured party what should be their standard of satisfaction).
Oh, of course, and I’d hate to impose, friendo! Let’s just assume my law school profs did an acceptable job ten years ago and I’ve picked up at least a little since then.
I didn’t learn that every news story was fake news, though, and that things were true just because you think so. Thanks for skewering that feminist bubble!
Could someone clarify?
[ul]
[li]Have any charges been filed?[/li][li]Have any suits been filed?[/li][li]Has anybody else come forward?[/li][/ul]
The last I heard he just wants an apology. I am starting to wonder if it wasn’t one of those stories that guys sometimes start telling about famous people and it got out of hand. We just don’t know for sure.
The incident is supposed to have happened in 1981. I’m sure that the statute of limitations has passed, both for a crime and a civil suit.
True, for me what I find so surprising assuming all these accusations are true, is how many grown adults never said anything when the harassment or rape occurred. I can totally understand when one is underage, but I find it so strange when adults would wait years and years to speak up.
I wrote an enormous screed about this earlier (which I intend to send to someone via PM), but the short version is, often adults internalize negative social myths about sexual assault every bit as much as children do, and as such, even victims themselves become experts at doubting their own judgment about what happened to them. Minimizing the badness of the event, blaming oneself for not responding in a different way, feeling ashamed of whatever dumb choices might have led up to it… It’s hard to speak out about something if you’ve convinced yourself that you brought upon yourself. If you do somehow manage to overcome all those mental contortions and realize that yes, you were in fact, victimized, you then have to face dealing with all those stupid myths with every single person you tell. At every instance of disclosure you run the risk of being blamed, discounted, minimized, or villified. In short, there’s no real incentive to talk about being assaulted, as it will do nothing but turn your life into a complicated shitstorm, and, as I’m sure people who revenge lie find out all too quickly, it’s usually a suicide mission.
I was physically abused as a child. It’s been 40 years or so since the last incident. The person is well respected in his community. He’s a pillar of his church, active in the city government, and was a beloved teacher for decades. I’ve told less than a handful people about what happened. I don’t know if I ever will. I don’t find it at all strange that someone might not talk about abuse, or sexual harassment, or various other harm, until events more or less push it out of them.
I have also been sexually assaulted as an adult. I never reported it. I was too embarrassed. I didn’t think I would be believed. I had no physical proof. It would be he said, she said. I did not want to go through that. I remain deeply ashamed of the entire thing years later, even though all I did was go to my gym for a workout.
It’s not as easy to just tell the world (or anyone) about thees things as people seem to imagine.
Who to?
The times I’ve been sexually assaulted or similar as an adult*, either it would have been a “he said, she said” situation or the other people present sided with the attacker, since he happened to be the boss. Oh, and then there was that time when my grandfather was the attacker and my mother’s response was “if your father hears a word of this, you’re not setting foot in my house any more; your grandfather is like that, just learn to deal with it.”
When there was someone that I thought could use the information and might believe it or at least take it seriously, I did tell them. But in general there wasn’t anything to gain by reporting it to either the legal authorities or company HR.
- “Assault”, at least in the Spanish Criminal Code, involves physical attack. By “similar” I mean things like attempts at coercion, or making me extremely uncomfortable and continuing the behavior after I’d pointed out it did make me extremely uncomfortable.
In this particular case, the victim would have been outing himself as gay in 1981, at the height of AIDS paranoia, and doing so by accusing a moderately-beloved Hollywood star who nobody had any reason to believe was gay. It’d likely have ruined his career if anybody believed him in the first place, so it doesn’t shock me that he didn’t talk about it at the time.
If he’s telling the truth, and I have no reason to believe he isn’t, then at least it’s to Takei’s credit that he stopped when he was told no, and so far this seems to be an isolated incident that could be chalked up to a misunderstanding. If it turns out that there’s a pattern of Takei taking advantage of drunk men, then we’ve got a problem on our hands.
There’s a lot of socialization factors in the reluctance to denounce – among them, many people had drummed into them for a long time that sexual harassment or assault or exploitation was some kind of, shall we say, occupational or environmental hazard of being female, or gay when it was something to hide. That “it happens” and you gotta practice defensive dating and if the behavior does not get as far as the worst, you get over or work around it.
Also, as mentioned earlier, people would feel that “this was nasty of him… but I don’t want to *ruin *him, either… if he’d only make right for me I’d be happy”.
That has often been the case, and still is. I have seen accuser’s back down when they learnt exactly the consequences that their attacker was going to face. Even attacker with whom there was no relationship otherwise and the victim would suffer not at all.
One of the things feminists lawyers in the 1970’s tried to reform was the ending of the death penalty as the punishment for rape. Once that was accomplished the number of convictions rose substantially.
A “bloody code” approach sounds fine in theory, not so good in practice.
:eek:
I am sorry, but thats near a Bloody Assizes level of reasoning. An individual can do a lot of harm without meaning to do so and the law must keep that in mind. A person who kills by accident is not considered at fault as much as one who does with negligence even though the effect on the victim is the same. Killing someone in a traffic accident for instance, where there was no negligence involved in not a crime. Smacking someone on the ass with intent to gain sexual gratification is in fact a crime. Tell me which has a more adverse and longer lasting impact on the victim.
Yeah, obviously their lectures did not stick. Ditto your legal research ones, since you’d have remembered the maxim to read the primary sources not the reports, especially when the claims in the later seem to be strange or extraordinary. And you also probably did not pay much attention in jurisprudence class, (cannot say I blame you, boring as shit), since you seem to not even have the basic idea of the efforts of feminists lawyers and pressure groups to undertake law reform in sex crime cases and the impact that had on law and practice as well as the analysis on the impact they had on criminal practice and the backlash and they faced. For instance, Harriet Galvins’s excellent analysis on rape shield laws in various states for the US, the UK Home Office studies in the UK, the refroms made by the Irish Government.
If it turns out to be true, I will be sad and disappointed with George. But I am reserving judgment for the moment until I learn more details.