Carmady, that is the feeling I’m getting as well. And I agree that these, “What if she’s drunk but consenting” situations aren’t rape. They’re not what I’m trying to discuss.
I also want to ask this question again which I posed to MitzeKatze:
I think it’s mostly a matter of stranger rape = unambiguously rape, whereas date rape = ambiguously rape in some cases. Rather than stranger rape is universally worse than date rape.
Date rape is ambiguously rape to whom? If you mean there’s more room for outsiders to wonder whether a rape actually occurred then that is in some cases true, but that’s not the question being asked here. We’re not being asked to weigh a clear-cut case of rape against a case where it’s not certain whether a rape actually occurred at all, we’re being asked to compare rapes where the assailant was a stranger to the victim to rapes where the assailant was someone the victim knew.
If you mean the rapist in a “date rape” situation may not realize that he is in fact raping his victim then that may sometimes be true, but it’s also true that many stranger rapists believe (or at least manage to act like they believe) that their victim was consenting or enjoyed the experience. I can look up the cite later if you like, but there was a fairly well-known study of convicted rapists in the '80s that indicated that about 1/3 admitted to having sexual contact with the victim but denied that what they’d done constituted rape. As far as I recall none of the cases described in this study were “date rapes”. Many were stranger rapes in which the rapist subdued his victim with the use of a weapon. There was one man who said that for years he hadn’t thought he was a rapist because he just asked his victim nicely to have sex with him and she agreed…which may not sound like rape at first, but this little exchange took place during an armed robbery. The rapist was threatening the victim with a bayonet (!), so it’s no wonder she submitted to his “request”.
I say all this to illustrate the problem with giving too much weight to the rapist’s point of view. A case that is unambiguously rape to any reasonable person may not seem like rape at all to the rapist, because many rapists are not in fact reasonable people…and even reasonable people can be very good at convincing themselves that their bad behavior is justified.
That’s “Convicted Rapists’ Vocabulary of Motive: Excuses and Justifications” by Diana Scully and Joseph Marolla, Social Problems, Vol. 31, No. 5 (Jun., 1984), pp. 530-544.
This must be the third time in as many months that I’ve cited this same study on the SDMB; I hope I’m not becoming a broken record!
I think it’s related to the reason why the question exists at all for some people. Or at least why stranger rape has a more serious and malevolent reputation.
I think there are situations where either party may not know whether it’s rape or not, or where an outsider might not find the situation unambiguous, and these situations are more likely to occur in non-stranger rape.
Are these less wrong? They are less unambiguously wrong, and that’s easy to confuse with actually less wrong.
I think the majority of cases of people saying date rape is less wrong are referring to the ambiguity of example situations and not to the actual morality. Except in the rare case of those archaic hold outs who think marriage means ownership of the woman and eternal sexual privileges.
If you were to judge comparably unambiguous scenarios from both categories, I would think that non-stranger rape is more wrong because in addition to the harm from the rape itself, there is the additional harm of the betrayal of trust.
I disagree with this. It isn’t the rape that is ambiguous, it is our information about it.
If we knew the thoughts of the individuals involved and all the facts, I think the number of situations that would be ambiguous is vanishingly small if not zero.
Date rapists benefit because people confuse incomplete knowledge of the actions with the actions themselves having been ambiguous.
To repeat an earlier question:
Is there any situation in which you would say “yes, I agree 100% that it was rape, but it was non-violent and less wrong.”?
I think either thing (or both) can occur, depending on the situation, but I agree the latter is more likely.
I don’t agree. I think either of these things (or both) can occur, but that they are not confused for each other. Unfortunately, incomplete knowledge becomes a factor alongside ‘burden of proof’ and ‘presumption of innocence’.
You seem to be implying that date rape is automatically less violent than stranger rape? I’m confused about why you included the term ‘non violent’ in there.
I mean, you could have a rape that uses “mere” force, but not “outright violent” force, and that would be slightly less horrible than truly violent force. And of course rape that ends in murder is “worse”. But these sorts of gradations of rape are not inherently present or not present based on whether it is stranger or non stranger.
As I said above, in comparably equivalent unambiguous situations for both categories, I think non-stranger rape is more wrong because of the additional betrayal of trust.
That’s of course based purely on principle. I strongly suspect that as a statistical matter, stranger rape happens to be accompanied more often by other crimes (burglary, injury, murder) thereby making it “worse”.