It is an incredibly tricky line, between a time (or place) where rape is legal and common and just something women should bear, and one where women are ruined and destined to be tormented for the rest of their lives. It’s difficult to maintain a grey area, to both tell victims they can live fulfilling lives, but at the same time encouraging them to go through therapy and pursue long, often re-victimizing police investigations and trials, not to mention demanding harsher sentencing for rapists.
I’d sooner liken it to child molestation or torture, in so far as there seem to be varying ‘degrees’ of severity from an outsider’s p.o.v., but that only the victim can truly say how they’ve been affected (anyone who watches Intervention can see how being assaulted as a child or even an adult can have drastic consequences).
What if the circumstances of the rape were far from clear? What if alcohol were involved? What if the accused were truly and fully repentant?
There are far too many assumptions looming behind these statements. Rape cases should never devolve into “blame the victim,” but let’s do keep in mind that just because someone is accused of rape doesn’t mean that person is guilty.
This rapist you can’t be friends with: who is this person? Someone who gleefully committed a crime, and now is not repentant in the least? Of course, who’d be friends with someone like that? But what if it were someone who just fucked up really badly a long time ago, and carries and faces an enormous burden of regret now, and has served time in the due course of justice? What if it were a drunken acquaintance rape with no clearcut guilty or innocent situation? What if it were a situation similar to that 18-year old African-American man who got a purely consensual blow job from a white 15-year old (I forgetting the precise details, but something like that.)
The problem with vigilantism is not just that it can get a lot of things really, horribly wrong, but that it dehumanizes the accused, whether the accused is guilty or not. No proper notion of justice can be carried out under such circumstances.
All right, I guess I’d leave aside statutory rape, or rape where it was completely ambiguous what happened (though I kind of wonder how someone got convicted if it was that ambiguous). So, let’s say it’s a case where we know, beyond a reasonable doubt, with DNA and the like, that the person is a rapist. If someone fucked up really badly and regrets it, that’s great, and it’s better than raping someone and gleefully laughing about it, but I still don’t think I could befriend them. It would be too hard. If that makes me a worse person, so be it.
I’m with you on that one. One of my brothers served jail time for killing someone - though he went down for manslaughter, not murder (I must have been one of the few five-year-olds in the world who had a clear understanding of the difference, legally and ethically, between manslaughter and murder), and he’s accepted by the family. One of my other brothers sexually abused his four-year-old stepdaughter. He might as well not exist, as far as the rest of the family are concerned.
We’re not talking about someone “accused” of rape, we’re talking about convicted rapists. And while there have been people wrongly convicted of rape, they are exceptions. The vast majority of convicted criminals are rightly convicted, and that includes rapists.
If you run into someone convicted of rape, it’s an extremely slim chance that they didn’t actually do the rape. Thus, your objection in this regard to people saying “I couldn’t be friends with a rapist” doesn’t seem to be a very compelling one.
My point is that its awfully easy for our imagination about the rapist to become a dehumanizing caricature, assuming all the most awful, monstrous things, and base our reaction on the caricature thereby ignoring the human reality, which probably doesn’t match the monstrous image. Again, justice cannot be served under such circumstances.
Okay, leaving aside issues where the wrong man was blamed (which doesn’t even really count, since the guy isn’t actually a rapist), and issues of statutory rape where there was consent but a relatively small age difference…when is a rapist not such a bad guy?
I take it we’re also trying to take a road here where the rapist’s guilt is clear-cut. Something nice and clean, with no gray areas.
Rape is a crime, and a pretty heinous one, at that. It deserves to be punished, and our legal system has provisions for such.
But I would like to point out that the crime a person has committed does not really tell you everything there is to know about that person. As a reasonably moral and ethical human being, I feel confident in my ability to determine whether an act is right or wrong, and even to make some judgment about appropriate punishment when wrong acts are committed. What I cannot do is look into a person’s “soul” (for lack of a better word) and see whether that person is intrinsically vile and utterly irredeemable. Therefore, what I do not feel is that I am thereby in a position to judge whether someone should live or die, and neither, I feel, are you or anyone else.
I am not making that assumption. I argued against it upthread, in fact–at least I think I did, though conceivably it was eaten by hamsters. Anyway, I phrased the remark you refer to in reference to the notion about rape being the end of a woman’s life, which is, as I said, fraught with some unfortunate sexist assumptions about what makes a woman valuable, and how much capacity women have for healing and strength.
You are looking at it from your point of view. I clearly gave 2 distinct classifications for the victim and the criminal
For you, their death is worse because you are not feeling their pain, you are only thinking that you will never see them again. Rape allows you to reestablish a connection with the victim while murder robs you of that chance. Its the same reason why some people refuse to let a loved one expire while on artificial life support: they dont feel the pain and they always think it can get better
Given my distinction between victim and criminal, or third party, you needn’t say that you disagree: we were talking about 2 different things and you mentioned nothing to agree or disagree with me over
My posts have also always not mentioned gender except in reference to specific people. I see a lot of other people posting without referring to gender too, except in posts like yours where there was a reason for bringing gender up.
Obviously not everyone who’s convicted of rape is actually guilty of it, but sometimes you do know for sure. I personally know several men who have raped friends of mine, including one who not only raped my friend but organised for several of his friends to do the same. He never even got charged, but I have personal evidence that he definitely did do it (I found her afterwards, when he and his friends dumped her out of their car in the middle of the road). He will never be a friend of mine. One man raped me in the same room as another friend (who didn’t realise what was going on at first, because there was a barrier between us and she couldn’t see him holding me down) - she would not be friends with him after that.
Another male friend was accused of rape and I was happy to stay friends with him, because I didn’t know if he’d done it - and he was actually cleared after three months in prison on remand. So sometimes you can’t be sure, but sometimes you really, really can.
No, it’s not just that. It’s because you can get over being raped (not always, but at least you have the chance), but you can’t get over being murdered. Yes, the suffering has ended for the murder victim - but so has absolutely everything else.
I don’t know, I’m prepared to agree with someone who thinks their decades long post traumatic stress disorder - which makes having a normal sexual relationship or parenting relationship impossible - makes them “ruined”.
I don’t think death is the worst thing that can happen to a person. I think that unrelenting suffering and anguish is much worse. Panic attacks and flashbacks are worse. A quick and clean murder doesn’t cause that. I think torture and rape both can be far worse than death.
I’ve been raped, and I think murder is far, far worse. Now, I did have a period where I felt incredible guilt for not fighting back enough. I don’t want to relive the experience, so I’ll sum it up by saying I submitted when it seemed the alternative was getting VERY hurt. And I didn’t want that. I felt guilt for that. I got over it.
However, what percent of murderers go on to kill again vs. rapists who go on to rape more? The answer to that would affect my decision on how strongly to punish one vs. the other. I don’t think rape deserves the death penalty, but if there’s high recidivism, I’d like to keep rapists in jail as long as possible.
As for the situation referenced in the OP, I cut the woman some (SOME) slack because it was her 13 year old daughter. I’m sure she doesn’t wish her daughter would have been murdered rather than raped, but there’s got to be an awful lot of trauma seeing something happen to her daughter, who was so very young.
Sorry, I didn’t mean you precisely. I didn’t make that clear. I understood what you were referring to–and I agreed with your statement about unfortunate sexist assumptions.
I wonder whether some people who think murder is justifiable also believe in life after death in some sense. Killing someone isn’t so bad, because there’s the afterlife, perhaps they think. Just wondering.
I wonder how many rape victims feel that they are ruined to the point they’d rather be dead, all due to the rape. I suspect, very, very few.
That would be me - sort of - and I’m working on changing my views.
I would have preferred death. If I were dead then the suffering would be over with. I am still struggling with the thought that the confident normal happy human being I was supposed to become was murdered by the actions of another and I am what remains.
My life is really messed up but I am trying to get better.
Of course, I think it would be difficult for me to say I think “murder is justifiable.” I just think that some of the things that are legally “murder” can at some times be justified actions. To add a context, some of the things that are legally “theft” can at some times be justified actions. Some of the things that are legally “kidnapping” can even at some (rare) times be justified actions.
Looking over your posts, I think that the main thing is that the person who rapes or assaults or takes advantage is always in the wrong. That is, no matter what happens to the victim (whether they live a happy life, whether they see it as no big deal or as a life shattering event), the rapist is still as bad. But the victim has the right to say, “For me, this was huge” or “For me, this wasn’t such a big deal.” Like, let’s not judge what a bad thing it was to do based on just how much the victim suffered. Whether they were raped and went on to live a happy life, or whether they were raped and are now unable to form close relationships/have sex, the rapist is still just as evil, IMHO.
I believe there may possibly be reincarnation of some sort, but I’m far from certain of that. But I don’t believe the “I”, the person’s personality and memory, reincarnates, no. So my belief - or, rather suspicion - in reincarnation does not color my view in this matter.
What colors my view in this matter is more logical than that: There are three possibilities, as I see it, for what happens after death. First the Christian/Greco-Roman/etc. view that there’s some sort of idyllic afterlife, in which case, the murder victim should be happy enough and we should all celebrate. Second, the reincarnation theory, in which case…meh. Sure, it’s probably annoying to have your lessons interrupted and have to go be a baby again, but most of us spend a whole lot more time getting things wrong than getting things right, and life, in a larger sense, goes on. Or the third option is the atheist belief that there is not anything at all after death - no bliss, no second chances, but just nothing at all. In which case, again, meh. The murdered person isn’t around to suffer or be bothered by his murder at that point.
Not as a result of the rape, but as a result of the way it was handled, I seriously considered suicide several times in my teens and twenties. The only reason I didn’t do it (and this isn’t a joke) is that I’m terrible at follow-through. I was a wreck, and I hurt a LOT of people, for which I’m terribly sorry today. I can only hope that my hurting them hasn’t created a situation where they hurt others in turn. If I had been able to see more clearly what I was doing, yes, I would have found the guts to kill myself and save the world that much more misery. What I did, emotionally and psychologically, to other people, was just as violent and destructive as most rapes. If I had a working time machine, I’d go back and put a bullet in my head, despite the joys I’ve had since then.
Just like when we discuss DNR Orders and Living Wills and Assisted Suicide, I think people have the right to determine when too much suffering is too much for them. In this case, they have the right to view themselves as “ruined” or “not ruined”. While things got better for me, and yes, they’ll probably get better for most victims of most crimes, it’s not up to me to approve of their level of suffering or not.
Freudian Slit, I absolutely agree. Just because someone doesn’t feel “ruined” doesn’t let his or her rapist off the hook. The potential was still there for huge suffering; the rapist couldn’t have known that his or her victim wouldn’t be one of the ruined ones. We should judge the crime on the *potential *for harm, as well as the actual harm caused in a specific case.