Preventing Rapists

[catsix]

villa said:
But all men (and all women) are potential rapists.

I don’t agree. The statement supposes the fact that all men have the capacity to rape a woman. This is nothing more than a misandrist statement designed to promote the ‘us versus them’ mentality that keeps feminism alive.

There is a valid reason for making that statement, if only to demonstrate that the paradigmatic view of rape (dirty, dishevelled man waiting in bushes in park at night to pounce on jogger) is not accurate.

The reason for it is to promote the victimhood industry that cannot exist unless women believe men are the enemy.

Give me some other statistics to trust, then. Until you do that, what do I have to base a decision on?

Why? I don’t have any reasonable expectation that you won’t stop clinging to the feminist party line, so, I’m just going to stop responding to this thread.

I thought better of responding on the first page when I noticed the misandry, but then the thing turned to fear of leaving the house alone and I couldn’t resist. I should have, though.

[villa]

Shame. Well, forgive me for not believing you when you don’t provide any evidence.

I don’t appreciate the jab at my academic integrity, but maybe I will send you a copy of the piece when it is finished and you can judge for yourself how much it follows the feminist party line. The fact that it draws heavily on the Texas A&M survey might suggest something different.

[Marley23]

@catsix

I don’t agree. The statement supposes the fact that all men have the capacity to rape a woman. This is nothing more than a misandrist statement designed to promote the ‘us versus them’ mentality that keeps feminism alive.

No, it’s just a statement of the obvious. Having the potential to be something (I could be a terrorist) isn’t the same as actually having the capacity to do it (I’m a wimp).

[Marley23]

I meant to further that I have no idea why anybody would bother to say it. But there you go.

[villa]

The reason for saying it is to draw attention to the fact that you cannot spot a rapist, that the nice boy (or girl) who takes you to the dance might be a rapist, and that you should be aware that the majority of rapes are committed by people who don’t fit the typical image of what a rapist should look like or be. It’s also important to deal with the typical attitude when the rich, good looking pillar of the community (such as a high school football player, for example) gets arrested, which states that he can’t be a rapist, he doesn’t look like a rapist.

[Demorian]

randomly inserting myself back into this thread

Earlier it was said that “rape is a crime of hatred, not a crime of sex”…

I want to disagree a bit with this. Not totally, but a little. I’m sure most of you familiar with this thread can recall my first post, where I divided rape into 4 basic categories.

I don’t think the statement that rape is a crime of hate applies to all 4 of them. Specifically, the “date rape” grouping and the extended threadjack about college students (the fraternity/sorority deal).

[Guinastasia]

@catsix

It’d be kind of hard to tell given the misandrist attitude of much of today’s post-feminist society in which a man is always the wrong doer and not the wrong. Of course in some places it’s not rape if a sober woman has sex with a man who’s too drunk to consent, but it is if a sober (or drunk) man has sex with a woman who’s legally drunk. I got that speech enough times at U Pitt.

How about some equity there?

It’s kind of hard to have a debate with you if you keep posting these strawmen. No one here has ever said such a thing, and it’s a complete exaggeration of society, IMHO. We’d appreciate it if you’d stop smearing anything that comes from a feminist centered site, or labelling all of our cites as “feminist bullshit.”

And I’d like it if you’d provide some cites of your own, rather than, “Well, this is what I experienced.”

[brickbacon]

This study of a small town places the false accusations of rape at 41%. The author cautions the reader to use the numbers as a reference and not an asserionthat the number is that high nationwide.

This Canadian study places the level at 6.7% in British Columbia and 5.7% in Ontario. In Toronto, where police squads restricts themselves to handling major rape cases, where the assailant is unknown to the victim, a whopping 30 percent of cases – 69 out of 232 cases – turned out to be false.

This article discusses why the numbers vary so greatly, and that the FBI estimates that 8% of reported cases are false.

Another cite regarding the number of false accusations. The following are some quotes of relevant points:

*"Begin with evidence of false accusation of rape, the crime which has become not only the metaphor for all cases of sexual misconduct but for male sexuality itself. Alan Dershowitz (1991), for example, has further harassed his students by telling them that an annual F.B.I. survey of 1600 law enforcement agencies discovered that 8% of rape charges are completely unfounded. That figure, which has held steadily over the past decade, is moreover at least twice as high as for any other felony. Unfounded charges of assault, which like rape is often productive of conflicting testimony, comprise only 1.6% of the total compared to the 8.4% recorded for rape. Consult also a recent development, DNA testing, which is now becoming routine in rape investigations (Krajik, 1993). Also routine is the discovery that a third of the DNA scans produce non-matches. Consequently, a growing number of men are not only gaining acquittals but are also being released from prison. As with all rape statistics, these figures need careful scrutiny. Police investigators warn, for example, that a mismatch proves innocence only when the DNA could have come from no one but the assailant and its profile or makeup doesn’t match the suspect’s. Even so, the DNA tests, primarily a prosecutorial weapon, have now been added to the arsenal of defense attorneys, and more evidence of false allegation is appearing.

The McDowell team studied 556 rape allegations. Of that total, 256 could not be conclusively verified as rape. That left 300 authenticated cases of which 220 were judged to be truthful and 80, or 27%, were judged as false. In his report Charles McDowell stated that extra rigor was applied to the investigation of potentially false allegations. To be considered false one or more of the following criteria had to be met: the victim unequivocally admitted to false allegation, indicated deception in a polygraph test, and provided a plausible recantation. Even by these strict standards, slightly more than one out of four rape charges were judged to be false."*

Lastly, this study discusses why the 2% number you guys go around quoting is complete bullshit. The author makes the point that only about 50% of rape cases that go to trial end in convictions. They disregard pleas bargains because they don’t effectively discriminate between the guilty and innocent. Even if you assume that the all the people that are convicted are guilty, and a full 2/3 of those found “not guilty” are in fact guilty, that would still mean 1/6 of all the cases are bogus. That number includes women who identified the wrong guy, but still may have been raped, so it may be a little high. But knowing that 84% of all sexual assaults are committed by an acquaintance of the victim, I doubt that number will cut deeply into the 1/6 of cases that are false. I’m sure many of you will argue that many people don’t report when they are raped (which is probably true), but their assertions have not been scrutinized in a court of law, and should not be trusted anymore than the assertions of the men they accuse.

I posted all these links to show “prove” that many rapes accusations are indeed false. Far more than with any other crime. Even the FBI rate is 4 times higher than what many of you have quoted.

[Siege]

How in the hell did a debate which was supposed to be about how society can prevent people from becoming rapists devolve into one about false accusations of rape?!!

Excuse me. I just needed to get that out of my system. I know how much damage false accusations can do, and not just of rape. Within the past year, one of my closest male friends was accused of being a sexual predator. The allegations spread within his circle of friends which, since he is a Wiccan, also means his religious community, and left him cut off from them. They destroyed his relationship with a woman who was his friend and mentor and ended his marriage. They’re the reason he moved 600 miles back to Pittsburgh and wound up on my couch. They were also about as well founded and rational as an accusation that George Bush is working for the Democratic National Committee would be. I also have an ex-boyfriend who was raped by a woman who was his girlfriend at the time. I know how much damage these accusations these do, and there are a couple of people in another state who I would like to some highly unpleasant things to, since I’ve had to cope with the fallout of the destruction of a friend’s marriage and his life.

Now, acknowledging that such things happen and that women can be every bit as stupid, foolish, and mean as men, can we please get back to the topic of the OP?

Now, I admit, I’m kind of stuck. I mean, I assume the fellow who stopped a woman a few miles from me, told her there was something wrong with her car and raped her when she turned into a nearby sidestreet so he could show her what was wrong knew what he was doing was rape and was socially unacceptable. On the other hand, what do we do about the man who raped a woman in the ladies room of a bar whose excuse was she wanted it and asked for it? She was at the boy with her boyfriend, if I recall correctly. There was also a case many, many years ago when I was at Pitt in which a football player came into a dorm room where a girl was sleeping and raped her. His excuse was he thought she was his girlfriend, her roommate. That same year, one of my roommates brought three drunken football players into our room at one in the morning. It was the only time I was grateful the beds were up on top of the desks. I’ve read in this thread that if a woman’s in a bedroom with a man in the wee hours of the morning, she should expect to have sex, especially if one or both of them were drunk. When this happened, I was an 18 year old, naive, prudish virgin. I knew that I was in danger, and I didn’t like it one bit.

I can make my limits clear, take responsibility for my actions, and do all I reasonably can not to endanger myself. I can’t prevent myself from being raped because I can’t control the actions or decisions of a man who’s out to rape me. One thing that bothers me in this thread and the one which spawned it is the notion that when some women say “No,” it will be taken as “Yes,” or a point for further negotiation. This tells me we need to educate both men and women. If it means some woman who is stupid enough to play that game goes home horny unsatisfied, I’m going to have a hard time being sympathetic since I know that happens to men at least as often.

This is a tough issue, I admit, but I’d like to see if we can at least make a dent in it.

Respectfully,
CJ

[Kimstu]

Siege: * I’ve read in this thread that if a woman’s in a bedroom with a man in the wee hours of the morning, she should expect to have sex, especially if one or both of them were drunk. *

But see, this is ridiculous. There is no situation and no circumstance in which a woman has given implicit consent to sex just by being there.

Telling women that it’s their responsibility to avoid getting into situations that might be interpreted as implicitly consenting to sex, and therefore result in rape, is wrong. It is the responsibility of men (and, of course, women too) not to rape anyone. Period. If men really are not able to control themselves enough to refrain from raping a woman just because she’s in their bedroom late at night, then men’s freedom simply needs to be restricted. If men can’t be responsible, they need to be supervised.

Of course, false accusations of rape do occur, and should not be tolerated either. But this attitude that women can’t trust men not to rape them and should therefore avoid being alone with drunken men, etc., just lends credibility to false accusations of rape. When we assume that men will automatically take advantage of situations where women are supposedly giving “implicit” consent to sex, and extort or demand sex from women who don’t want it, we are fostering the myth that rape is just something that guys tend to do, so we’re making it more likely that a false accusation of rape will be believed.

This doesn’t mean that women shouldn’t be cautious about getting into situations that some men might misinterpret. That’s just common sense. But we shouldn’t treat those situations as though it’s justified or legitimate to assume that men will automatically expect sex and use violence to get it, as brickbacon and some others seem to be suggesting.

And that’s my approach to the question that the OP and others are actually asking here: namely, how do we discourage people from becoming rapists? There are lots of issues involved, but IMO at least acquaintance/date rape can be reduced by getting rid of this obsolete attitude that there are situations that give implicit consent to sex or where people are not responsible for forcing sex on others. Nobody has a right to have sex with someone who doesn’t want it. I’d extend that to argue that nobody has a right to get so drunk or otherwise wasted that they can’t refrain from forcing sex on somebody else, or can’t tell whether the other person consents to it. (Maybe people who want to get that drunk should just accept that they have to stay in a sort of “party drunk tank” where their behavior will be supervised and they’ll have no access to sex.)

A similar approach would be to increase awareness that, as catsix and others have pointed out, women are not entitled to force sex on men either. Just as a woman does not “implicitly” consent to sex by being in a drunk guy’s bedroom late at night, a man does not “implicitly” consent to sex by being male and alone with a horny woman. Widespread attitudes that a man’s masculinity depends upon his eagerness to have sex, and that a guy who had a chance at getting some sex but passed it up is somehow a wimp, are IMO a big part of this whole problem.

[Siege]

Catsix, villa, would you consider taking your discussion here (Preventing False Accusations of Rape)?

CJ

[brickbacon]

@Kimstu

Telling women that it’s their responsibility to avoid getting into situations that might be interpreted as implicitly consenting to sex, and therefore result in rape, is wrong. It is the responsibility of men (and, of course, women too) not to rape anyone. Period. If men really are not able to control themselves enough to refrain from raping a woman just because she’s in their bedroom late at night, then men’s freedom simply needs to be restricted. If men can’t be responsible, they need to be supervised.

Of course, false accusations of rape do occur, and should not be tolerated either. But this attitude that women can’t trust men not to rape them and should therefore avoid being alone with drunken men, etc., just lends credibility to false accusations of rape. When we assume that men will automatically take advantage of situations where women are supposedly giving “implicit” consent to sex, and extort or demand sex from women who don’t want it, we are fostering the myth that rape is just something that guys tend to do, so we’re making it more likely that a false accusation of rape will be believed.

This doesn’t mean that women shouldn’t be cautious about getting into situations that some men might misinterpret. That’s just common sense. But we shouldn’t treat those situations as though it’s justified or legitimate to assume that men will automatically expect sex and use violence to get it, as brickbacon and some others seem to be suggesting.

You clearly have a hard time grasping what I am clearly laying out for you. You seem to envision that the 84% of rapes, which can be classified as acquaintance rape, are clear cut. I think the vast majority of them are situations that involve alcohol or drugs, and/or are situations where the woman has not made her desire not to have sex clear. The vast majority of these cases involve no violence. They don’t involve a women kicking and screaming as she is held down. It is usually two people who sincerely hold two wildly different perspectives of what happened. Most of the time, these discrepancies stem from the different meanings men and women attach to different actions. You can bitch and moan all you want about how going to a guy’s room at 3 am means nothing, but in the real world, most guys feel it is a clear explicit invitation for sex. Unless you advocate we live in a world where men ask for consent before each sexual act. Where every two seconds, a guy must say something like, “is it ok if i massage your left breat now”, then we need to have an open dialogue on how to the lessen the likelyhood that 2 people are put into a situation where such a misunderstanding could happen.

You said “telling women that it’s their responsibility to avoid getting into situations that might be interpreted as implicitly consenting to sex, and therefore result in rape, is wrong.” I disagree. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it has and will prevent people from getting into dangerous situations. It is their responsibility avoid being implicit or unclear. It is their responsibility make it abundantly clear what your intentions are. It is their responsibility to actually say no, and mean it. Not doing so doesn’t mean you deserve to be raped, but it does mean you were irresponsible in a way that might have terrible consequences for 2 people.

[Evil_Captor]

@Rebekkah

I doubt very much that teaching young children to get informed verbal consent before having sex would do anything to stop rapists. The average normal kid will grow up and want to have sex out of pleasure. Teaching him that the girl must say yes is of course good, but does nothing to prevent rape.

Rape is NOT about sex. Rape is about anger, and about power. No rapist is going to be deterred by a “no”.

I agree. I do not think normal guys are turned on by a sex partner who is deeply unhappy to be having sex with him, although I do think that there are social circumstances (such as date rape or the culture at some frat parties) where a normal guy’s aversion to rape can go away for a time.

[Evil_Captor]

@Demorian

Right, and my post was about how it is impossible to prevent rape. I merely tacked on the most realistic alternative.

If you have any ideas on how to prevent rape short of castration of all men at birth or… um, your post amounts to psychological denial, the floor is yours.

I’ll bet you can significantly reduce the number of rapes though maybe not completely prevent them. That would undoubtedly help a lot.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

I think rape has to be dealt with through deterrent factors. Rape should be dealt with like murder. If a person commits a single rape, he should get life without parole and chemical castration. Date rape needs to be treated the same way.
The victim blaming in this thread makes me sick, by the way. The woman has ZERO responisibility. ZERO.

I also don’t believe for a second that there are more than a miniscule number of false accusations going on. The cases where people are wrongly convicted are usually more due to mistaken identity than knowingly false accusations.

[Evil_Captor]

To get back to the OP, I think one thing that could help a lot with “normal” rape would be to stigmatize the hell out of it, without also stigmatizing normal male sexuality.

I think most guys like to think of themselves as “regular guys” that is, guys who exist comfortably within social norms for their group (not what regular guys would call it, but that’s what it is). I think the thing to do is to establish that although the following is true of regular guys:

[ul]
[li]regular guys find women generally to be sexually attractive[/li][li]regular guys like to look at women’s bodies[/li][li]regular guys have no problem expressing their interest in women[/li][/ul]

Regulars guys DO NOT have sex with women against their will. Any women. Ever.

I think part of the problem is that for some guys, there are certain categories of women whom it is OK to have sex with against their will: really drunk women, women who go to parties with lots of guys and hang around late; women who dress sexy and act sexy; women who don’t say no loud enough and often enough to REALLY mean it.

These guys need to be recognized as NOT being regular guys, as being creepy pervs who just use these situations and categories to get away with rape because they’re RAPISTS and NOT regular guys.

However, those elements of society that maintain that regular guys should not find women attractive, or that regular guys don’t find the sight of women’s bodies to be attractive, or that regular guys shouldn’t express their interest in women’s sexiness at all are a problem, because they are feeding out a line of bullshit and every guy knows it. We know we find women attractive, we know we like the sight of their bodies, and we know it’s OK to express our feelings, which we know to be healthy and OK."

If you try and tell men bullshit about their sexual feelings, they’re likely to not buy anything else that you tell them, such as that there are no categories of women whom it’s OK to ignore when they say “no.”

Regular guys are not likely to be the ones who commit all-out stranger rape, but they’re the ones who are likely to have trouble with those “iffy” situations where a clearly inebriated woman at a party might be getting a little more ‘partying’ than she bargained for. Getting a good, solid, unambiguous “no” out there for that kinda thing would probably help a lot.

[Guinastasia]

@Diogenes the Cynic

I also don’t believe for a second that there are more than a miniscule number of false accusations going on. The cases where people are wrongly convicted are usually more due to mistaken identity than knowingly false accusations.

And those that ARE actual deliberate cases of false accusations are usually done by someone who’s mentally ill (that woman who claimed that Bush was having her and her husband abducted and raped periodically), or someone trying to cover up a crime (the woman who left her kids in the car for three hours while she was having her hair done. They died, she tried to claim that they were left there because she was abducted and raped.)

I honestly can’t see someone making a false accusation up out of the clear blue.

[Kimstu]

brickbacon: *You can bitch and moan all you want about how going to a guy’s room at 3 am means nothing, but in the real world, most guys feel it is a clear explicit invitation for sex. *

Then “most guys” need to learn that they’re wrong. They need to do what you sensibly recommend that women should do: namely, “make it abundantly clear what your intentions are”. A “clear explicit invitation for sex” is not “Do you want to come back to my room now?” but “Do you want to come back to my room and have sex now?” A guy who takes it for granted that a “yes” to the former means “yes” to the latter is setting up trouble.

No, I don’t think that we need to extend this to requesting explicit consent to every separate act during sex. But we do need to foster awareness that people often have different interpretations of sexual situations, and that sex partners (of either gender) are absolutely free to change their minds at any point in the process. If we can just get rid of this obsolete attitude that there is some situation or action or agreement that somehow irrevocably commits a person to having sex, and therefore the other person is excused for forcing sex on them, we’ll be making great progress.

As a corollary, since (as you note) many such situations involve alcohol or drugs, we need to reduce the tendency to use drunkenness as an excuse (for either party). People whose judgement is seriously impaired by drugs or alcohol are simply not in a condition to know clearly what they want or what their partners want. Realizing this, we should strongly discourage people from seeking sex when they’ve had a lot to drink, or seeking sex with other people who’ve had a lot to drink. In other words, you can get wasted or you can get laid, but you should stop expecting to combine the two.

We’ve made good progress in recent years convincing people that drinking beyond a certain point incapacitates them from being able to drive responsibly, even if they don’t feel impaired. Similarly, we need to increase awareness that being drunk incapacitates you from being able to make good decisions about sex, no matter how happy and horny you’re feeling in your drunken state. Maybe we don’t have to go so far as putting all sloshed people in a “party drunk tank” with supervision and no access to sex, as I facetiously suggested above, but we should definitely start eradicating the stupid idea that getting sloshed and having sex (especially with people you don’t know very well) is a good combination. Friends don’t let friends screw drunk.

[gigi]

@Ludovic

However, not only did they impress upon us that sex when one party says no is rape (which is obvious, but worth saying because some people just dont get it,) and that sex when one party is incapacitated is rape (which is informative in that while obviously morally wrong, not everyone knows the penalties for it are so high,) but they also emphasized, and I mean emphasized, that if two parties are just stark raving drunk, not incapacitated, and have sex, the guy is raping the girl.

Which makes no sense at all, is condescending to men AND women…

In the third scenario, are you saying no rape occurred? To me “stark raving drunk” means “incapacitated” (they are unable to make a clear decision), but are you making the distinction that neither one consented and so the guy didn’t rape the girl? In what sense is it “condescending”?

[even_sven]

[QUOTE=brickbacon]
You clearly have a hard time grasping what I am clearly laying out for you. You seem to envision that the 84% of rapes, which can be classified as acquaintance rape, are clear cut. I think the vast majority of them are situations that involve alcohol or drugs, and/or are situations where the woman has not made her desire not to have sex clear.**

Few people that are not extremists believe that sex involving any alcohol or drugs is automatically rape. In my super liberal extreme feminist college rape prevention presentation they taught us that rape is when someone is unable to resist- either through physical force or extreme intoxication, and that women are and need to be able to take responsibility for their own actions in run-of-the-mill intoxication.

Don’t think that bad things don’t happen when people are passed out. I recently witnessed the phonomenena of “drunken jenga”, where you pile stuff on top of a passed out person until they wake up. I can easily see this turn into a sexual sitation in different circumstances.

The vast majority of these cases involve no violence. They don’t involve a women kicking and screaming as she is held down. It is usually two people who sincerely hold two wildly different perspectives of what happened.

Rape isn’t bad because it hurts. Rape is bad because it violates. It can ruin sex for a person. It can make them uncomfortable in their own skin. It can make them scared of life. If you’ve ever had your house robbed, you know how deeply a sense of violation can shake you. Now imagine your own body being violated.

It’s a really good idea to make sure your perspective matches you partners.

Most of the time, these discrepancies stem from the different meanings men and women attach to different actions. You can bitch and moan all you want about how going to a guy’s room at 3 am means nothing, but in the real world, most guys feel it is a clear explicit invitation for sex.

THEN WE NEED TO CHANGE THIS BELIEF. THIS BELIEF IS WRONG AND HARMFUL. THE MAN THAT BELIEVES THAT A WOMAN IN HIS ROOM AUTOMATICALLY CONSENTS TO SEX IS WRONG AND WILL GET HIMSELF IN BIG TROUBLE. IT IS A REFLECTION ON OUR SOCIETY (or maybe just you) THAT WE SOMEHOW THINK THIS IS AN OKAY BELIEF.

Fuck.

Unless you advocate we live in a world where men ask for consent before each sexual act. Where every two seconds, a guy must say something like, “is it ok if i massage your left breat now”, then we need to have an open dialogue on how to the lessen the likelyhood that 2 people are put into a situation where such a misunderstanding could happen.

Actually, most guys that I’ve been with have said something along the lines of “Do you want to do this”- especially in one night stand type situations. It’s not unreasonable to get a final confirmation from your partner that you are both thinking along the same lines. In fact, it’s standard procedure…like finding the condom. If you arn’t doing this now, you probably ought to start. Women think that men that don’t make sure what they are doing is all right are kind of jerks.

**You said “telling women that it’s their responsibility to avoid getting into situations that might be interpreted as implicitly consenting to sex, and therefore result in rape, is wrong.” I disagree. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it has and will prevent people from getting into dangerous situations. **

WTF. I enjoy being drunk. I enjoy being around guys. I enjoy meaningless sex. I enjoy walking around at night. I enjoy holding jobs where I might be alone with men. I think you underestimate the sitations that could end up with a woman raped. I’m sorry, but giving up the things I enjoy- and some things that seem like basic things like existing at night or being around men- is not the “right thing to do”.

It is their responsibility avoid being implicit or unclear. It is their responsibility make it abundantly clear what your intentions are. It is their responsibility to actually say no, and mean it. Not doing so doesn’t mean you deserve to be raped, but it does mean you were irresponsible in a way that might have terrible consequences for 2 people.

Uhhh…nope. It’s a rapist’s responsibility not to rape me. It is a man’s responsiblity to make sure their partner is consenting. Why? Because being implicit or unclear doesn’t really hurt anyone. Rape does.