I’m trying to find some way to look at this to make it look less like some male power play thing. And failing. Combined with the other decisions listed in the article I have to wonder what year the members of Italy’s high court thinks it might be. 1950, perhaps? You can’t rape someone who wears skin-tight pants? You aren’t as culpable for abuse if your victim has had consensual sex in the past?
Can we send a couple of members of the US women’s curling team over there with a supply of clue-by-fours to engage in a little “hearts and minds” work? Please?
I was thinking about this too. Jesus, Italy, great timing. I have a feeling you’re going to lose a little Olympic-related luster in the court of world opinion over this.
That said - I would note that the ‘damage to the victim’ was not a part of determining innocence or guilt; it was in determining punishment. So ‘you can’t rape someone with skin-tight pants’ might a bit inaccurate.
I’m trying to think about what the reaction would be if this weren’t a sex crime. Sex crimes come with way too much emotional baggage (especially in the US - i.e., Megan’s Law, for example).
Should my punishment for stealing $100 from a rich man be lighter than if I stole $100 from a poor single mother? Since the damage to the victim would be lower. Should we take into account the damage to the victim in determining punishment (not guilt or innocence, obviously). Could make for an interesting Great Debate.
OK, I didn’t read far enough down. I’d need to know a bit more, though - could just be a journalist’s take on something to make it more of a juicy story - like the ‘woman spills coffee on self, wins millions from McDonald’s’ headlines that glossed over the facts of the case.
Wasn’t there a famous case in Italy where a charge of rape was thrown out after it was proven that the jeans that the alleged victim was wearing on the night of the alleged attack were too tight for the attacker to remove himself, and therefore the victim must have removed them?
Is this not the case that the last sentence in the article is refering to?
I read that article yesterday. It seemed to me that they weren’t arguing that the title said at all. What they were arguing was that the girl was sexually mature enough to perhaps not be classed as a minor in some regards. The girl was 14, and had had sex with several men. I guess the standpoint was, if she’s old enough to have sex with several men, then perhaps it’s not appropriate to trial her as a minor.
But I wouldn’t take much from that article as truth. It seemed rather sensationalist.
Dominic Mulligan- IIRc correctly, it wasn’t proven in court, the judge just assumed that the woman would have had to help remove thr jeans because they were tight. Which doesn’t prove anything, if she was forced to remove the jeans.
An Italian judge has also suggested in the past that every woman, if given the choice between rape and death, should choose death i.e. that lying quietly because you have a gun at your head or knife at your throat means that it’s not rape, because you “let him”!
You don’t punish someone for rape based on how much someone suffered, or how they recovered, you do it because no one has the right to do that to anyone else. That’s it. Full-stop.
So when actress Fran Drescher was given a choice of having sex with one of the men who broke into her house while the other man was pointing a gun at her husband Peter’s head and saying he would kill Peter if Fran didn’t have sex, I guess that wasn’t rape?
The thing that bothers me most about this case is that any consideration for the victim’s sexual history seems to be made while ignoring the greater consideration that it was her own step-father who was abusing her. I am somewhat hypersensitive about the issue of persons in authority abusing that authority, but I cannot imagine how the Hell anyone could argue that any putative loss of purity on the girl’s part mitigates the actions of her step-father.
I’m not directing this at anyone in this thread, because for all the contrarian comments I’ve seen, I don’t see anyone actually supporting the decision as reported. Just venting a little bit more.
Actually, I didn’t mean that. I think the reasoning that we’re reading in this article does imply that, and if one were to accept that reasoning, other circumstances should also be considered.
More to the point - the only way, in my opinion, the sentence should be affected for circumstances is by the relationship between victim and perp. This wasn’t a stranger abusing a stranger, but a girl being abused by someone she should have been able to look to for protection, and support. I merely meant to play Devil’s Advocate with the reasoning being used by the court.