SlackerInc started a threadin the BBQ Pit but I would like to have a non-Pitting type discussion about it:
Essentially, it’s interesting to note that the issue of rape on college campuses tends to make many liberals espouse a “conservative” viewpoint and many conservatives espouse a “liberal” viewpoint.
Generally speaking, with regards to most crimes, conservatives are more likely to have a tough-on-crime-stance - to want to see more convictions, to favor the accuser against the accused, to favor severe punishment, to see more criminals in jail. This is the case with murder, robbery, terrorism, etc.
Liberals are more likely to favor the defendant and hold a “It is better to let 10 guilty walk free than convict 1 innocent” viewpoint and want a very high standard in order to get a conviction. Liberals tend to decry America’s high incarceration rate and favor rehabilitation rather than punishment.
But when it comes to the issue of rape on college campuses, suddenly both sides seemingly switch viewpoints. Suddenly it’s the liberals - and especially feminists - who want more convictions of people accused of rape, who want the bar of conviction set a bit lower to make it easier to get a conviction, who adopt a “tough-on-crime” stance, who complain that rapists don’t get punished enough, or that when they do, the punishment isn’t severe enough.
And then it’s the conservatives - and especially, the MRAs - who bring up instances like Duke lacrosse, the Rolling Stone article about the University of Virginia fraternity, etc. It’s the conservatives who mention instances of false rape accusations, who repeat the importance of “innocent until proven guilty,” etc.
Does anybody else feel this way - that on this particular issue, liberals sound “conservative” and conservatives sound “liberal”?
I speak as someone on the left/liberal end of the political spectrum. I also consider myself a feminist, someone who supports equality of the sexes. Despite these things, i don’t agree with all lefties/liberals, or with all feminists, about everything. Both groups are too big and diverse for that.
I’m going to start by accepting your basic premise about the different attitudes of liberals and conservatives to the general topic of criminal justice, even though i think you’ve oversimplified it. But even if we accept, as a general proposition, that conservatives are generally tougher on crime, and liberals have a less punitive attitude, your more specific discussion of the issue of rape is dramatically oversimplified
In my experience, discussions of sexual assault do not generally take on a desire for more convictions just for the sake of convictions. In fact, it seems to me that one of the first and fundamental arguments made by feminists and liberals on the issue of sexual assault is simply that we want accusations to be properly investigated, and not dismissed or covered up because “she was drunk” or “she was wearing a tight dress so what did she expect” or “he’s a star athlete who doesn’t deserve to have his life ruined.”
I’m not after more convictions, per se. I am, in the first instance, simply after a criminal justice system that doesn’t minimize sexual assault even before the evidence has been gathered. I don’t want the bar for conviction to be lowered; it should be a “beyond reasonable doubt” bar, just like any other criminal accusation. But the evaluation of the evidence should not be filtered through antiquated ideas about women’s sexual availability, or about men’s “natural” inclinations, in which any sign of promiscuity or independence by a woman is considered prima facie evidence that she wanted to be fucked, and any sign of remorse or indecision by the guy after the fact is considered to be a reasonable excuse for, or mitigation of, an act of sexual violence. And we need people at all levels of the criminal justice system, from cops to prosecutors to judges to juries, to recognize that the definition of a sexual assault is much broader than just a stranger holding a knife to a woman’s throat in a dark parking lot.
And if liberals appear (to you) to be inconsistent in calling for tougher sentences for those convicted or sexual assault (the recent Stanford case is a good example), it might be because, having seen their constant appeals for a less draconian criminal justice system ignored for decades, they would at least like some consistency in the system when it comes to punishing people convicted of violent offenses. And, before any conviction is even recorded, and before a trial can even start, they would like institutions like universities, as well as law enforcement organizations like police departments, to do their fucking job and investigate allegations of sexual assault professionally.
The issue of violence is important. You claim that liberals “tend to decry America’s high incarceration rate and favor rehabilitation rather than punishment,” but this call has always been made the loudest in defense of non-violent offenders, and those who have shown themselves, after lengthy prison terms, to be rehabilitated. It has never simply been a call for letting people get away with violent crime.
The key arguments are generally in favor of reducing or eliminating criminal penalties for non-violent drug offenses, for example. But violence against another human being is something that even us hippy-dippy lefties and liberals believe should be punished, despite the claims by some conservatives that we’d indiscriminately let murderers walk the streets collecting welfare checks. So, contrary to the argument made in your OP, there’s no inherent contradiction or paradox in calling for a reduced incarceration rate and more emphasis on rehabilitation, on the one hand, and calling for a more serious attitude to dealing with cases of sexual assault, on the other.
First, MRAs aren’t just conservatives; they are, for the most part, fucking morons. Getting inside their tiny brains is too much work, so i’m not going to try it.
Among conservatives more generally, there’s probably some truth to what you say, but conservatism is also a big tent. I’ve heard conservatives, especially but not only conservative women, argue for a more serious approach to investigating sexual assaults. There are also plenty of conservatives who, whatever they might think about broad issues of social policy and the criminal justice system, still believe in “innocent until proven guilty” for ALL crimes, not just rape. While conservatives might, on a general level, take a more “law and order” approach than liberals, most conservatives also support the basic principles of justice and presumed innocence.
The fact that conservatives and liberals are on the opposite sides in this case doesn’t prove anything about both, it might be all about one. IOW, conservatives would say they’re advocating for consistency between these crimes and other crimes, but that society - influenced by liberals - treats them differently. And liberals would say the opposite. Naturally, as a conservative, I incline to the first view. mhendo’s post above is an example of the second.
Worth noting that this happens on other issues as well. Most notably free speech, where many liberals are absolutist free speechers until it’s speech that they really really don’t like.
This isn’t exclusive to (some) liberals – just as liberals poll higher on accepting restrictions on bigoted speech, conservatives poll higher on accepting restrictions on blasphemous or pornographic speech.
Is is the liberals who have switched. I know this because I’ve been one for 60 years and watched it change, while McCarthyism has stayed the same. Liberalism has swung heavily toward protected class advocacy, and the liberal platform is now heavily dominated by political correctness. While conservatives have traditionally been law ad order zealots when white males are the victims, now the liberals are law and order zealots when white male perps can be identified and held out as examples. Law and order and criminal justice has never been the issue itself, but only a reflection of how victims team up as advocates for closure. Criminal justice (another word for revenge) has now morphed into closure (another word for revenge), with the euphemism changed to reflect a shift in the protected class.
A lot of times the discussion gets muddied by the difference between convictions and public opinion. I have a lot lower threshold for belief for my own personal self than I’d have if I served on a jury.
Rape is weird among violent crimes inasmuch as it’s committed in higher numbers by people who have social prestige. You don’t often see sports stars or movie stars or CEOs or diplomats engaged in robbery, breaking and entering, aggravated assault, or murder; but rape (and sexual assault in general) is something that for whatever reason some people with privileged positions think they can get away with. (Not to say high-prestige people never commit other violent crimes–it just seems to be relatively rarer).
Rape is weird among violent crimes in its very close resemblance to a non-criminal act. If someone punches your face, they’ll have a hard time defending themselves by saying it was consensual; that’s a very common defense against rape charges (and appropriately so). This trickiness in prosecution, coupled with the second point about people thinking they can get away with it, makes it very difficult to compare to other violent crimes.
Rape has a history of being terribly under-prosecuted. In my state, it wasn’t until I left high school that spousal rape even became a crime. And we all know the news stories in which people who unambiguously committed rape get away with absurdly small sentences.
On the left, there seems to be general support for low standards to “prove” an accusation - not to secure convictions in a court of law, but to allow campus committees to sanction and expel students. On the right, this view is largely rejected due to documented flimsiness of evidence and inexperience/incompetence/bias of campus committees, but there remains solid backing for putting convicted criminals (including rapists) behind bars.
Speaking as someone of the (extreme) center, I would like to see all campus sexual abuse/rape cases handled by seasoned law enforcement professionals financed by colleges and universities, and for convicted offenders to be jailed - not expelled or compelled to attend behavioral workshops.
The conservative position as laid out in the OP just so happens to be the position that benefits white men.
From that perspective, there is no confusing flop. Conservatives are tough on crime as long as most of the perpetrators are black and poor.
Things that our white sons do, like commit rape and do recreational drugs, well, let’s not ruin their lives. That black kid with pot or who mouthed off to police? He may have gotten the shit beat out of him, but hey, someone’s got to teach him a lesson.
This aligns with my rebuttal to the OP (although in an un-subtle way). I see consistency in the supposed Liberal and Conservative viewpoints.
In rough terms the image is that Liberals want to defend the less privileged - in this case women - and call into responsibility the more privileged - in this case the privileged males.
Whereas, again in rough terms, the image is that Conservatives would be more likely to call into question the less privileged, while defending the privileged.
Through those lenses, IMHO what **Velocity **describes in the OP is consistent.
But you can’t just ignore the actual facts and just rush straight to the ideological theories.
For example, if you could show that conservatives are in favor of using “preponderance of evidence” at criminal trials when it comes to poor/minority defendants and then suddenly oppose it when it’s middle-class white kids, then you can go to the next step. But people are just skipping all that pesky detail.
Conservatives would deal with rape by locking up women.
Liberals would deal with rape by making prostitution illegal.
Nobody would deal with rape by locking up rapists.