Yeah. The hate for the crime of rape is so strong that even the victims are hated in a way. People pity them to the point of resentment.
You know with murder, people are kinda like, let’s look at the circumstances, let’s talk about it okay? Maybe their victim had it coming in some way. Maybe the killer is not all there in the head.
But with rape? Even the most logical and compassionate people will shut down all reason and mercy and revenge and brimstone is the only acceptable answer. Even if the rapist is 10 years old or mentally retarded, death or eternal suffering is seen as the only possible justice. It’s interesting.
One: is rape worse than murder in some absolute sense? And I think that has two sub-categories: is a rapist always or sometimes worse than a murderer, and is it always or sometimes worse to be either raped or murdered? Honestly, I think that’s a set of pretty useless and meaningless questions, but whatever. Knock yourselves out.
Second: Are fictional portrayals of rape more disturbing than fictional portrayals of murder? If so, why? This seems more interesting to me. I think they are, much as, like I mentioned above, portrayals of animal abuse are. I think it’s a combination of things–convention (people getting killed on stage is a long and highly stylized tradition); sympathy (it’s hard to imagine yourself getting murdered, but you can see yourself or a loved one getting raped–or a pet killed); context (people get murdered in all sorts of movies with all sorts of tones–they only get raped in dark, serious films), and probably several others.
But the question of which is actually seen as “worse” and the question of which portrayal is more disturbing are really separate issues that have to be discussed separately.
I don’t think it’s a meaningless question actually. Don’t you think that if society thinks rape is worse than murder, in a certain sense it means they view rape victims as being social zombies? This has strong implications. Also, rape’s status as a “special” kind of evil in people’s eyes challenges our commitment to due process since it’s a very difficult crime to prove in most cases, yet there is such a strong demand for convictions that there’s a temptation to risk convicting people falsely. The sex offender registry being made publicly accessible is already a form of double jeopardy.
Personally I think murder is worse because I’m an atheist and don’t believe in an afterlife. I think in some ways people are actually a bit too overdramatic about rape relative to other crimes to the point that is makes rape victims less willing to come forward. I mean it’s no doubt heinous and worse than an ordinary beating, but people act like it’s the Holocaust or something. Yeah killing someone is definitely worse.
I think comparing suffering is sort of pointless, and that both “rape” and “murder” are such vast, complex things that trying to make an absolute statement about which is “worse” is really pointless. There are certainly individual rapes where it likely would have been more merciful to just kill the victim: there are certainly others where that is not at all the case. And I don’t see how it matters, in the end: I’m not going to tell a rape victim “At least he didn’t kill you”, nor someone mourning a murdered loved one “Hey. Could have been worse. Could have been RAPED!”
I guess my point was like if someone’s daughter was raped and kidnapped I could easily imagine her parents saying “Thank god you’re alive!” when she came home but I couldn’t imagine their daughter being killed but not raped and them being like “at least her honor is intact”. Though maybe in some crazy theocratic society in the Middle East or Asia that might be easier to picture lol.
Isn’t there a movement out there with the specific aim of fighting the notion that rape “ruins” a person for life or that it’s a fate worse than death?
(And I recall a scene in “Erik the Viking” in which a rape victim sarcastically thanks Erik for saving her from a fate worse than death after he stabs her rapist and her with the same thrust of the sword.)
I think it largely depends on what we’ve been conditioned to react to and what we’ve been desensitized towards. It can change with any media cycle.
Both are horrible crimes, but as you’ve stated in your original post, people are generally indifferent when it comes to bad guys killing bad guys, or even good guys killing bad guys (what is a bad guy has changed many times, from nationality, to faith, to race, etc.). On the other end, people are pretty indifferent about prison rape and there are tons of jokes surrounding it, but we typically don’t include that in discussion, because we feel they’re bad people.
I don’t think (by law) we really consider murder less serious than rape, but right now, especially brutal cases of rape have entered into a lot of headlines, so it’s what we’re seeing. If you look at an area like the Congo, very serious cases of rape have been happening for years, but gone largely ignored for a variety of reasons (alongside murder). At the same time, murder is almost a daily topic in the news, so we’ve largely become desensitized, save for very brutal cases. People enjoy murder mystery novels, shows, and even board games (Clue). And more recently, something like mass shootings don’t receive as much media attention, anymore. In some capacity I can see where murder is more tolerated, but there are enough cases where we just as well don’t care about rape or any other crime.
Sad as it is to say, the reaction/seriousness to any event(s), seems to correlate with how often and loudly it’s presented in the media, and usually a bigger problem when it’s at a persons front door. Outrage moves in cycles, and every so often it can motivate change, or indifference.
I’ll add that there is an element of imagination at play too. We can more easily imagine what it feels like to be raped than murdered, so there may be a bit more visceral reaction. I remember watching “Die Hard” and finding it much harder to watch scenes with John McClane pulling a chunk of glass out of his bleeding foot than watching any number of people be shot, simply because I know exactly what it feels like to pull a sizable chunk of glass out of my foot.
I think it’s cultural. In a puritanical-based society that glorifies or at least tolerates violence and attaches shame to anything involving sex, of course rape is going to be worse than murder.
I wonder what the cultural stigma of rape vs murder is like in cultures that don’t attach a such a religious/moral/shame factor to sex. Say, Japan.
That’s true, there are rapists who would rather have consensual sex but it’s not available to them. But still, a person shouldn’t have the desire to rape someone even if that’s their only option for sex.
I don’t think it’s worse to be raped than to be murdered (it could be, if it’s brutal torture versus a quick and painless murder, for example, but in general it would be worse to be murdered) but I think most rapists are worse people than some types of murderers.
And I’m just thinking of things I don’t consider to be in a gray area, but things that are definitely rape or murder. The guy who drugs a girl is definitely a rapist but the guy who has sex with a drunk girl, it’s harder to say since there are different degrees of drunk.
We know more about the psychological after-effects of rape. We’ve heard the survivor’s stories. We can sympathize and empathize with rape victims. Even if we have no personal experience of rape, hearing about or seeing rape touches something deep within us because we know what it can do to a person.
The murder victim has no story to tell or psychological effects to deal with. We can’t empathize with their feelings because they aren’t having any. We may feel for the survivors, but we can’t relate to the feelings of the victim.
To put it another way, rape can get to us personally more than murder can.
While I disagree with your hypothesis that Rape is considered worse that Murder. The common theme is that there are some instances where murder is jusitifiable, we have even coined the term “Justifiable Homocide”. There are no instances where rape is. That is the main distinction that I think people are conflating with rape being worse. There are times when murder is aceptable, self defense for instance. There is never a time when you can say the same about rape.
Well, sure, but if someone’s daughter were held prisoner for years and raped and came back a shattered shell of a person who never really recovered and who, after 20 years of self-destructive behavior and pain killed herself, I can see them saying “He should have just killed her; these twenty years have been worse than that”. I mean, you can spin scenarios every which way.
I’m of the opinion that murder is always worse than rape. Certainly, there are different kinds of murder, one out of passion compared to one done to fulfill some sick fantasies. But there’s no such thing as a justifiable murder, as murder is, by definition, illegal and intentional killing of a person. If it’s not intentional but still illegal, it’s manslaughter, and if it’s legal or justified it’s not murder. I could potentially see an argument being made that some forms of killing someone else that are not murder are less serious than rape, but intentional killing is on it’s own level. That is, both rape and murder involve intentional harm done to another human, and while both leave permanent damage, only one leaves one in a completely unrecoverable state, dead.
This doesn’t in any way lessen the harm caused by rape, and I think we have a society have a way of seeing some forms of rape, like that at knife point, being considered “real” rape, or oddly “rape-rape” and other forms, such as that done on a helpless victim, to someone unable to consent, or when a man is the victim, as somehow not all that serious. All of those are real rape, and they should be thought of as such. Rape of any form leaves mental and emotional scars, even if there’s no physical force involved, and those types of damage can be as or more serious than a lot of physical injuries.
That all said, I think there’s a few reasons why some people see rape as worse or even nearly equal in severity to murder. At least here in the US, violence is everpresent and it’s often glorified. It’s in our entertainment, it’s in the news, it’s in our history, it’s everywhere. But we still have a relatively sexually repressed culture. In a society where parents will flip out more over a nip-slip than violence during primetime on TV, it’s little surprise that crimes that involve the former will receive dispropotionately higher degrees of outrage than the latter.
I don’t think killing in self defense is murder though, it’s more similar to killing a person by non-negligent accident. On the other hand killing your daughter’s rapist in revenge certainly is murder, but it’s a murder many people would feel was justified. I think murder is always wrong.
Also - is it rape if it’s by accident? Like let’s say a man thought a woman consented but he was wrong. I know such a scenario is highly improbable but I’m sure it’s happened before.
I disagree. I hear people of all sorts justifying murder all the time but it seems like only a certain kind of person makes excuses for rape.
Except prison rape. Nobody seems to care about that. :(:smack:
Well yeah if she killed herself obviously I could see them rationalizing it that way. It’s fairly uncommon for rape victims to commit suicide though, it happens but not as often as you’d think. But I mean like Elizabeth Smart or Jaycee Dugard for example, I’m sure their families would rather be able to have a chance to put them back together than just hear their tormenters killed them.