My comment was in the subjunctive (or maybe the conditional; I get confused): if it were all about power, we might put the emphasis on empowering the victim. My implication is that this is what we’ve done for the past several decades, and that it may not be the best approach.
Likewise, I apologize for the bristling :). I definitely didn’t mean the first statement as a reflection of my views; I was suggesting it was the bad result that I fear came from misunderstanding the root causes of rape.
FWIW, I’m not convinced about that train of thought, either, nor do I mean to suggest that the empowerment of rape victims is a bad thing. I’m just wondering whether it’s where the focus ought to be, rather than placing the focus on preventive education of potential rapists.
That doesn’t follow at all, not even suggestively. For example, for all we know given the data, rapists are simply opportunistic. They like sex, and they take it where they percieve they can get it. The motivations in that case have nothing to do with a desire for power.
But the data does not suggest an opportunistic approach. The data very strongly correlates to a planned strategy for control. Which is very much to do with a desire (or assumption) of power. Opportunistic rapes are statistically very much in the minority.
LHofD, no harm, no foul. I don’t have any answers either. I’m just worried that the easier answers seem predicated on false information.
Well it’s hard to come up with clear conclusions when the facts have holes in them. We all know there are lots of unreported rapes and there are good chances for those to be hypothetically planned or spontaneous.
To clarify things maggenpye, you mean rape by strangers when you says opportunistic rapes right?
At this point, there are still people who say rape has nothing to do with power or nothing to do with sexual desires. Both of these are clearly present in the act of rape so when someone tries to discard one of them, they must really provide a lot of feasible evidence to support it rather than just stating so with or without studies by “professionals”. Maybe some data would support it but it doesn’t automatically discard its presence for it is a requirement to have both power and sex involved to be considered rape. It’s okay to weigh one more than the other (since these are mostly opinions) but discarding one is very questionable.
I think I used the word “opportunistic” incorrectly. I didn’t mean to imply spontaneity. I just meant to characterize someone who takes what s/he wants when s/he thinks s/he is able to–whether now, or as a result of planning, or whatever.
In any case, I don’t see how planning and strategy indicate a motivation to control.
Ted-Y. No, stranger rapes tend to be planned - finding a suitable location, waiting for a lone target etc. Or, following a woman until she’s alone. Or breaking into her house after watching to make sure no-one else is there. The intent to rape is there before the target is selected.
Opportunistic rape would be more along the lines of deciding to go to the mall and raping a woman because she happened to walk within grabbing distance. The opportunity initiates the decision to rape. The latter situation does happen, but it’s rare.
Love the " " around professionals as though they were given their qualifications out of a lucky dip. Doesn’t change the facts.
I’m not saying rape has *nothing *to do with sexual desires - it’s often the excuse and method (because rape can be oral, anal, with an object or weapon, not just penile penetration of the vagina). But the facts keep showing that it is not the reason. Again - as many rapists are already in consensual relationships, they are not raping through sexual frustration.
Are you suggesting the *unreported *rapes will support your position? Because those are predominantly the acquaintance rapes, where the victim is usually in a relationship (marriage, dating, friend, family, parent/child) where the attacker has access to consensual sex.
“Maybe some data would support it”? Oh, well - some (unassisted visual) data suggests the world is flat, despite the vast amount of research that says it’s a globe. Let’s give those equal weight, shall we? Opinions do not carry the same weight as facts.
Brian Ekers - in the context of the examples given - they were all about one person exerting power over another person.
Frylock - Planning and strategy are about controlling the situation and a persons ability to resist. If there is planning, there is intent to control.
Of course there is intent to control, in a very trivial sense, whenver one makes plans that involve other people. But this is not necessarily motivated by a desire to control. I thought the position I am skeptical of was the position that rapes are chiefly motivated by a desire to control or to have power over others.
I don’t think that anyone has said that rape has “nothing to do with sexual desires.”
But the man may be sexually turned on by the thought of violence to a woman or by establishing his dominance and power than he is by soft skin and a pretty face.
Some who stand in opposition to chemical castration of sex offenders do so because that still doesn’t deal with the violent nature of the person. He would still be dangerous.
Some of you are very confident, self-assured males who have probably never felt powerless. You may not understand what feelings of powerlessness do to a person. If it happens for a long enough period of time, it instills rage.
A. I haven’t “disbelieved” any studies. Rather, I have not seen how they could be interpreted as suggesting what you say they suggest, given your own description of those studies.
B. The link you just provided directly contradicts what you’ve been saying.
It does start of by saying power “is believed to be” one of the primary motivations for most rapes. But most of the cite goes on to cite research or arguments for just the opposite view.
It says the goal is sexual satisfaction, not power. (Notice the evidence cited for this claim is exactly the evidence you cited for your opposite claim–namely, the fact that rapists don’t tend to prefer rape to consensual sex. This suggests to me, just as I said before, that that little tidbit of information is not relevant to the question since it is perfectly compatible with the truth of either your claim or its opposing claim.
The cite then goes on to say that at least one group of rapists demonstrates “more arousal” when presented with forced sex situations. That would suggest that a motivating factor in rape is power or control–except that it is immediately followed by a very next clause which says both groups were more aroused by consensual sex. This result is, again, quite ambiguous. Perhaps this group of rapists is motivated to gain control or power through rape. Or, since apparently they prefer consensual sex after all, perhaps they’re just motivated to get sex, but for some reason associate sex and non-consent together, and so are aroused by situations of non-consent, thinking subconsciously or consciously that this kind of situation is especially likely to get them sexually gratified. If that’s what’s going on, then the motivation is sex, not power.
Again, I’m not disagreeing with any studies. Rather, I’m disagreeing with the way they are being interpreted. They are not good evidence for the claim they are being used to support.
The study you cite to support this does so by saying that acquaintance rapists begin the evening planning to have sex with their victim, not that they begin the evening planning to rape their victim:
This is a crucial distinction when determining the rapist’s motive.
There are plenty of people who plan an evening with the goal of having sex at the end of it. The difference between the rapist and the nonrapist is that the nonrapist, when realizing that his date doesn’t want to have sex, backs off.
(Again, I do not think this is true for all rapes. I do think it’s true for many acquaintance rapes. I think conflating stranger rapes and acquaintance rapes is a bad idea. Punish them the same, prevent them differently).
There is a major causation issue going on here as well.
It is probably true that a greater percentage of women are wearing “revealing clothes” (whatever that may mean) when they are raped than the percentage of women wearing “revealing clothes” in the population at large.
However, this can likely be explained by the fact that a disproportionate percentage of rape victims are young women, of child bearing age, and who, because of the overwhelming dominance of acquaintance rape over stranger rape, are quite likely to be on a date when raped. Given that people tend to dress up for dates, it is therefore more likely that, if victim to a rape, whether planned or not, they will be dressed in “revealing clothes.”
Women often get dressed up to dates. Women don’t often wear sweats on dates. If women are more likely to get raped on dates than in other moments of their lives, which is true, then they are more likely to be wearing “revealing clothes” when raped. None of which suggests that the “revealing clothes” were in any way causative of the rape.
Revealing clothes is also relative, isn’t it? I don’t remember who it is, but someone upthread pointed out that a woman showing her bare arms or ankles in Saudi Arabia is probably in more dangerous than a woman in the U.S. wearing a sports bra. If you were presented with someone wearing, says, jeans and a tight tank top, you might think, “Okay, sexy,” and that’s it…but if you were presented with that person and told that this person was a rape victim, you might think, “Oh, revealing clothes.”
I think the word “planned” is quite vague in the context of rape. Assuming it’s based on sex, wouldn’t the rapist have **planned **to have sex at some point?
Nope. Well kinda before but not completely. I’m saying that there are good reasons for unreported rapes to be both stranger and acquaintance. Because they are unreported, we can’t really use it to support either scenario I guess since we don’t know what they are for the fact that they are unreported. (I should no longer use it to support stranger rape nor should anyone else use it to support acquaintance rape. Pointing out facts which it might favor one is okay but even then we should no longer use it because it is even less definite than everything else that might be involved in this discussion. )
If the person can just go up to any stranger, and if they all consent to sex, then he wouldn’t need to rape and I’d presume he’d be quite satisfied. Actually there wouldn’t be such a thing as rape in such a case but (sadly?) the world isn’t like that. Just because the rapists already has sex regularly, doesn’t mean that they prefer the violent rape over normal sex. It’s like giving a fat kid one gram of pizza. He ATE pizza, why would he want more? Actually, my analogy would suggest that the kid would want more pizza because he got that teaser.
The analogy you used isn’t good though because it is definite. We know that you can travel around the world and there are visuals that aid proving the world is round. The facts around rape are for sure more ambiguous so we cannot treat them the same as the world being round. If research showed that they took 100 rapists and gave them all the sex they’d ever wanted with any girl they want and they still decided to rape people, then no one would argue that those rape isn’t primarily about power and control. But that kind of research cannot be done and if it were, I would think the results would differ.
I don’t think many people denies that power isn’t involved, but just that it isn’t the primary motive. I like the example I gave earlier where if I want to show that I have more power than my dad and my brother, I don’t do so by raping them. Some crazy people out there might but they make up less than 1% of the population that their motives aren’t worth discussing.
Hmm I’m not so sure. I plan to have sex with [insert name of famous and beautiful actress] if she asked me to. I don’t see control there. What about (hypothetically - cause some douche will probably quote this is say “end of discussion” or some gay shit like that) if I plan to spend the rest of today playing video games because I have nothing else to do? My plans can readily be changed if something better comes up.
I’m enjoying the discussion but I think people (myself included) should be a lot more careful when stating things “definitively”.
Please provide info for your cite (title, author, year, publisher, etc.)
Were you having an aneurism when you wrote this? It makes no sense.
Cite, plz, on % of rapes that involve elderly or senior women. I don’t know how you know this, but I don’t know it and I’m not taking your word.
So you deliberately started a thread with a disingenuous title and OP, hoping to generate a discussion which you would then be able to “prove” and thus “win your own thread”? At this point I’m at a loss to understand what information you hoped to glean from this, or what information you hope to spread around, other than your supposition that women who are raped are, to some degree, “asking for it”.
In case it’s not clear, I think that the OP makes no sense, and the OP’s follow-up posts don’t make sense either. There is no causative relationship that I can discern between what a woman wears and whether she’s raped, with the possible exception of a firearm.
Frylock - You’re free to interpret reality any way you want to - the experts disagree with you. Felson’s study was included in that Wiki link as the one, single dissenting study. The results have not be repeated in the 14 years since it was published - of course you chose the only one that supported your view.
LeftHandofDorkness - Wanting to have sex, even expecting to have sex are very different things than deciding to have sex regardless of what your date wants. The last is someone who believes that their partner *must *fulfill a role. The rapist decides without consultation or consent that this is going to happen. The planning may involve buying roofies, making sure the target drinks enough to be incapacitated, is physically smaller - whatever it takes. That’s planning and control.
It’s completely different to spending the evening thinking “Woohoo, third date!” and hoping like mad your girlfriend lives by the same dating rulebook as you do.
Most of us fall into the “Woohoo” camp. Rapists don’t care what rulebook their partner has read - it’s his way because he’s the only one who matters.
Ted Y - Unreported means unreported to the police. They *are *reported to academic studies, that’s why there are freely available statistics that say you’re still wrong. Your one source is not reliable.
If rapists were given enough consensual sex they wouldn’t rape? Sorry - wrong about that, too. Go back and look at the links provided. I’m sick of repeating myself.
The example was wrong then too. Already answered, go back read the links.
False example. You plan to have sex with her if she *doesn’t *ask you, *doesn’t *want to, and tries to resist. You plan how to get around her resistance, or at least get her to a place where no-one hears her screaming - that’s rape.
Snowboarder Bo - He doesn’t do links. He’s read one book and the rest he makes up as he goes along.
It’s one thing to argue imaginatively - it quite another to use imaginary arguments.
People pay for pizza, right? Well they also pay for sex. I’m quite sure it’s available in every state. Which explains why prostitutes never get raped and all rapists are too poor to afford a prostitute, right?
I think Left Hand of Dorkness pretty much nailed it.