Rape
Offline I was reading through one of the forums that I regularly visit, and I came across a thread about a news article about a man who had just been sentenced to 20 years in prison because of rape charges. He had attacked and raped two women in the Seattle area. He had a childhood history of being raped by his father. The members of the forum were calling for his death, saying that it was the only possible way to avenge the attacking of these two women (note that neither of the women were killed). Other people said that he should be raped every day for the rest of his life and that this was the only way for him to be handeled. Out of all of the crimes a man can commit, rape seems to be the most offensive to the most people-- even moreso than murder in some cases.
I think that the reactionary responses to this event are extremely interesting. Why is it that rape is the worst thing one can do to a person? Is it because of its sexual nature and our christian conditioning to believe that sex is evil? That man could have beat both of those women to near death and got a lesser sentence than what he got for raping them. He could've got the same sentence for murdering someone if he was lucky. There is a strange knee-jerk reaction to rape that automatically makes people violently offended. Many women are traumatized for life after they are raped. Why is this? Why does this make women lose more trust than if they were beaten very horribly and not just fucked against their will?
Why do people feel that rehabilitation is impossible? Many times, rapists have moments in their past that are the source of their neurosis and a therapist could help their Antisocial Behavior Disorder and they could be a functioning member of society again. This, unfortunately, is rarely even considered. Rapists are so fucking crazy that there is no way that they can come to grips with reality. Once you rape someone, your life is entirely over, regardless of circumstances.
It sickens me when people suggest that the US court system be used for revenge instead of justice. Rapists have commited a violent crime, and should be treated according to the severity of their crime. They shouldn't be murdered for the sake of making the victim happy. They shouldn't be raped in order to get revenge. The mentality that causes these suggestions is totally barbaric. Jailtime should be in order, but not to an extent moreso than that of other equal crimes.
What do you think?
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Offline I need more information about the rape incident to give an adequate response. Too often I see people formulate an opinion after a short news blurb or hearing about an incident 3rd hand.
If it's a rape case in Seattle, you may well be discussing "Curtis Thompson" as he is heavily featured in the news right now. I do know quite a bit about that particular case.
Thompson was just found guilty of one rape incident and there are several more rape cases he is also being charged with. In the guilty incident, he broke into a woman's home...tied her up...raped her repeatedly and then poured bleach over her (both internally as well as external) causing considerable injury, in order to remove any possible DNA evidence.
Thompson was only a few months out of prison after serving time for (4) previous rapes when he went on his current rape spree. He is also awaiting trial for killing one of these rape victims with a screwdriver to the back of her head. While in court he has attacked his own attorneys and laughed at and mocked his victims trying to summon enough courage to testify against him.
If that's the case you're referring to, I'm gonna have to go with "No" on any rehabilitation.. What really would be the point ? The most compassionate move I can think of is to remove him from society permanently.
No victim should ever have to go through something like that.
I get the impression this may indeed be the case you're referring to as one of the victims has made the somewhat unusual request of turning the tables and "raping the suspect" in lieu of any victim compensation (I asssume she is referring to anally and w/ an object)...
Although I can't say I agree w/ this sentiment.. I can't say that I disagree either.
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Offline It sickens me when people suggest that the US court system be used for revenge instead of justice.
I hate it when advocates of the death penalty or "eye for an eye" fans accuse pragmatists of being soft on crime because we see the dangers of the innocent getting caught up by vigilante mindsets.
People have been in the past been convicted on mere "he said she said" testimony, which this "get even" attitude doesn't take into account.
AND I also saw a recent report on cable news about how flawed our justice system is, and one of the major criticisms is that the crime labs are not independent of the state, and are run by the state which can and has set up situations where that bias has crept into the process.
The expert said that crime labs far to often are run by unqualified people and do not have scientifice acreditation.
WITH the flaws our system has we must take every precaution that if a mistake is made it can be reversed.
EVEN with DNA which is in the same catigory as a finger print, that also depends on the "expert" presented to a jury, in not missinterpreting or flat out lying to that jury, which does happen.
The process must have quality control and the attitude of presumption of innocence. People like Nacy Grace and John Walsh are part of an irresponsible media that sell the idea that getting even is how you "fight back", and they are helping errode the quality control of our process by selling that societal mindset.
When the day comes, and it will, in their carrers, that an innocent person is set free from jail, in which they partook in portraying her/his guilt poisoning jury pools, I hope that person sues the fuck out of them and puts their vigilante attitude out of business.
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Offline AND I also saw a recent report on cable news about how flawed our justice system is, and one of the major criticisms is that the crime labs are not independent of the state, and are run by the state which can and has set up situations where that bias has crept into the process.
The expert said that crime labs far to often are run by unqualified people and do not have scientifice acreditation.
I have read about how terrible our crime labs are.
Here is what the New York Times had to say about a National Academy of Sciences report on crime labs in the US:
People who have seen it say it is a sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on, including fingerprinting, firearms identification and analysis of bite marks, blood spatter, hair and handwriting. The report says such analyses are often handled by poorly trained technicians who then exaggerate the accuracy of their methods in court.
Or if you want something a little more graphic:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/131527.html
Go about half way down that page and take a look at the video. Just a warning: don't watch that video unless you want to see a medical examiner defacing a child's corpse in order to falsify evidence.
We really need to do something about this crime lab problem since it is certainly sending innocent people to prison.
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
British General Charles Napier while in India
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Offline
I think that the reactionary responses to this event are extremely interesting. Why is it that rape is the worst thing one can do to a person?
It's a good question. Unfortunately, I don't have enough science on this to try to be authoritative, but I can make some educated guesses. At first glance, rape is kind of paradoxical. In study after study, we learn that sexually healthy women often have rape fantasies, and this makes a certain amount of sense. The male who is aggressive enough to overpower a woman and have sex with her is probably aggressive and strong, and in our formative environment, that might have been enough -- particularly before our brains started growing, but after we had started standing on two feet. Even today, dominance is sexy to women. In the business place, at the restaurant, on sports teams, dominant men get lots of attention from women. Sexual selection is competition. Plain and simple. Humans compete with, among other things, strength.
So we ought to wonder why females get so offended when they're overpowered sexually. Shouldn't this mean they're getting good genes?
Well, the other side of it is that after we stood on two legs and our brains started to grow, we had to push babies out before they were mature enough to do much of anything. (Compare a human baby's muscle coordination with that of a newborn chimpanzee, who can hold onto its mother without help almost immediately after birth.) This means that there's a lot of care that needs to go into human babies. A man who just casually rapes a woman is probably not going to stay with her to raise the child. He's just planting his seed wherever he can. This is good for the man, but very bad for the woman, who must bear the entire resource load necessary for caring for the child. So, we can see that strategically, rape may contain elements of things that women find desirable in mates, but it is not in their best interest.
Besides evolutionary reasons, there are questions of culture. Women have been oppressed, suppressed, and repressed for thousands of years in Western Culture. It should not surprise us that the "equal and opposite" reaction ought to come down with full force when women are granted legal rights. If people are a little reactionary over rape, it's understandable, given that until very recently, rape was permissible to men of proper station, and only the most elevated of women were protected. (Also, men and women of low station were seldom interfered with on such matters, so we may assume that rape was commonplace among the poor as well.)
Also, it must be frustrating to be a woman today. Women are the sexual selectors in a male dominated society. I believe that women "know" instinctively that they are the selectors, and there is a cognitive dissonance that comes from this realization. Sure, they are the selectors, but their selections are completely dictated by laws made by men. What kind of selection is that? Men make the rules by which females are allowed (or not) to exercise their genetic privilege of mate choice. I can understand how there could be a deep and innate rage at being denied this fundamental act of sexual selection. Add an angry man with a knife and a hard dick, and I can understand the outrage.
Finally, there is reason for men to be outraged at rape. Men are unsure (at best) of the parentage of the child they will raise. Children come directly from a woman's body, so there is no doubt of who is the mother. Who the father is, now that is a matter of quite a bit of consternation for men. Rape has serious consequences for men when it is their mate who has been raped. It literally adds certainty to the man's parental uncertainty. He is certain that there is another possible father for the baby he will raise. Genetically, this is the highest of crimes.
Is it because of its sexual nature and our christian conditioning to believe that sex is evil?
I tend to think not. Rape is viewed as pretty horrible across most cultures, including primarily secular cultures who have never been exposed to Christianity in a significant way.
Many women are traumatized for life after they are raped. Why is this?
That's one of the biggest questions in cognitive psychology. The best I can offer is that this fits very parsimoniously into the model of humans as instinctive animals as opposed to free willed spirits attached to a body. There is some aspect of the human brain that is permanently altered by certain kinds of stimuli. We know all about PTSD, and many of the sexual side effects of rape are very similar to PTSD. When we consider that in cases of violent rape, women are being sexually violated while they are also afraid that they will be killed. It's not unlike war with an added kick in the vagina.
Why does this make women lose more trust than if they were beaten very horribly and not just fucked against their will?
Because fucking is about reproduction, and our genes "care" more that we reproduce than that we go unbeaten. In fact, in many animals, we see that getting beaten half to death is part of getting to fuck. When you mess with what genes "want" us to do reproductively, you mess with their "ultimate purpose."
(Of course, you must take all of those intention words as metaphors to illustrate the blind math.)
Why do people feel that rehabilitation is impossible?
I dunno. It has yet to be determined whether violent rapists tend to form an "addiction" to rape. This is certainly a possibility, and we do see that rapists are often repeat offenders. Also, poverty breeds crime, and when a rapist leaves jail to go back to poverty, he's going right back into the environment that contributed to his first crime. Without a change in the environment, it's definitely possible that rehabilitation is impossible. Yes, this has a strong behaviorist streak. Yes, I'm a neo-behaviorist. (I may have just made up that term. I mean to say that I firmly believe we are slaves to our environment, but I do not adhere to the Skinner or Pavlovian outdated model of behaviorism.)
It sickens me when people suggest that the US court system be used for revenge instead of justice
I agree.
Rapists have commited a violent crime, and should be treated according to the severity of their crime. They shouldn't be murdered for the sake of making the victim happy.
I also agree with this. A violent rape of a stranger is far different from drunken, possibly nonconsentual sex that neither college student fully remembers.
They shouldn't be raped in order to get revenge.
I am opposed to all forms of torture. Rape as revenge is torture.
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Offline Brian37 wrote:AND I also saw a recent report on cable news about how flawed our justice system is, and one of the major criticisms is that the crime labs are not independent of the state, and are run by the state which can and has set up situations where that bias has crept into the process.
The expert said that crime labs far to often are run by unqualified people and do not have scientifice acreditation.
I have read about how terrible our crime labs are.
Here is what the New York Times had to say about a National Academy of Sciences report on crime labs in the US:
The New York Times wrote:People who have seen it say it is a sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on, including fingerprinting, firearms identification and analysis of bite marks, blood spatter, hair and handwriting. The report says such analyses are often handled by poorly trained technicians who then exaggerate the accuracy of their methods in court.
Or if you want something a little more graphic:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/131527.html
Go about half way down that page and take a look at the video. Just a warning: don't watch that video unless you want to see a medical examiner defacing a child's corpse in order to falsify evidence.
We really need to do something about this crime lab problem since it is certainly sending innocent people to prison.
People like Nacy Grace and John Walsh rely on the gulibility of emotionalism to sell their product. I will give them some credit in that they most likely do not realize how their using "free speech" irresponsibly, is damaging long term, societies future jury pools.
To assume that a policeman cant lie, or that a state run crime lab cant lie, is dangerous. Blind trust is what causes abuse and to minimize the mistakes that will happen, in an imperfect world, and is scary that it seems to be that mass media is based on 30 second emotinalism.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
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Its the same reason why you can go around saying "fag" "chinc (sp)" "gook" and other offensive terms and all you'll get are a few looks and maybe some angry faces. But as soon as you say nigger your career could be in jeoprody. Basically if you do something to offend an especially stupid and loud minority (in this case feminazis, not woman in general) the whole world seems to be focused on you.
Just try looking at rape from "the alien observing earth" point of view. The aliens see two people on a crowded bus being squished against eachother, obviously touching, and nothing happens. Then they see two people touching eachother and one is put in a strange building for the rest of their life. Does really make much sense does it? Obviously there is more to rape than this but it still has to make you think.
To me it does not make sense to treat rape as such a terrible crime. If a CEO steals millions from a company making thousands of people unemployed, wouldn't this be a much terrible crime. Why don't people advocate for their executions and for them to be raped everyday for the rest of their lives? Surely they have ruined hundreds of lives. And they actaully reuined them.
Back when MattShizzle was on here he would advocate daily torture for life as a penalty for being a CEO, but that is just a side point.
As for rape, I think it should have a lengthy prison sentance as a punishment and I am glad that you can legally use deadly force to prevent it. I don't see a difference between rape and torture. Sexaully torturing someone (which we call 'rape') deserves a pretty harsh punishment. I don't advocate raping rapists though, long stays in prison are good enough for me.
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
British General Charles Napier while in India
Maybe the reasons behind the punishment are more to due with the reasons behind the act and not so much the act themselves. How many reasons for rape are not malicious in nature? At least for murder you have self defense or accident.
Sounds made up...
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I think that punishments should be solely on the basis of their effect at preventing further crime, and that this assessment should be done on a societal level. In fact, punishements should be a last resort, and all attempts should be made at rehabilitation first, for the sole reason that rehabilitation, when done properly, is far more effective at preventing crime than punishment is. In fact, there are good examples of how the current system of punishments, especially in the US, tend to reinforce criminal behaviour. Criminals are surrounded by other criminals, they get immersed in a criminal sub-culture and mindset, and then to top it off, when they're released, they can't find jobs since no one will hire them. The only resort is to go back to crime.
Instead of leaving them to rot in prison, society should be providing these people with therapy, education, skills, and re-socialization. It is only our mythology that criminals are 'bad' people, as in rotten and incorrigible, that causes us to sweep them under the rug.
If society took on the perspective that when someone commits a crime, that's not an indication that the person has failed, but an indication that society has failed to effectively socialize the person, then a huge portion of crimes could be prevented.
Instead, people hang on to this myth of the evil criminal mind, and crime remains a big problem.
The fact that the US has a huge proportion of criminals compared to other countries is not a shame on those criminals, it's a shame on America.
As far as the rape double-standard, it's just an extension of the same myth. People don't see punishment as a way to prevent crime, they see it as a way to exact revenge. The only way this makes sense is if they see the perpetrators as evil people, undeserving of mercy, not really people at all. It is simply demonization.
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20 years doesn't seem reasonable for 2 counts of rape but I believe there are variables that go into sentencing...i don't know the specifics of the case. The call for death to a rapist is a bit extreme imo (but I am against the death penalty for any crime) Being raped for the rest of his life wouldn't help the man recognize his crime and become a functional member of society once released.
I think you are mixing up the "religous right" with a persons individual rights.
Rape is an elimination of a persons right to choose who they share an extremely intimate situation with. It has NOTHING to do with a theists' view. It is the view of the person getting raped.
Women are traumatized by verbal abuse, physical abuse, and all types of sexual abuse (along with boys/men) add rape to the list and then rank them by degree of severity and guess where Rape would fall. I will wager top of the list. As for the last sentence in the above paragraph... are you saying that a woman being raped should only be as upset as if they were beaten?
I actually agree with you - I believe in a rehabilitation attempt for any person charged with a sexual assault. Can you elaborate on how a rapists life is over (and I am assuming you mean after doing time) moreso then a murderer, an armed robber...
My thoughts are this regarding a rapist: they have committed a violent crime and should be exposed to rehabilitation as well as jail time. Are their crimes to the same degree as a murderer? I say no. The punishment should fit the crime. What that punishment is ... I couldn't even put a time-frame on it (how do they come up with the exact years incarcerated anyway?)
As for the mentality of those suggesting death and constant raping for the rapist...we can't blame theists for that. Ask any mother or father their thoughts on the matter if their child were violated.
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