Etrigan: Because a victim should absolutely be smart enough not to, say, shower for a couple of hours in an attempt to wash away the feel and smell and stain of the inhuman bastard who committed a profound violation.Um, yes. It's shocking to suggest that the victim of a crime not remove evidence before contacting the police, and then demand that their word should be good enough? I have been attacked on the street by some thugs, and the first thing I did was call the police, even though my face was a mess and I was hurting and bleeding.
I have no way of reacting to that rationally- basically, it seems like a stream-of-consciousness jumble involving pits and stones and olden times that admittedly sucked, all to prop up the initial point of "Sure, for rape- because it involves women who historically were mistreated- we should throw out due process as a nuisance." Somehow he simultaneously defends improvements in the judicial process over the generations while implying that we shouldn't have them, or... something. I don't think I was able to even process that by the end.However, no crime is horrible enough to suspend the protections and burdens of proof required by the legal systemallen.spaulding: This would make sense of the procedures of the legal system were perfect in every way, developed in a vacuum to best serve the public, or perhaps divinely given. They aren't.
Marty Marx: There is no good reason to push the 41% figure (to say nothing of the 90% figure!) in the face of widespread academic consensus that rape is underreported, and in the face of the pervasive accounts of women who say they were raped but did not report the rape to the police. This nonsense is only likely to make it even more difficult for people who are raped, especially women who are raped, to be taken seriously.The 41% figure is bullshit, of course. But then, most figures about rape/sexual assault are bullshit, since we could find figures to suggest apparently every woman I've ever known has been raped. Which- either all these women are conspiring to protect one really awful man, or all men but me are rapists, or the figures are wildly inaccurate.
I know these threads are somewhat predictable, but what's the point of calling out people for things they haven't even said yet?Please see Marty Marx's post, as an example. Apparently I went from "Well due process is important whether it's a rape case, or child porn or molestation case, or check kiting" to "pervasively" suggesting all dem bitches are lying about rape. Sorry for being defensive!
allen.spaulding: This in no way means we throw out due process, which seems to be the case allen.spaulding is making.You're just being difficult and trollish at this point, and I resent you for it. My point is not nor has ever been that due process is some set-in-stone handed-down-from-the-gods concept, but rather that it is an ideal that we are constantly striving for like "justice" and "fairness" and "peace".
No. You're not even wrong.
You are taking the status quo conception of due process as a given, assuming it to be appropriate, just, and measured. You are reacting to attempts to improve judicial procedure to make it more equal, demanding that all cases receive the same protections created by flawed historical processes.
Attempts to change due process to better address gender-based violence are about thirty years old. Attempts to fight any change to the status quo is much older than you, I, or the English language. You're fighting history and the dustbin may be well-populated, but it gets old over time.
jokeefe: we could find figures to suggest apparently every woman I've ever known has been raped. Which- either all these women are conspiring to protect one really awful man, or all men but me are rapists, or the figures are wildly inaccurate.Well, the 100% was hyperbole, but I believe it was in the last rape thread just a couple of days ago that figures like 1 in 3 or in one case 53% (later researched to have been that of incarcerated women being sexually assaulted at some point in their lives) were tossed around. My point in being hyperbolic was to say that these figures can get inflated without fact-checking to the point that one has to seriously question "That can't be right, can it?" As in, if a huge minority to majority of women are being sexually assaulted, then please be vocal! If any of my friends are assaulting you, tell me and I will at bare minimum never speak to them again. As far as I know, no male friend of mine has sexually assaulted a woman much less raped anyone. If that's not true, it does no one a favor to stay quiet.
Please to direct me to these figures which prove that 100% of women have been raped, hincandenza. And I'm very sorry that you have nightmares about suffering institutional rape or being raped while incarcerated, but please do understand that the fear of sexual assault is pretty widespread amongst women, too.
"When I was raped, it was part of a progression of something relationshipesque. We were kissing, talking, hanging out outside my room. And then he kept going and pushed me down and, though I remember struggling and remember saying no, he had sex with me. And afterwards he told me I didn't struggle and he certainly didn't hear me say no - he'd never have kept going if I had. And so I started to doubt my memories of an already scary and confusing thing WITHIN 5 MINUTES of what had happened. That, for me, is scarier and worse than what physically happened, because now I start to doubt everything I remember and say and always thought I'd be capable of in a bad situation.posted by emilyd22222 at 6:10 AM on July 20, 2010 [6 favorites]
People knew that we were sort of a thing - it would have been the ultimate in "He says, she says." If what I knew about the situation started being fuzzy as soon as it happened, I knew that wouldn't stand up in court. I was somewhere where doing a rape kit was not an option at all. And I knew that telling someone in charge about it would only get people talking about me and speculating about me and what sort of person I was, and repeat the things that were already rolling around in my head: Well, didn't she know that she invited him to her room? What was she thinking? How could she be so stupid? If she really didn't want sex, she would have struggled or said no or fought back.
So in the end, the only person I told was my friend who had emergency birth control. I don't think that me going to the police would have had ANY positive outcome for me. Did "the bastards win?" Well, I guess. He's still out there doing his thing. But I kept what dignity I had left in the situation intact. I would have felt no sense of justice if we'd gone to court and I got raked over hot coals as the defense targeted my character, my previous relationships, dissected whatever poor choices I made to get to that situation, and ultimately exonerated him. Because there's no way he would have been prosecuted. Even though I KNOW I was raped."
Why does it require that one consider the system we have now to be perfect to feel that we should pretty much always err on the side of making it harder to convict?Because the fact that it is currently almost impossible to convict means that rapists can rape with near-impunity. And that, in turn, means that most women live with constant low-grade fear. It means that many, many women have been raped and then denied justice, and they spend the rest of their lives dealing with that trauma. It affects all women's lives to some extent, and it affects a pretty big portion of women's lives in huge ways. I think that's kind of a biggie.
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!Yay, A Man For All Seasons.
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
Gee, I dunno. How do you feel about child molestation? Do you not care about that? And have you stopped beating your husband yet?Yeah, with all due respect, fuck you. This is a discussion framed around the premise that women who report rape are often lying. That assumption, which shapes the way we talk about rape, is part of the reason that so very, very few rapists are ever convicted. The burden of proof for rape is higher than for other crimes. The victim of rape is put on trial the way victims of other crimes are not. This post advocates making that bad situation even worse.
Exactly what reaction do you expect when you tell someone they don't care about women being raped?I expect a reaction pretty much like I got, actually. Or at least I should have. This is the double bind that you experience when you try to talk about fighting rape. On the one hand, it is conventional wisdom that rape is taken much more seriously than other crimes. Therefore, if you point out that something tacitly supports rape and rapists, you are pulling the nuclear option. How dare you accuse someone of promoting rape?!!?! That's the worst thing you can say about someone!!!!
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The "epidemic" link cites three alleged cases of false reports. Not really sure how that constitutes a bona fide epidemic, the general immorality of false police reports of any nature notwithstanding. I am also curious how the chronic underreporting of rape affects the analysis in the research link. Assuming that 50% of rape reports are actually false (a huge assumption based on the actual data they examined), then this number becomes somewhat less shocking in light of the fact that so many actual rapes are not reported.
posted by joe lisboa at 5:11 PM on July 19, 2010 [5 favorites]