There’s an old myth that women who report being raped were actually ‘asking for it’ in some manner. Unfortunately, this myth isn’t so old: a recent survey finds that a disturbing percentage of people in Britain believe that women do…

Please do not post any more comments here, and thank you to everyone who contributed to a productive discussion.

There was a witness who saw part of it, and one of the rapists threatened her with violence if she testified about it. That tacked about three months work detail to his sentence. Incidently, he was on probation already in another county, but that did not affect his sentencing.

People did protest, for all the good it did this young girl, who attempted suicide twice the first year after the rapes. The judge was really dandy too, making statements that if she’d been a nun or a virgin, it’d be different. She wasn’t the *right* kind of victim, and she was Black and I really don’t think our prosecutors out there consider Black women who’ve been raped as victims.

This judge was not one of the two female judges out of our 25 total judges either.

If you want to lengthen the sentence, usually there has to be either an enhancement or separate charge if a weapon especially a firearm was used. Or a gang enhancement. Either of those by itself may add ten years, which may be longer than the rape sentence without them added. One guy did get a 50 year sentence mostly on the weapons’ charges, and he was convicted for rape, even though he was the accomplice and not the actual rapist. Because of his rape conviction, the police, prosecutors, etc. are not really looking for the one who actually left his DNA inside his victim. Case closed.

How is this relevant?

It’s relevant because a number of posters on this thread think that one night stands are inherently riskier than official dates. That would only be true if the population of men who engage in one night stands was statistically more likely to rape than the general male population. I’m saying that I don’t believe that to be true; that there is no difference in the level of rape being committed by the general male population, and the subset of the male population who engage in one night stands.

Violent misogyny is not “human nature.”

Unfortunately, it is. We can reduce it, but it will always be there. Again, men are ALWAYS going to want toi have sex with women who don’t want have sex with them and a few of those will force women. That’s not going away.

Funny, because when the crime being discussed is theft, the general attitude is entirely different. No one believes that theft will ever be completely eradicated, but generally people are willing to change behaviors and tactics to help prevent theft. Not so with rape; rape is ghettoized as a “woman’s problem”, and the onus is on women to prevent themselves from being raped, rather than proactive tactics to prevent rapists from raping. For one thing, we know that men who have been convicted of rape in the past are far more likely to rape again in the future. Yet typically, we sentence rapists to either probation and time served, or to very short prison sentences—shorter than for any other violent crime. What’s up with that? Apparently, our society doesn’t really regard rape as a serious crime—otherwise, there’d be a serious prison sentence to go with it. Will long sentences deter other rapists? Maybe not—but they will take those proven to be a risk to society off the streets.

Afterwords, he issues an apology in which he conceded that he understood how she could have believed that the encouter was nonconsensual. However, there is not really an account of the events where she could believe that it wasn’t consensual and he could have reasonably believed otherwise.

The case “kind of fell apart” because the “slut defense” worked, because she was getting death threats, because the courthouse staff kept “accidentally” posting confidential materials where the public could access them.

November 16th, 2005 at 4:36 pm

Carib, that appears to be a stastic for rapes reported to police. Since the vast majority of rapes are not reported to police, I don’t think your statistic is very meaningful.

Hey, we can only count that we can count. Those are the best stats out there. If there are better stats, lets see them.
In any case, its pretty clear that the vcast majority of violent crimes are men on men assaults, which was the point I was trining to make.

Going by my personal experience, my DA was a woman, the head of the Sex Crimes unit was a a woman, and many of the prosecutors in my office were women.

There were quite a few women judges.
In the police department, I saw a good number of female cops( including a few female detectives).
Now I was a big city prosecutor, so my experience may have been different from the norm. Dunno.
My juries typically ahad lots of women on them
I triedan attempted rape case, in which the defendant got 15 years. He was on probation at the time.
i also remember a ” he said, she said” rape trial in which the guy , a first offender, was convicted and got 13 years.

Those don’t seem like light sentences to me, and our jurisdiction had lighter sentencing judges than most!

Q Grrl Writes:

November 16th, 2005 at 2:12 pm

Cough up the statistics please.

http://www.fbi.gov/filelink.html?file=/ucr/cius_04/documents/CIUS_2004_Section2.pdf

Among other things, there were 859,000- aggravated assults in 2004, versus 94,000 forcible rapes. the vast majoprity of those assaioults wqere men on men.

How is consent difficult to judge in the OC case?

Citing single cases won’t help us. That’s not even the typical date rape case. Generally, things are murkier.

yeah…that’s why all the feminists focused on Kobe being obviously guilty rather than the slut argument of the defense. /sarcasm

Dunno what happened in the Kobe case, frankly. Seems that case kind of fell apart, and the victim decided to take the money.

Seriously, how insulting are you trying to be? How many stereotypes are you intent on perpetuating?

As many as I can ? :-)

More seriously, I’m glad folks here are willing to give the accussed the benfit of the doubt and the presumption of innocence. That’s definitely not the tone of this thread!

Also, I think you have made a continuous factual mistake: Nick didn’t bring these guys to hir home. Sie went back with them to their camp, in a tent. I believe I read somewhere that at another time, sie brought an entirely separate paratrooper to hir home, because neither of them had a condom.

Many of us have also pointed out that it’s tough to have confidence in the conventional wisdom that strangers are dangerous — nobody has even attempted to demonstrate this empirically — though I don’t think one can conclude the converse either. Can you demonstrate empirically that strangers are more dangerous than acquaintances? Or must you rely for that proposition on theory?

Finally, you assume that Nick’s behavior would not change after birth (presumably including your incorrect assumption that sie brought the two paratroopers home). I’m not sure that conclusion is correct, and I’m fairly sure if you asked, Nick would answer. Because I have some experience with sleeping babies, I suspect that Nick will be too sleep deprived and worn out to look for sex for a few months, and that after that Nick will look for a babysitter and getting laid somewhere that there is no sleeping baby to wake.

The tone of your post prompts some questions: you believe Nick should simply forgo no strings attached sex, am I right? And independent of any risk, you believe Nick is morally obligated to do so, yes? You believe that Nick’s desire to have sex with two men at once is aberrant and that she ought not to have fulfilled it, am I correct?

“Oh, and Brian? It’s relevant because it means that engaging in one night stands is not necessarily any riskier for women then getting involved in long term relationships. ”

This may be true, but apparently you don’t know, and neither do I, so it stands as a theory and nothing more. Is this your way of rationalizing one night stands, and eschewing long term relationships? Or as a prop to claim that there really was no risk to Nick’s behavior?

I ask you: if you were Nick’s friend (maybe you are, for all I know), and you were babysitting her child and had just put that child down to sleep, and Nick came in with two drunk paratrooper strangers and asked you to leave……would you? Would you happily dart out of there, with the child asleep, and say “have a happy fuck!”.

“And if the one-night stand did to you what one did to your friend, would you appreciate some snotty asshat telling you that they hope you show more regard for your daughters than you do for yourself?”

After I did what I did, and my friend did what he did, we did not go off and start a blog, rationalize our behavior on that blog, and close our post in saying that we deserve to be free from any authority telling us that we should behave otherwise.

I had no daughters at the time of my one night stands, and my friend (who has a son who was alive when this incident happened to him) has never repeated his behavior since. He realized that it was a symptom of something he needed fixed for himself. He has never repeated it since. He got no acceptance from anyone for what he did, and he regrets it to this day.

this sense that there is this universal acceptance of unacceptable behavior from me, while at the same time there’s a universal lack of acceptance of same in women, is simply delusional and wishful thinking; rationalization in support of unacceptable behavior.

Name one.

Let it be noted that a large percentage of the prosecutors , judges, and police officers these days are, in fact, women and that juries are often majority women.

On what planet? Nationwide, about 16% of all LE officers are female and in most agencies, it’s much less than that. And that is even more apparent in the detective rank, even in the sexual assault divisions. Most judges are still men, particularly in my area, in criminal courts. Most of our female judges seemed to be in juvenile or family courts. Most prosecutors are still men, though the number of female prosecutors is growing.

As far as vigorous prosecution of sexual assault crimes? There’s some improvement for White women, very little if any for Women of color(who are often invisible victims in discussions of rape and other forms of sexual assault) and most of the vigorously prosecuted cases are “stranger” rapes. Still, the conviction rates are miniscule.

Yes, plea bargains exist, in fact most crimes overall are disposed through plea bargains, but given the seriousness of rape as a violent crime, most of the sentences given out on the “lessor” offenses in plea bargains, are laughable at best. Often very little or no incarceration or jail time. Mostly formal probation and sex offender registration.

Classism and racism also play roles in how rape crimes are treated. And who’s the perpetratuer, who’s the victim. Or whether there even is a victim at all.

As far as jurors, they can be mostly male, mostly female.

I guess some of Ms Young’s diciples wondered on over here.

Brian’s just behaving as an asshat. It’s inevitable in any discussion of this type that a man is going to come and lecture women on how they can avoid causing their own rapes. Does he spend an equal amount of time lecturing men on how to not rape women? Oh, well, that’s probably the women’s job!

Just b/c a woman’s decision might not be smart or might be very unwise, doesn’t mean that the men who commit rape aren’t 100 % responsible for what they do. They are the ones who make the decision to rape, whether it’s a stranger, an acquaintance, friend, significant other. If a woman’s doing something that might put her at risk, that does not negate the crime against her. Besides, women are victims of crime even when they are doing all the “right” things on the checklist that’s created and put out mostly by male individuals. The reason why this happens, is because rape is that the decision to rape is not in the women’s hands in theses cases, but in the rapist(s)’. So she can be doing anything. Walking down the street, going out with a guy or sleeping in her own home.

I have to wonder who these “people” are? Do they belong to some secret society? Secret handshakes to identify others or something?

How is consent difficult to judge in the OC case?

How does a jury concluding that a woman must have been looking for sex because she went to his house, not that she did not have sufficient proof of assault (they convicted on the non-sexual assault charge) equate to “innocent until proven guilty”?

The juries don’t come out and say to the judge and lawyers that they found the alleged rapist innocent because they found her guilty, but that doesn’t mean that isn’t what they talk about behind closed doors.

“Sorry for all feminists who think that the accuser should be simply taken at their word.”

What part of “presumed innocent” was I taking issue with in your mind?

“as I suspect many here would”

yeah…that’s why all the feminists focused on Kobe being obviously guilty rather than the slut argument of the defense. /sarcasm

We don’t have a chance to talk to the paratroopers so we are taking Nick at her word in an exercise in hypotheticals, not because we would automatically believe her if we were part of a jury. Seriously, how insulting are you trying to be? How many stereotypes are you intent on perpetuating?