Is it a hard disciplining mother that frustrates her son so that he wants revenge on womanhood, or hot little Lolita’s who flaunt their beauty, that incite his lust until it explodes in a violent way, or are we to believe that rapists are just born with that proclivity and there aren’t environmental factors?

It’s a little disturbing that both your examples of “environmental factors” blame women.

I don’t know of any evidence that rapists are more likely to rape women who wear revealing clothing; nor any that shows that rapists are more likely to have “hard disciplining” mothers. (There is, however, evidence that rapists are more likely than non-rapists to be members of gangs, teams, or frats.)

There’s actually a lot of serious discussion and work on factors that make some men more likely rapists than others. However, I don’t think either of the factors you bring up count as part of serious discussion, because there isn’t any evidence supporting them.

But I write from a concern that so much focus on the “women are raped more often than men,” view, has the effect of dismissing/disregarding/diminishing the experience and pain of those men who were raped. When I was a young boy, I was “pantsed” under a bleecher at the local ballpark, but a pair of older boys. It was a humiliating event, although fairly common in those bygone days. I think it was less likely that a girl would be stripped, or made to stip by threats of violence, as a power thing, because everyone knew it was wrong; or they felt it was more wrong.

My point is that even is women are more vulnerable, and more likely to experience unwanted and even forced sexual acts, their pain is no greater and not much different from men who experience similar attacks. I think it somewhat more useful to look at why perpetrators feel driven to do such things, what frustrations or backgrounds lead them to force or rape? I think men feel a good deal of frustration of lusting for that which they can’t have, and women showing bellies and cleavage, etc. drive much of that frustration. Porn does also. I suspect some of the rape emotion is anger or rage about the frustration of being unable to satisfy the lustful feelings in more acceptable ways. Everyone says, “Well, just because a woman shows off a little skin, doesn’t mean she wants to be forced sexually” That is right, of course, but why is it so politically incorrect to look hard at the causual stimulii that drive the rape behavior? Is it a hard disciplining mother that frustrates her son so that he wants revenge on womanhood, or hot little Lolita’s who flaunt their beauty, that incite his lust until it explodes in a violent way, or are we to believe that rapists are just born with that proclivity and there aren’t environmental factors?

Given that rape is about power, what are the frustrations of lack of power that drive the rapist?

Apparantly the girls, teenagers according to the victim, attacked the man, beat him and raped him with a stick while saying things like “now it’s your turn” et.c. They also seemed intoxicated. The girls all got away and afterwards the police thought that it was a revenge gone awry and hitting the wrong person.

So yes, women can rape men. But in todays society it really is something of an anomaly a la “man bites dog”.

I dare men to walk up to friends and tell them you have been raped, watch what the reaction is. Even women will look at you as if you are crazy, if not try telling them it was a woman that raped you. That will work the best.

And in other breaking news, the sun is going to rise in the east tomorrow.

IMNSHO, some things are just a little too obvious to be worrying about opinions to the contrary.

Galileo would have disagreed.

When you see a man in a dark parking lot and your availability heuristic tells you he is going to hurt you, you are more likely to get hurt, so science tells us.

Nonsense. If a man in a dark parking lot doesn’t intend to attack anyone, he won’t attack you, no matter how much fear you might feel.

If he does intend to attack someone then whether he does or does not attack you will depend upon your actions, not your feelings.

Ginmar:

Gee, talk about blaming everybody BUT the attackers. Men rape women yet we’re so twitchy about acknowledging it that we wind up with every damned excuse under the sun as to why we won’t deal with that directly. Men minimize rape, glamorize it, fetishize it, and try to make it disappear. Now here’s a wonderful excuse; if the culture didn’t reflect this reality, it just wouldn’t happen. It’s the culture, baby, not the men. Fancy words don’t do much to disguise that thestatement ‘if you see a man in a dark parking lot and think he’s going to hurt you, you’re more likely to get hurt” is nothing but victim blaming. Let’s stick to blmaing the rapist, okay? Sorry if makes men uncomfortable.

What makes men uncomfortable is that you use the word ‘rapist’ and ‘men’ as if they were interchangable.

If a woman sees a man loitering in a car park, and she suspects he might be up to no good, what advice would you give her?

a. Blame the rapist, or
b. Get the hell out of there.

Me, I’d go for b every time. Sorry if you regard that as victim-blaming. I see it more as victim-prevention.

Since most rapes are committed by individuals close to the victim, it seems more research needs to be conducted on why these rapes occur. What makes these men attack women, women they know. Is it just power, sex or rage or a combination of all of these? Personally speaking, I think it would be easier to hit a person you do not know. Knowing the person simply makes it more painful for you to hit them, unless they have treated you awefully or you are simply one of those that like to hurt people! So why rape women that you know? Just because they are physically (proximitywise) available? Do they think they can get away with it?

Gee, talk about blaming everybody BUT the attackers. Men rape women yet we’re so twitchy about acknowledging it that we wind up with every damned excuse under the sun as to why we won’t deal with that directly. Men minimize rape, glamorize it, fetishize it, and try to make it disappear. Now here’s a wonderful excuse; if the culture didn’t reflect this reality, it just wouldn’t happen. It’s the culture, baby, not the men. Fancy words don’t do much to disguise that thestatement ‘if you see a man in a dark parking lot and think he’s going to hurt you, you’re more likely to get hurt” is nothing but victim blaming. Let’s stick to blmaing the rapist, okay? Sorry if makes men uncomfortable.

Has anyone tried using prison rape statistics to get prison classified as “cruel and unusual punishment”?

To answer your question, there was this ruling from Texas a year and a half ago:

In a legal first, a unanimous federal appeals court has ruled that seven ranking Texas prison officials can be sued for damages due to discrimination based on sexual orientation, the American Civil Liberties Union announced Sept. 9.

The ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals came in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of a gay man who was repeatedly raped by prison gangs and whose pleas for help were ignored by officials.

Margaret Winter, Associate Director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project and an attorney for the former prisoner, Roderick Keith Johnson, applauded the decision, which was issued late yesterday. The decision also upheld the right to proceed in the case under the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

Note that the result isn’t finding prisons unconstitutional, but (at best) paying rape victims some damages and ordering prisons to do a better job protecting their wards.

Although the above case established the prisoner’s right to sue, in the end the prisoner in question lost his lawsuit. It’s striking to me how much the excuses for not taking a gay man’s claims of being raped seriously resemble the usual misogynistic excuses for not taking female victims seriously - including talking about how tight his pants were.

As this Findlaw article points out, the Supreme Court ruled over a decade ago that prisoners have a Constitutional right to be protected from rape. In practice, however, lower courts haven’t enforced this ruling:

In Farmer v. Brennan, a 1994 decision involving a transsexual inmate who sued prison authorities for failing to provide protection from rape, the Supreme Court recognized that prisoner-on-prisoner sexual exploitation is constitutionally unacceptable. Confirming the prior holdings of a number of lower courts, the Supreme Court held that a prison official violates the Eighth Amendment if, acting with deliberate indifference, he exposes a prisoner to a substantial risk of sexual assault.

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented. […] Although the law is set by the Court’s majority, many lower court judges appear to hold views approaching those of Justice Thomas. Notwithstanding the relevant legal rules, many judges seem eager to abdicate responsibility for protecting prisoners from abuse. While they may be less explicit than Thomas in justifying their disregard of prisoners’ claims of abuse, their actions, in case after case, reflect a similar bias.

For more information, this article on rape of male prisoners, and this one on rape of female prisoners, both seem pretty good. (Although I’ve only skimmed them, not read them thoroughly.)

I don’t know how that would work (hopefully not at all) since it’s the prisoners generally speaking doing the raping. It would be like saying that being imprisoned is cruel and unusual punishment because every time I’m imprisoned I smash my head into the wall and that hurts me.

Or, rather, that someone else incarcerated in the prison smashes your head into the wall, only not on behalf of management. The fact that prisoners are the ones committing prison rape doesn’t change the fact that you as a prisoner are getting raped.

I have no idea, though. I have trouble thinking of other examples, but admit that I don’t know much about the issue.

…It doesn’t seem like the greatest strategy, although the same thing has brought about some reform in death-penalty application.

Has anyone tried using prison rape statistics to get prison classified as “cruel and unusual punishment”?

I don’t know how that would work (hopefully not at all) since it’s the prisoners generally speaking doing the raping. It would be like saying that being imprisoned is cruel and unusual punishment because every time I’m imprisoned I smash my head into the wall and that hurts me.

And in other breaking news, the sun is going to rise in the east tomorrow.

IMNSHO, some things are just a little too obvious to be worrying about opinions to the contrary.

Well, it is complicated, but you should read more about the issue before trying to reason it out on your own. One reason is that the victims of violent rape do not perceive the act as sexual. They are typically concerned primarily for their life. Afterwards, there’s a incongruous response, where the victims are feeling assaulted/violated, but many people around them are focusing much more on the sexual part of the assault. So, there’s a framing issue that requires continuous pushback.

Another reason is that lust is part of the many ways that men are excused from raping women. Most people can relate to overwhelming, unreasoning lust, where they do things they later regret. Seen in this light, rape would be part of the spectrum of sex, just an unpleasant and illegal part of the scale. There are many problems with this framing of the issue: it posits entirely unacceptable behavior as just a little smidge over from acceptable behavior; it entirely overlooks the violent, threatening, and humiliating aspects of the act; and most importantly, it is a key part of the puzzle where rape victims get blamed for the crimes against them.

Although greatly discounted in rape-case defense arguments since the 1970s, it used to be common to interrogate the woman closely about what she was wearing, her actions prior to the rape, and so on. Quite a few rapists were excused because the victim was young, sexy, or sexily dressed. It’s still done today, in and out of legal circles. The change from object to subject is easy to understand if you think about it. It’s common for men to think of the women who are arousing them as responsible for that arousal. After all, it’s women wear the burkhas and chadors; it’s not the men who are required to wear blinders.

A final reason (at least, that I can think of before jetting off on a camping trip) is that many acts of rape aren’t so obviously sexual. Something like 50% of male rapists don’t even ejaculate. Many times the assaults are purely abusive or humiliating, e.g., inserting bottles or branches into the victims. Note also that in men-on-men rape, there’s a very specific pecking-order component to it, both for rapes inside and outside of prisons. For instance, one scenario is that a man will be both robbed and raped, then told, “now go tell the police.” Naturally, in many cases, they do not.

So, if you want to assert that there’s some element of lust or sex in rape, sure, they’re obviously related. Sex is a very, very complicated part of the human condition. But the emphasis should be on pushing sex to the background in rape, since it is not really the foreground issue.

I’ll come back to this thread in a few days in case anyone wants to call me an idiot or anything. I offered no cites here, but I was a rape counselor in NYC for six years, and I read a fair bit about it at the time. I counseled men, but I saw nothing nothing that would contradict what Ampersand was saying.

It was a rant. That’s all. It’s just based on this observation that there’s a lot of effort put into making sure men are never “raped”. If you read the first link I referenced there is a lot of discussion about that — how men avoid calling what is done to them “rape”. Since we know that the legal code is written primarily by men, and quite often primarily for the benefit of men, I’m suggesting that perhaps there’s also a bias in the legal code to make sure that men are never “raped”.

Here’s the Texas code –

http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/statutes/docs/PE/content/htm/pe.005.00.000022.00.htm

If the victim is female, well, it’s easy for “foddling” to become “sexual assault” because female genitals are, by their very nature “penetrated”. Penises penetrate vaginas, not the other way around. (And obviously penises can penetrate other things as well, but a vagina has never penetrated anything …) Male genitals can be “fondled” without resulting in “penetration”. If what’s harmful about sexual assault is the psychological trauma it causes (because most of the time the physical injuries will heal themselves), how is “fondling” male genitals less harmful? Yet because it is all about penetration — as you pointed out — males are at a legally codified disadvantage for having anything that’s done to them called “rape” (or in the case of the Texas statutes “sexual assault”). Indeed, if what was done to you (someone grabbing your penis) was done to me (someone grabbing my vagina), what was done to me would be called “sexual assault” and what was done to you wouldn’t under the Texas criminal code.

At any rate, as I said, it was a rant. Perhaps it would be an interesting thread starting topic?

Isnt a thirsty person more likely to rob a water canteen? An hungry person more likely to steal food? Why do people believe that a sexually excited person is less likely to rape? I think he/she wont beat the person, force them to have sex but certainly is more likely to use forceful coercion tactics to get them to have sex. One thing for sure, a rapist has to have a very low respect for other people, whether it is visible or not in their regular interactions. But that does not mean it has nothing to do with sex.

But I have read the FBI files which were not based on police records alone, and which support the stats I wrote, so the fact that you found some based on different research that gets different results does not deter me.

Okay. But you can hardly expect me to trust statistics that you don’t provide a link or citation to. The fact is, I’ve provided sources for my claims and you haven’t (”I have read the FBI files” is not a source).

As for the rest, I think there are areas of agreement between us. And I’m sorry if I implied that you were saying there was no difference in rape prevalence rates by the sex of the victim; I didn’t intent that, but you’re right, what I wrote can be read that way, and I’m sorry about that.

However, I do agree with Marcella’s critique of what you wrote, in comment #9.