Rape, blame, responsibility, Amnesty, etcetera.

In court, if a degree of responsibility can be attached to the victim of an accident, their 'reparation' is reduced.

Similarly, if someone can be shown to have influenced the perpretrator into committing the crime, the verdict is influenced by 'mitigating circumstances'.

It depends on what you call 'degree of responsibility'. Admittedly, the original question was more about the woman 'accepting some degree' rather than the courts proving it as such.

I don't know if that's less offensive or what.

i was totally clear, i hope, in saying that morally there's no nuance (i didn't use that word) at all; my point was that in proving that a date/relationship rape has taken place, the authorities have great difficulties, for reasons i gave, in establishing whether there was or was not consent. no-one is saying that these types of rape aren't rape.

I think in most cases the underlying current is more along the lines of "rapists, muggers et al. are just OUT THERE, they exist, they are a risk, what can y'do" everybody who apportions some part of the blame to the victim of a crime is not necessarily empathizing with the perp, they're usually just thinking along the same lines of thought that people use to blame people for living in San Francisco or Florida. I think that's lazy bullshit thinking but it buttresses society's collective feeling of guilt for all the things that happen which are nearly impossible to police against or protect people from.

Does any of this make sense?

Enrique, you're right, nuances was Nick's word. Regardless, I think your point is basically crap. We're back down the slippery slope of the idea that there ARE different kinds of rape--which there aren't, really, there's just defendants who can get out of it and defendants who can't and a bunch of people in charge who don't take the crime that seriously, quite frankly--which I cannot help but feel actually encourages relationship/date rape. I mean, it's not really rape if it's your passed out/drunk/struggling gf, right? I mean, it's not like the authorities can prove it or really think much of it...

So, no, I don't think it's a point that should be brought up. Though I'm never a fan of police apologists.

xpost x2

I thought he (nick) was just playing 'devil's advocate'. i think you're absolutely right about the 'why the fuck would you' point about blame ratio in such situations ethan, but to attack Nick in this way still seems unfair, but whatever really.

i went out of my way to say that were weren't different kinds, but yeah i know it does kind of license this kind of thinking.

I mean, it's not really rape if it's your passed out/drunk/struggling gf, right? I mean, it's not like the authorities can prove it or really think much of it...

in britain at least we have a through-and-through sexist police and judiciary, but at the same time it's hard to tell cases where sexism has been in play from those where they really *do* have trouble proving non-consent in date rape cases (front page example: numerous footballer 'roasting' incidents). i'm not defending it or being a police apologist, but the difficulty of prosecuting is as much a fact of life in this society as the number of people prepared to commit date rape.

it's really just to do with trying to get to the causes of the problem rather than wasting time pointing out the obvious (that the problem is a bad thing). granted people tend to go about it in a cack-handed fashion. if nick's suggestion is sincere then he'd do well to expand on it hugely though i suppose it would cause offence however detailed (still doesn't mean people need fly off the handle onto a high horse, even if this is ILX). there are lots of interesting questions re sexual behaviour of men and women and the subject of rape tends to bring most of them rearing their often ugly heads. but with presumably everyone ultimately being so unanimous in their views on this matter, threads like these only really deliver vitriol based on misinterpretation. unfortunately there's no satisfactory answer to the question of 'why do they do it', excuses such as 'because they're evil' (wrt the rapist) and 'because they asked for it dressing like that' (wrt the victim) are equally feeble.

boozy babes wearing short skirts need to be encouraged in their behavior by feeling safe and protected to the utmost extent of the law, and that's the end of it as far as I'm concerned

Because: I defy you to explain to me what these "dangerous situations" are. Most of the usual suspects that get trotted out up top -- drunkenness? flirting? revealing clothes? being in private with men? -- are things that people do all the time, constantly, normally, without getting raped willy-nilly, which is precisely as it should be and mostly normally is. And I'd guess that most of the women who are victims of rape never put themselves in any position more dangerous than anyone else's life: their big "dangerous" moves were walking down the street in sweatpants in the middle of the day, having fathers, having boyfriends, or any of a million everyday things.

So without even getting into the details of this, and the bizarre idea that it should be the victim's responsibility to protect herself (that being raped is equivalent to leaving your iPod on the table when you go to the bathroom, that we should "expect" rape on the human-nature level of petty theft), the whole thing strikes me as idiotic on the face of it. There's no thread of "dangerous situations" that women put themselves in, unless that dangerous situation is just "normal participation in the world around us." The thread that does exist in all instances of rape is the same one: that there are men who do it.

And oh we can fret forever about the most confused and subtle of cases here, the real headscratchers and vexed ones, but that's beside the point. It's the expectations in this whole discussion that are striking me as flatly ridiculous.

EXACTLY

nabisco, you've been on the internet, right?

seriously though is Nick just playing devil's advocate? Cos he doesn't seem to be explaining his point very well.

This morning on the radio Nicky Campbell was asking a woman from Amnesty whether she thought a prostitute being raped was equally as bad as a nun being raped. I was surprised there wasn't already a thread on the topic actually (specifically relating to the Amnesty survey thing).

Also I'm in the UK, right? I finished work several hours ago and I can't (quite) sit on the net all day monitoring a thread when I am at work - if that makes me a scaredy cat, so be it.

Trife, Evan, whatever the fuck you're called and whoeverthefuck you are, I don't really know or care, you seem like an asshole.

see, there, he admits he's only even attempting to argue another viewpoint because it's in the news!

Does any of this make sense?

Yes, it makes perfect sense.

Sick Mouthy, how could this be a thread? The answer is just sort of, "yes" and that's it, or am I missing something?

nick, it is a gigantic waste of bandwidth. i am outraged.

xpost oh hell no