Rape, blame, responsibility, Amnesty, etcetera.

it's so normal pregnant women and toddlers do it.

It's a shame because this thread had got me thinking about some interesting stuff, and it seemed like quite sensitive things were being debated in a way that didn't make me feel uncomfortable on a personal level. Which it now does.

I like how Trife is now insinuating that I am a rapist. Not every victim is innocent. Not everything you read in the papers is true.

I take Nick's point, but the logic seems flawed somewhere. Maybe I'm being dumb but "The guy's 100% responsible, but the woman needs to take some of the responsibility" doesn't make sense to me.
-- Come Back Johnny B (john.barlo...)

you're looking at it from the wrong end of the telescope. with a large number of rape cases, the thing is to prove that an offence has taken place -- to prove that the woman is 'a rape victim'.

it's difficult to prosecute for rape, at levels below violent attack, precisely because concepts like 'consent' become very slippery when drink/drugs/etc is involved. so you have lots of very ugly court cases where the guy has clearly 'taken advantage' (and of course he may well have been under the influence also) but it's very hard to prove that the victim was not consenting -- partly of course because of lack of witnesses.

nick hasn't said the crime of rape is diminished by the irresponsibility of the victim, but it's actually fairly cold comfort for victims to know that they have some internet dude in their corner saying it's categorically never your responsibility to do your best not to get into difficult situations, like some guy's car at the end of the evening when you're shitfaced.

(Sorry Kate)

im sure rape victims enjoy some creepy internet dude looking for ways to blame them and increase their exact percentage of culpability even more

When a person, a private citizen, about their OWN business, fails to take whatever "reasonable measures" (avoiding drugs and alcohol; avoiding bad parts of town; avoiding living in a flood plain; avoiding living over a faultline; wearing heavy clothing; having a penis; carrying weaponry) then there are no damages to be apportioned to other parties. The victim is the only victim. So why does blame need to be apportioned?

Because it is in society's job description to protect the freedom of its private citizens to go about their own business. So by apportioning blame to said private citizens, you are effectively stating which protections are not in society's job description, and saying "we do not, as a society, give a shit about people's freedom to do this or this or this." What do you think should fall under "at your own risk" and what should be protected? Is going down the pub looking hot and having a few more than you really should (possibly because everybody else was cheering you on) honestly fall in the same fucking category as "trying to jump my snowmobile off this 50 foot bluff" or "racing motorcycles in the pouring rain?"

I'm not going to touch the idea of not blaming the rapist because the victim was so drunk because that's patently absurd and indefensible, ergo not worth anyone's time.

no-one has done this!

Nick Southall has said nothing on this thread which as offended me - AS A RAPE VICTIM - while Ethan certainly has.

And how is it an "ad hominem" attack to ask someone if they have ever experienced the behaviour that they are trying to prescribe the reactions to? Unless you think that asking someone if they've actually been raped is by definition offensive.

Ethan seems to think somebody has. I'm trying to send the message that he's being unreasonable and wasting his time.

I resent being told, as a rape victim, how I should feel about it. I ESPECIALLY resent a male instructing other males in the sensitive treatment of rape victims by threats of sexual violence.

Ethan's brand of chatter vs your brand of chatter vs. A Nairn's comments vs. Nick's = "one man's trash is another man's treasure" "different strokes for different folks" "welcome to the internet arguing about the relative validity of different forms of discourse is a moot point in 2005"

It's ad hominem because you're doing it because he's Ethan.

I am doing it because I utterly hate men shooting their mouths off about how women should or shouldn't or do or don't react to rape. And that gets a reaction and a comment out of me regardless of whether it's Ethan or John Darni3113 - with whom I've also tangled over this issue.

mark, explain that statement

But it is still rape: non-consensual sex. You're forcing sex on someone who did NOT ask. The woman or man said no and that should have been respected. If s/he was so drunk, s/he could not consent... then you should assume s/he said no. It's a sad thing if you put some blame on the raped woman (or man). they didn't want it, so how can you twist that around into saying "Well, you sort of asked for it." The underlying current in this: The rapist can feel less guilty. I just... *shudder* I find this a horrible train of thought.

Kate, what if someone told you:"Well, you wore a mini skirt and you drank too much alcohol. You sort of asked for it." This is a serious question. Not trying to hurt you; but trying to show you how people diminish the guilt of the rapist.

But if the woman 'bears some responsibility', then that by definition reduces the guilty man's sentence by a percentage.

Not necessarily - I think a man who takes advantage of a woman's drunkenness to assault her is as much a predator as a rapist by force.

I know that it's complicated by other factors - what if the man is as drunk as the woman and unable to assess *her* ability to give consent?

x-x-x-post

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.

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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.