rape prevention , by " teaching men not to rape " a concept ?

I was being kind, not snotty, but I think your emotional virulence on this subject may make you interpret things differently.

Perhaps, then, the question of things like date rape, if they cannot be intelligently and reasonably considered by our society, will simply continue as they seem to be now. Men will always be considered criminal, women will always be considered victim, even the way of asking the question will destroy the man's life in many ways, great numbers of men and women both will then defend criminals in the name of trying to compensate for what they know is an injustice on the other half of the spectrum where men have also become victims of the situation, and nothing will ever change. This seems to be working very effectively in our culture so far.

captaintyinknots
So, disregarding the attempt to take it back to a false accusation conversation, can you provide one piece of evidence to back up the claim that judges have reduced sentences in rape cases because the victim was partially to blame?

A judge may take into account the circumstances of the situation, but i have NEVER, and I mean NEVER, seen a judge give a lighter sentence because the girl was 'asking for it'.

You are contradicting yourself here. And what does 'asking for it' mean to you: the way women dress, the way women act by luring/leading men on, if the victim or both partners were intoxicated, if they were previously out on a date, etc?

'Asking for it' to ME means the women WANTED SEX but later changed her mind. Of course this is still rape in the technical sense and men should always respect their partners wishes, but some men cannot control themselves enough.

This is a different kind of rape than stranger rape by use of duress, ie deadly weapon. Of course there will be a smaller sentence.

This is a completely fallacious argument. Being charged with something is not the same things as having actually done the thing (which, again, is what we are talking about)

And your assuming the victim spoke no CLEARLY ENOUGH, the perpetrator doesn't have a hearing impairment, how far into sexual intercourse they were. You have never heard of a mixed "yes, no" message?

You are taking everything for granted when you say "simple: yes means yes and no means no." Yes normally it is rather simple(cut and dry), but not always.

I hadn't seen this until reviewing the thread. I missed a lot of posts earlier.

SearchLightsInc
Because its absolutely okay to rape someone if they're dressed provocatively, drunk and unable to really make a mature, sober decision?

Skipping dress, I think the inability to make a 'mature sober decision' is problematic on both sides, and is a context that should be taken into consideration. However, I believe your example would be consensual sex and not rape, if her decision were to engage, or to not resist engaging. I would agree there are definitely circumstances that override this though (I would consider any group situation to be one of those) but again, that is why context matters to such questions.

DISRAELI
The idea is absurd, because the decision to do or not to do these things does not depend on understanding or not understanding concepts.
I'm sure most murderers, to take another example, have a perfectly clear understanding of the concept of "not killing". They're just not motivated to act upon it.
If you want to change people's behaviour towards other people, you need to work on their motivation, not on their understanding of concepts.

This. ^^ Excellent point. Educating men and women both could be useful if we were aiming at human decency as opposed to the expansive semantic definition of when it's legally wrong.

reply to post by RedCairo


I had to turn down a drunk girl once, many years ago, because she was intoxicated quite a bit above the legal limit with slurred speach and what not, very pretty/attractive. My instinct was go for it, but I knew I would be in deep #.

Mature people say no, immature people say yes.

And I was also somewhat intoxicated! In fact I could barely drive home.

crankyoldman
We have turned into a world where we are "teaching" things that come from a moral center and should not need to be taught. Even worse, they are taught by the same jackasses that brought us the "Just Say No" crap, the "Get Out The Vote" crap and all the slogan driven "change your behavior" drivel. Instead of treating people like humans, we treat them like defective assembly line robots who, when corrected by some pseudo authority, will surely turn into the model citizens, just like the millions of kids who sat through a stupefyingly simpleminded DARE program in grade school and never, never, never took drugs.

LOL -- thank you, that is excellent.

Actually I had thought that this thread was mostly a long line of hysterical people yelling at each other but I'm finding some really good posts I missed earlier.

This whole "teaching men not to rape" thing is just as retarded as stopping rape by teaching people to consent.

reply to post by Rosha

The meme originally came about in response to oppose "blame the victim" tactics used by many that effectively say " if you didn't wear that, drink that, show that, say that or go there' - then you wouldn't have been raped'. This blaming of the victim dogma is prevalent in the policing and court systems around the world and is also widely embedded in public consciousness around the world. The reply to this stance demanding women acquiesce to rapists by changing their dress and behavior, being a case of " don't tell me what not to wear or do - tell men not to rape!"

Thanks for that, as it emphasizes the context of the 'training' and hence the thread.

I think this is an important point though, that you made (and talked about after that): this issue of blaming the victim. And of course it's what the thread ends up in great debate about.

Part of the reason this comes about is because of the extreme response to 'rape' which has a very wide range of context but is fairly polarized in our culture. If something is going to utterly ruin the man's life, and I mean way, way beyond repair, then of course every effort is going to be made to defend him and that is perfectly fair, just as defense of anyone in court is fair.

It's obvious that a lot of that effort is going to be along the lines of, it wasn't rape because ____.

So the polarization of this subject is a great deal of what CAUSES the defense of rape and the blame of the victim.

That this only results in more polarization doesn't help, obviously. I feel that the more emotional hysteria levied at non-stranger rape, the more polarized it gets, and the more both underreporting and victim-blame/rapist-defense kick in.

This happens on the witness stand and is one reason rape is so underreported (few women want to go through what amounts to another kind of rape as part of the trial). I would like to see a more spectrum response to the topic which I believe could result in a much higher reporting ratio of rape, this would help women and provide more corrective response culturally. It will not happen as long as the response to the claim, no matter what the circumstance, is so extreme.

This happens in the family/friends/situation of everyone who knows the man. Were it a private issue of probably getting fined and counseled and doing community service, people wouldn't be so frightened of the risk to a man they know or love and trying to protect him from utter devastation, and I mean the kind of devastation to his life that in other contexts a person would be justified in killing to defend themselves from.

This also happens in culture in general, and this thread examples it pretty well. When a gradient situation is treated as something polarized, when everyone has known good men [or at least just stupid-for-five-minutes in a nearly-engaged situation men] who've been ruined over a claim that in some cases they don't even understand because they didn't perceive that way, they will be prone to think that is often the case.

Not to mention the whole spectrum of sexual issues that are injust toward men in our culture but are commonly ignored (such as BardingTheBard's excellent message about this on page2 of this thread).

When that happens, reasonable people will defend men by default, not all men and not all situations but "in the benefit of the doubt about context" situations, because the consequences for the man are so abominable, it would be sociopathic to do anything else.

Particularly when, in the case of most non-stranger/non-serial rape, the result of the follow up on a rape claim does not actually do anyone any good unless 'making the victim feel better' counts against the utter destruction of his whole life (and again we're not talking about obvious rape here but about contextual situations where men and women due to many differences and situational elements may simply disagree on what was legitimately rape). I mean if there is ANY question whatsoever, I would not give a man over to the absurdly injust legal pretrial negotiations and court-case incarceration-term minimums and all kinds of exclusionary evidence issues and more.

Anybody with a shred of empathy and who does not have reason to believe that a given man is a raping-cretin (as opposed to a generally decent man who clearly had a disagreement on the dynamics of the situation, even if abetted by some degree of rudeness, stupidity or alcohol) is going to rightfully fear the actual results of a rape claim against him.

And our legal system is such a disaster at this point that anyone thinking their being innocent or even had-reasonable-cause-to-consider-consensual is going to surely result in that understanding in their trial, is suicidally pollyannic.

So making a claim of rape against a man is basically saying, "I hereby wish to utterly annihilate your life in every possible way." When a man is a violent rapist or a serial rapist I think that is a fair weapon, in part because such people are so harmful to the culture at large.

If a man is not a violent or serial rapist, the social, public, professional, financial, legal, physical and more results of this are themselves a heinous humane injustice, regardless of what our 'justice' system laws are. This is not to say there should not be any recognition or retribution for behavior, but to say the current degree of 'rape' results are absurdly horrible, to the degree that unless I considered a certain man to be genuinely "a criminal," and not just a man with a disagreement over a brief and often complex event, I would not even wish to see it come to today's trials.

Some of that probably manifests in a degree of what's called blaming the victim, but if you look at this without biasing emotion, one can see that "blaming the victim" is often simply part of "attempting to recognize the complex context of a situation which may have mitigating circumstances which should make us reconsider whether a man truly deserves to be utterly destroyed over this." That doesn't mean one is saying "It's all her fault" but it does mean one is saying "Look two people were involved here and he is not a lunatic attacker, the circumstance should be fairly considered before judging him guilty of what's considered a heinous crime."

Less polarization, less blaming the victim.

I hope you'll all forgive me for chiming in so late in the discussion, and for the fact that I only read twelve pages before posting. I saw a lot of discussion tactics not befitting members of ATS, and didn't expect much to change in the interceding dozen or so pages.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but it seems to me that a lot of time gets spent arguing about the words, and not discussing the subject they describe; Not only in this thread, but in other fora of discussion about the topic. The majority of what I see is reactionary attacks from each side of the argument against the other based on faulty assumptions about what the other means. If we were to completely strip the discussion of biological sex and social gender,much of this confusion would be avoided, and I think that we would all find that there is much less to argue about.
It is irrelevant to the discussion whom is raped by whom and how often; The problem is that people get raped, and as long as there is still someone out there getting raped, there is still a problem, regardless of the identity, sex, gender or sexual orientation of the perpetrator.
Since no one can control what is done to them, and can truly only control their own actions, and even those to only such a degree, it only makes sense to direct prevention education toward a potential actor rather than a potential victim.
Obviously, most people can agree that rape is bad, and understand why it shouldn't happen. For the purposes of our discussion, people that don't understand why rape is bad can be excluded because nothing we can say will get through to them. They're going to do what they want regardless of what anyone thinks or feels because that's what they want, consequences be damned. The thing is though, that those people only account for a small percentage of estimated rapes; The implication being that most rapes are carried out by reasonably sane people that think rape is bad. How can that be? How can an otherwise sane, rational and moral person carry out such an heinous act, especially one that they acknowledge to be wrong themselves? The only explanation I can think of(again, barring sociopathy), is that they don't know what they're doing; Or, to rephrase, they know that rape is bad, but don't know exactly what constitutes rape. This is why I think rape prevention education aimed at actors would be (and/or should be) focused on discussing and exploring the cultural ambiguities regarding sex and sexuality we possess as a society.
What do I mean by ambiguities? What I was taught growing up was that anything less than explicit verbal consent to sex meant 'no', and I was (and am still) shocked to find myself in a minority of opinion holders in that regard. I've had people of both sexes tell me that an explicit 'no' doesn't always mean 'no' on numerous occasions. I remember a particular time I argued the point against my friend and his girlfriend at the time for hours, and at the end of it all we still had to agree to disagree. In my own experience, I failed to seal the deal on a number of occasions because the girl didn't tell me "let's have sex now" or because I didn't persist after she said no to an unambiguous proposition. If yes doesn't always mean yes, and no doesn't always mean no, then how can anyone ever be sure they're not raping someone?
For another example, I was at a party not too long ago where, after telling an old friend of a friend about all the sex I wasn't having, he looked me dead in the eye with a straight face and a factual nod and said "There's always rape." There are two possibilities in that situation. Either he was joking or he wasn't, and the fact that the cultural attitudes toward the subject are such that he can joke or speak earnestly about such a topic in such a way in public, in mixed company without anyone so much as batting an eye doesn't say much good about our culture.

TL;DR:
Excluding sociopaths, people rape other people because they don't know they're raping. Teaching people not to get raped is useless. Teaching people regardless of sex or gender exactly what constitutes rape and consensual sex would be more effective than chanting mantras of "rape is bad, mmmkay?". Also, our society would probably run smoother if our language allowed us to speak in a gender neutral tone.

The implication being that most rapes are carried out by reasonably sane people that think rape is bad. How can that be? How can an otherwise sane, rational and moral person carry out such an heinous act, especially one that they acknowledge to be wrong themselves? The only explanation I can think of(again, barring sociopathy), is that they don't know what they're doing; Or, to rephrase, they know that rape is bad, but don't know exactly what constitutes rape. This is why I think rape prevention education aimed at actors would be (and/or should be) focused on discussing and exploring the cultural ambiguities regarding sex and sexuality we possess as a society.

Star. Maybe best comment on the thread.

I'm not sure that everything that person-A thinks "constitutes rape" is always unarguable. And I do not think that sex is always "heinous" even in claimed-rape situations depending on the detail, which was part of points I made earlier, that most men accused of rape are NOT horrible criminals but otherwise decent men who may simply have a very different perspective on what constitutes rape -- but you have the point of it.

If nothing else, we could make all men utterly paranoid about the topic, to prevent their accidentally having their lives utterly destroyed by a misunderstanding. As a happy side effect that would reduce women getting raped, too.

captaintyinknots

Maslo
reply to post by captaintyinknots

 

Im not so sure about that. Does a person who possesses stolen property stand to be punished, even if they dont know it was stolen?

Of course not.

They dont? Then why are there laws against possessing stolen property?

Are there laws criminalising possession of stolen property even if you dont know it was stolen? I dont know any such laws, but if there are, they should be repealed IMHO. You should not be punished without mens rea.

EarthCitizen07

SearchLightsInc

I agree that its wrong to label all men as potential rapist's but let me tell you, when im walking home in the dark and i see a man anywhere in the area, you bet your bottom dollar that just for a second, i consider how much of a threat he is to me.

They also teach "say no to drugs", "practice safe sex and birth control"....and we all know how far we have progressed. Society itself is rotten. As long as politics and msm continue being depraved like they are nothing will change.

I sympathise to an extent, but what more do you want? Carry a gun if it makes you feel safer. That is what the second amendment is for, self defense. Just be careful not to get paranoid and shoot everyone with the slightest suspicion.

Sorry, replied to the wrong poster initially. Now corrected.

edit on 28/9/13 by EarthCitizen07 because: (no reason given)

Not your sympathy that's for sure lol Im from the UK where you cant carry a gun or a knife. Its natural for anyone to be on their guard when walking the streets at night or in a place you are unfamiliar with. Very few men are actually rapists but the reality of a threat does not afford me time to judge a man's character while im making my way home. Easier to be vigilant, treat everyone as though they are a potential threat. Im not hurting anyone in the process of taking care of myself