Define Consent.

[mijopaalmc]

Originally Posted by truethat

Um he did? That's what you got out of his post???????

He's trying very hard to find a way out for men accused of rape. Rape victims often change their stories because rape prosecution takes a huge toll on the victim and often the only way to disengage the justice system when the psychological trauma becomes too great is to recant.

[truethat]

Women also do accuse men of rape because they regret having sex with them and lost their self control due to excessive drinking. As I stated before, this is why it is very important to teach young men that even if she consents, she's still legally able to have you arrested for rape if you had sex with a drunk woman.

But then you accused me of being homoerotically biased.

Quote:

Percentage of college students who have regrettable sex
August 18, 2009 at 1:03 pm by Kristi Gustafson Barlette
What is happening when our kids go off to college? Momlogic.com surveyed 2,500 college freshmen nationwide to see what really goes down on campus.

This five-part video series, running August 17– 21, goes behind closed doors to uncover the dark side of freshman year at college. Their cameras captured what is the reality for incoming freshman: partying, drugs and sex.



Here are some of their findings:

56 percent know someone who ended up in the hospital because of partying.
38 percent admit to having sex with one or more people since arriving at school.
32 percent have partied so much they have not remembered the night before.
37 percent drink until they’re very drunk, throw up, or pass out.
26 percent of kids have passed out from drinking too much.
32 percent have hooked up with or had sex with someone they regret.
13 percent have woken up somewhere and not know how they got there.

http://blog.timesunion.com/kristi/pe...ble-sex/16134/

[mijopaalmc]

Originally Posted by truethat

But then you accused me of being homoerotically biased.

I said heterosexist.

[AvalonXQ]

Originally Posted by mijopaalmc

He's trying very hard to find a way out for men accused of rape. Rape victims often change their stories because rape prosecution takes a huge toll on the victim and often the only way to disengage the justice system when the psychological trauma becomes too great is to recant.

It's nice to see you are doing everything in your power to exonerate child pornographers and normalize pedophilia.

See? Anyone can do it!

[truethat]

Originally Posted by mijopaalmc

I said heterosexist.

Yes you did. Sorry.

[mijopaalmc]

Originally Posted by AvalonXQ

It's nice to see you are doing everything in your power to exonerate child pornographers and normalize pedophilia.

See? Anyone can do it!

Except what you said doesn't even have anything to do what I have said in this thread, whereas what I said, while possibly hyperbolic, relates directly how you, Kevin_Lowe, and JJM 777 have addressed rape in this thread. You make assertions about the frequency with which women lie about being raped, produce examples that are irrelevant to adult women lying about their rapes, and use the preceding "facts" to assert that rape is unique among crimes in that men can be convicted on the basis of circumstantial evidence.

[truethat]

Originally Posted by mijopaalmc

It's nice to see that you are doing everything in your power to exonerates rapists and normalize rape.

Originally Posted by mijopaalmc

Except what you said doesn't even have anything to do what I have said in this thread, whereas what I said, while possibly hyperbolic, relates directly how you, Kevin_Lowe, and JJM 777 have addressed rape in this thread. You make assertions about the frequency with which women lie about being raped, produce examples that are irrelevant to adult women lying about their rapes, and use the preceding "facts" to assert that rape is unique among crimes in that men can be convicted on the basis of circumstantial evidence.

How does what you just posted make any sense? Women do lie about being raped, especially when consent is doubtful. Regretful sex is often passed off as rape even if the woman does't report it because it's a way of assuaging part of the guilt and regret.

Men don't think they are raping the woman because they are drunk as well and the woman may have seemed like she was really consenting when she was in the middle of a blackout.

These are true and important things. How does discussing them exonerate rapists and normalize rape. Rape is not abnormal in this particular circumstance but only because sadly it happens very often. Probably more often that is reported. That's why I stated that young men especially need to be taught that having sex with a drunk woman IS RAPE. Whether she seems like she's consenting or not.

[bookitty]

Edited by jhunter1163:

Moderated content removed.

FBI reports consistently put the number of "unfounded" rape accusations around 8%

Rape is among the least reported crimes. Somewhere between 50% of rapes are never reported to the police. Only 12% of reported rapes lead to an arrest. Only 5% lead to a felony conviction.

Some police departments have put rape on the back burner. Here in Los Angeles, the police finally processed a backlog of nearly 7000 rape kits going back 10 years. Arrests have been made. Houston, Detroit and other cities have reported the same backlog.

Police do charge rape victims with making false statements even if there is no accused rapist to dispute the story.
http://www.kirotv.com/news/news/alle...-arrest/nD45g/

Quote:

Police who accused a Lynnwood woman of lying about being raped 2½ years ago are working to clear her record after they discovered that a Colorado man accused of sexual assaults there may have attacked her as well.

Colorado authorities have filed 28 counts -- including burglary, kidnapping and sexual assault -- against Marc Patrick O'Leary, 32, who they said tied up victims, assaulted them for hours and then stored pictures of them on his camera.

In some cities police are simply disregarding reports
http://www.examiner.com/article/do-b...e-rape-reports

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...84103G20120502

---
Basically, it comes down to this - Even if someone files a false rape accusation, there is a ridiculously small chance that the accusation will lead to a trial and an even smaller chance that the falsely accused will go to jail. That accusation has to hold up, the accuser can not change any part of their testimony, they will face an apathetic or hostile police force and then an extremely hostile trial.

Unfortunately, the stats for actual rape victims aren't much better.

[jhunter1163]

Consider this an official mod directive not to personalize your arguments, and to remain civil and polite.

Posted By:jhunter1163

[Kevin_Lowe]

Originally Posted by bookitty

Edited by jhunter1163:

Moderated content removed.

FBI reports consistently put the number of "unfounded" rape accusations around 8%

This might underestimate or overestimate the number of false complaints, since some unfounded complaints are not false (but rather based on an error about what the law says) and some false complains cannot be shown to be false due to lack of relevant evidence. I know of no better statistic though, and it does establish that false rape reports happen and are a small minority of total rape reports.

Quote:

Rape is among the least reported crimes. Somewhere between 50% of rapes are never reported to the police. Only 12% of reported rapes lead to an arrest. Only 5% lead to a felony conviction.

Where are these figures from? The wiki page you link to says that 25% of reported rapes in the USA lead to an arrest, not 12%.

On the other side of the same coin, the percentage of rapes that lead to a conviction in the UK is said on the same page to be 1%, not 5%.

This is relatively meaningless without data about how often other criminal complaints result in arrest however. I haven't been able to find any very timely data easily but it seems that in 1971 in New York about 20% of felony complaints led to an arrest, and 0.2% of mail theft complaints lead to an arrest. So arrest-per-complaint figures seem to vary strongly with the type of crime committed but it's not as if 5% is an order of magnitude away from the clear-up rates for other crimes (other than homicide).

That said, this 2008 Australian source indicates that over here the clear-up rate for sexual assaults generally was more like 28% in 2006, and that the fall in clear-up rates from a historical high of 60% is mostly due to the fact that a decreasing proportion of assaults are violent rapes by strangers - probably because such crimes are effectively deterred or prevented - and that the remaining cases are the hard-to-prove acquaintance rape cases.

In other words, the clear-up rate per offence has fallen because stranger rape has been largely wiped out, and so a far higher percentage of rapes are hard-to-close acquaintance rape cases. If we could somehow split up the data into stranger-rape and acquaintance-rape categories, it might even turn out that the clear-up rate for acquaintance rape has improved over time rather than gotten worse.

This 2004 Australian source indicates that clear-up rates for most crimes here are probably in the 20%-30% range although for some crimes like car theft it's more like 7%.

So even a 5%-per-complaint conviction rape for rape in some jurisdictions, given that rape is often a very difficult crime to prove, doesn't seem particularly extraordinary in context. Obviously a higher rate would be better, but given the practical difficulties in making a case I don't think we should be surprised the conviction rate is lower than for crimes which leave more of an evidence trail.

Quote:

Police do charge rape victims with making false statements even if there is no accused rapist to dispute the story.
http://www.kirotv.com/news/news/alle...-arrest/nD45g/

It's a fact of life that any system is going to have some false positives and some false negatives. The only way to ensure you never falsely convict a man of rape is to never convict any men of rape, and the only way to ensure you never falsely convict a woman of a false rape accusation is to never convict any woman of a false rape accusation.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't do our best to get the false positive and false negative rates as low as we can, but the mere fact false positives exist isn't proof the system is broken.

Before you can say that you need to show us the evidence the police had which led to them believing in the first place that her complaint was false. Maybe they had really good reason to believe that and maybe they didn't. I don't know.

Quote:

Basically, it comes down to this - Even if someone files a false rape accusation, there is a ridiculously small chance that the accusation will lead to a trial and an even smaller chance that the falsely accused will go to jail.

That seems to depend on where you are. In NSW in 2006 it seems like the chance of a trial was pretty decent, especially if the complainant didn't withdraw the complaint or request no action be taken.

You are also assuming, and I think this is a serious error, that the chance of a false rape complaint getting to the trial stage is exactly the same as the chance of a randomly-selected real rape complaint getting to the trial stage. To begin with in malicious false rape accusation cases it seems plausible to assume that the complainant is relatively likely to have samples taken for DNA testing promptly, to give a strong witness statement and to identify a specific assailant.

Quote:

That accusation has to hold up, the accuser can not change any part of their testimony, they will face an apathetic or hostile police force and then an extremely hostile trial.

The first issue, that the accuser can't change their story as they see fit, seems to me like a damned good thing.

The second two you have not established as factual. I suspect that the availability heuristic might be distorting your estimate of how likely this is: if you immerse yourself in feminist publications it's easy for you to recall anecdotes where police were hostile or apathetic, and hard for you to recall anecdotes where the police were sympathetic and efficient.

For my part whenever I've had to report things to the police they've been efficient and reasonably sympathetic, but I've had friends report the police being unsympathetic in other cases where the police had reason to believe their time was being wasted. (One friend who had a somewhat grungy appearance had his house robbed in the nineties, and the police were clearly going through the motions for the first half hour or so until he made it absolutely clear to them that he had no insurance whatsoever and so this definitely was not a case of insurance fraud. At that point they actually started looking for evidence properly).

Quote:

Unfortunately, the stats for actual rape victims aren't much better.

As shown earlier, the clear-up rate for sexual assaults varies from place to place but it seems like a reasonable guess that it's better than the clear-up rate for mail theft and about the same as the clear-up rate for car theft in some times and places. Given that it's by its very nature a hard crime to prove or disprove that might not be seen as too extraordinary.

The fact that clear-up rates have seemingly dropped seems likely to be due just to the fact that stranger rape and acquaintance rape are bundled together in the data, stranger rape is much more likely to be cleared up, and stranger rape makes up a much smaller proportion of the total rape rate than it used to.

[JJM 777]

Originally Posted by mijopaalmc

He's trying very hard to find a way out for men accused of rape.

Half true: trying to find a way out for men who are accused but not guilty of rape.

[bookitty]

Originally Posted by JJM 777

Half true: trying to find a way out for men who are accused but not guilty of rape.

Because on this board, it's always important to remember who the real victims are.

Forget the people who are actually raped (or as JJM 777 tells us, didn't try hard enough to enjoy it.) How microscopically small is their physical and mental trauma compared to those who have been falsely accused of rape. Especially the ones who just wanted a nice time with a passed-out, limp form or a maladjusted 13-year old. Thank goodness the JREF forums have so many who are willing to speak for those, the true victims.

[bookitty]

Originally Posted by Kevin_Lowe

This might underestimate or overestimate the number of false complaints, since some unfounded complaints are not false (but rather based on an error about what the law says) and some false complains cannot be shown to be false due to lack of relevant evidence. I know of no better statistic though, and it does establish that false rape reports happen and are a small minority of total rape reports.



Where are these figures from? The wiki page you link to says that 25% of reported rapes in the USA lead to an arrest, not 12%.

On the other side of the same coin, the percentage of rapes that lead to a conviction in the UK is said on the same page to be 1%, not 5%.

This is relatively meaningless without data about how often other criminal complaints result in arrest however. I haven't been able to find any very timely data easily but it seems that in 1971 in New York about 20% of felony complaints led to an arrest, and 0.2% of mail theft complaints lead to an arrest. So arrest-per-complaint figures seem to vary strongly with the type of crime committed but it's not as if 5% is an order of magnitude away from the clear-up rates for other crimes (other than homicide).

That said, this 2008 Australian source indicates that over here the clear-up rate for sexual assaults generally was more like 28% in 2006, and that the fall in clear-up rates from a historical high of 60% is mostly due to the fact that a decreasing proportion of assaults are violent rapes by strangers - probably because such crimes are effectively deterred or prevented - and that the remaining cases are the hard-to-prove acquaintance rape cases.

In other words, the clear-up rate per offence has fallen because stranger rape has been largely wiped out, and so a far higher percentage of rapes are hard-to-close acquaintance rape cases. If we could somehow split up the data into stranger-rape and acquaintance-rape categories, it might even turn out that the clear-up rate for acquaintance rape has improved over time rather than gotten worse.

This 2004 Australian source indicates that clear-up rates for most crimes here are probably in the 20%-30% range although for some crimes like car theft it's more like 7%.

So even a 5%-per-complaint conviction rape for rape in some jurisdictions, given that rape is often a very difficult crime to prove, doesn't seem particularly extraordinary in context. Obviously a higher rate would be better, but given the practical difficulties in making a case I don't think we should be surprised the conviction rate is lower than for crimes which leave more of an evidence trail.



It's a fact of life that any system is going to have some false positives and some false negatives. The only way to ensure you never falsely convict a man of rape is to never convict any men of rape, and the only way to ensure you never falsely convict a woman of a false rape accusation is to never convict any woman of a false rape accusation.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't do our best to get the false positive and false negative rates as low as we can, but the mere fact false positives exist isn't proof the system is broken.

Before you can say that you need to show us the evidence the police had which led to them believing in the first place that her complaint was false. Maybe they had really good reason to believe that and maybe they didn't. I don't know.



That seems to depend on where you are. In NSW in 2006 it seems like the chance of a trial was pretty decent, especially if the complainant didn't withdraw the complaint or request no action be taken.

You are also assuming, and I think this is a serious error, that the chance of a false rape complaint getting to the trial stage is exactly the same as the chance of a randomly-selected real rape complaint getting to the trial stage. To begin with in malicious false rape accusation cases it seems plausible to assume that the complainant is relatively likely to have samples taken for DNA testing promptly, to give a strong witness statement and to identify a specific assailant.



The first issue, that the accuser can't change their story as they see fit, seems to me like a damned good thing.

The second two you have not established as factual. I suspect that the availability heuristic might be distorting your estimate of how likely this is: if you immerse yourself in feminist publications it's easy for you to recall anecdotes where police were hostile or apathetic, and hard for you to recall anecdotes where the police were sympathetic and efficient.

For my part whenever I've had to report things to the police they've been efficient and reasonably sympathetic, but I've had friends report the police being unsympathetic in other cases where the police had reason to believe their time was being wasted. (One friend who had a somewhat grungy appearance had his house robbed in the nineties, and the police were clearly going through the motions for the first half hour or so until he made it absolutely clear to them that he had no insurance whatsoever and so this definitely was not a case of insurance fraud. At that point they actually started looking for evidence properly).



As shown earlier, the clear-up rate for sexual assaults varies from place to place but it seems like a reasonable guess that it's better than the clear-up rate for mail theft and about the same as the clear-up rate for car theft in some times and places. Given that it's by its very nature a hard crime to prove or disprove that might not be seen as too extraordinary.

The fact that clear-up rates have seemingly dropped seems likely to be due just to the fact that stranger rape and acquaintance rape are bundled together in the data, stranger rape is much more likely to be cleared up, and stranger rape makes up a much smaller proportion of the total rape rate than it used to.

Look at any rape thread on this board. Look at how you have completely dismissed any idea that the police may be unhelpful because I "immerse yourself in feminist publications" and have nothing to do with the links I posted. Look at how many ways rape is excused - If I child doesn't know it's sex, if a woman is wearing something revealing, if she said no after any physical contact, so forth and so on. Including (I swear to god this happened) If the world ends and there are only two people left, the men has a moral obligation to rape the woman for the good of the human race.

Do you really think that cops are any different? Do you think the majority of them are studying feminist philosophy or debating consent? Even in the case of stranger rape, there is no guarantee that it will be taken seriously or that it will be investigated. When it comes to the greyer but far more common cases of acquaintance rape, there is less chance that it will be investigated.

Perhaps it's different in NSW which would make any comparison to the prosecution of rape in the US null.

Btw, accusers change their story all the time for all sorts of crime. The human memory of traumatic events is neither photographic nor linear.

[truethat]

bookitty I think you exaggerate the likelihood that rape accusations are not investigated. I think it's far more likely that a man thinks he has consent when he doesn't than it is a rape accusation is ignored.


Just because a woman is raped doesn't mean the man is a rapist. He might honestly have thought he had consent. Understanding the confusion with consent isn't making excuses for rapists, but being honest in trying to understand the problem.

Not just feminist grand standing. Do you really want to lower the incidence of rape? Or just keep soap box standing.

[bookitty]

Originally Posted by truethat

bookitty I think you exaggerate the likelihood that rape accusations are not investigated. I think it's far more likely that a man thinks he has consent when he doesn't than it is a rape accusation is ignored.


Just because a woman is raped doesn't mean the man is a rapist. He might honestly have thought he had consent. Understanding the confusion with consent isn't making excuses for rapists, but being honest in trying to understand the problem.

Not just feminist grand standing. Do you really want to lower the incidence of rape? Or just keep soap box standing.

Bolded = W.T.F. She was raped but he's not really a rapist. Just a poor sap who couldn't understand consent. Really, you might want to try thinking better of men than that.

A little light reading:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-...327424.graphic

More:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/mar...495701.special

[AvalonXQ]

Yeah, I don't agree with truethat's phrasing either. The right way to say that would be "she didn't consent to sex, but neither did he rape her." I don't think you can reasonably call it "rape" if there wasn't a rapist.

The obvious example would be two people who both get intoxicated and have sex -- neither of them could consent.

[JJM 777]

Originally Posted by bookitty

> Just because a woman is raped doesn't mean the man is a rapist.

Bolded = W.T.F.

Even without going into possible ambiguities of verbal and other communication concerning love and feelings, "raping without intending to be a rapist", i.e. accidental rape, is certainly possible in circumstances where both parties are drunk: one a bit too much, and the other one just a bit less than too much. If the slightly less drunk person fails to notice the (possibly rising) intoxication of the partner crossing the limit that is perhaps known to lawyers, less to laymen, voilá we have sex without legally acceptable consent, an accidental rape.

[JJM 777]

Originally Posted by bookitty

Because on this board, it's always important to remember who the real victims are.

It would be fair (for all discussers) to recognize that a man falsely accused and convicted of rape is helluva much a victim too. I will not try to estimate which is more traumatic, being without cause socially stamped as a sex offender and removed from life for several years, or once having sex without consent.

Be as feminist as you wish, but you should recognize the profoundness of this male victim scenario.

[truethat]

Originally Posted by AvalonXQ

Yeah, I don't agree with truethat's phrasing either. The right way to say that would be "she didn't consent to sex, but neither did he rape her." I don't think you can reasonably call it "rape" if there wasn't a rapist.

The obvious example would be two people who both get intoxicated and have sex -- neither of them could consent.

I'm speaking strictly as the way the law is applied now. If they both got drunk and had sex it doesn't matter if neither could consent.

He is the one who has committed a crime. This is a distinction that I made earlier that was ignored but it's very important.


I posted that she is the one who must consent. Put it this way, if he is drunk and she is sober and she has sex with him, it's not really considered rape.

Only the other way around. If you really and truly want to lower the incident of date rape that may be a misunderstanding on the part of the guy then you need to make sure they know that having sex with a drunk woman is considered rape. Period the end. Doesn't matter if it's your wife, girlfriend or some woman who seems to be consenting, even initiating sex.

Why bookitty doesn't want young men to know this is beyond me. If this is promoted then even men who are deliberately raping a woman and trying to use the excuse that they "thought" she consented, will have no leg to stand on. And they won't be able to get away with it so they might not try.

[AvalonXQ]

Having read a few of these threads, one reason that I believe bookitty is irked by this is that:

a) it is her understanding that there are far more true rape accusations that are dismissed than false rape accusations that are believed; and

b) it is her understanding that there's something of a zero-sum game here. Any focus on believed false accusations will generally increase the level of skepticism against true accusations, exacerbating the more prevalent problem of dismissing true accusations.

Seeing that, whenever the subject is rape, the topic invariably turns to false accusations, she is justifiably frustrated that the credulity of any given rape accusation is being attacked rather than bolstered by such posts.

There's also a strong gendered component to the discussion.

[bookitty]

Originally Posted by JJM 777

It would be fair (for all discussers) to recognize that a man falsely accused and convicted of rape is helluva much a victim too. I will not try to estimate which is more traumatic, being without cause socially stamped as a sex offender and removed from life for several years, or once having sex without consent.

Be as feminist as you wish, but you should recognize the profoundness of this male victim scenario.

Quote:

Because on this board, it's always important to remember who the real victims are.

Forget the people who are actually raped (or as JJM 777 tells us, didn't try hard enough to enjoy it.) How microscopically small is their physical and mental trauma compared to those who have been falsely accused of rape. Especially the ones who just wanted a nice time with a passed-out, limp form or a maladjusted 13-year old. Thank goodness the JREF forums have so many who are willing to speak for those, the true victims.

Please point to the gendered statement in the above.

You don't seem to have a problem with other people being raped (although you tend to lean towards rape not affecting women a bit more.) Hint: It is not "having sex without consent." It is being attacked with sex as the weapon.

Obviously at this stage you should be able to realize that your empathy for rape victims has a gaping blind spot and that trusting your comparisons of rape to being falsely accused (or even that time you had a hangnail) may be subject to bias.

[bookitty]

Originally Posted by AvalonXQ

Having read a few of these threads, one reason that I believe bookitty is irked by this is that:

a) it is her understanding that there are far more true rape accusations that are dismissed than false rape accusations that are believed; and

b) it is her understanding that there's something of a zero-sum game here. Any focus on believed false accusations will generally increase the level of skepticism against true accusations, exacerbating the more prevalent problem of dismissing true accusations.

Seeing that, whenever the subject is rape, the topic invariably turns to false accusations, she is justifiably frustrated that the credulity of any given rape accusation is being attacked rather than bolstered by such posts.

There's also a strong gendered component to the discussion.

Thank you. That is primarily correct.

I am disturbed by how invested many people on this board seem to be with finding an out for rape. It reads as a constant barrage of "Well, could someone get away with it if this...?" As if they are slowly but steadily writing a playbook on how to rape without repercussion. It is beyond creepy. There are many people here who I would never, ever be alone in a room with. Not even with my gun.

[truethat]

I have no idea what you are blathering on about. Where has anyone ever said "Can you get away with it if you do this...." Your blind spot seems to focus solely on victimhood and never solutions.

The majority of rape is not "violent stranger rape" it's date rape. The topic of the thread is to define consent. Why you would argue against me pointing out that young men need to be told that if a woman is drunk (or has been drinking) she cannot legally consent to sex, is beyond me.

No matter how enthusiastic she may be about it, legally it's still rape. An intoxicated woman cannot consent to sex.

And somehow to you this is being blind? Maybe you need to check your own blind spot.


There are a great many supposed activists who don't want to stop a thing from happening in the first place, they just concern themselves with dealing with the fall out.

I'm not concerned about false accusations, I'm concerned that men don't think they've committed rape because the woman completely consented to them. Guy and girl go out, both get drunk, go home and the woman puts on sexy music and strips and entices the guy etc. He thinks that is consent. Legally it's NOT. The number one contribution to date rape is alcohol. That's a fact.

[AvalonXQ]

Originally Posted by bookitty

You don't seem to have a problem with other people being raped (although you tend to lean towards rape not affecting women a bit more.) Hint: It is not "having sex without consent." It is being attacked with sex as the weapon.

Except that it's often not.

Date and acquaintance rape is often about selfishness and sex. When a man or woman drugs a friend or partner, or takes advantage of a friend or partner's intoxication, or refuses to listen to a friend or partner's refusal, often the genuine intent is to have sex, not to send some deeper violent message or harm the other party.

The lack of respect for the victim and indifference to harm and trauma that this causes the victim are both reprehensible, but I have a tough time calling this type of interaction "an attack with a weapon". The behavior isn't harm-focused, and the intent isn't violent. The person is in the wrong, and should be punished; that doesn't mean we get to attribute motives to her or him that she or he legitimately did not have.

[truethat]

I know the difference between date rape and violent rape. To try to equivocate the two shows a disgusting level of ignorance.

[bookitty]

Originally Posted by AvalonXQ

Except that it's often not.

Date and acquaintance rape is often about selfishness and sex. When a man or woman drugs a friend or partner, or takes advantage of a friend or partner's intoxication, or refuses to listen to a friend or partner's refusal, often the genuine intent is to have sex, not to send some deeper violent message or harm the other party.

The lack of respect for the victim and indifference to harm and trauma that this causes the victim are both reprehensible, but I have a tough time calling this type of interaction "an attack with a weapon". The behavior isn't harm-focused, and the intent isn't violent. The person is in the wrong, and should be punished; that doesn't mean we get to attribute motives to her or him that she or he legitimately did not have.

My nephew is 18 and went to a very Christian high school which didn't teach any sex ed. Now he is in college. Let's say a new friend invites him back to a dorm room and pulls out some beer. They drink. The friend hits on him gently. My nephew politely declines but doesn't want to seem provincial so he doesn't storm out and he doesn't refuse the next beer that is handed to him.

Vodka mixed with soda is introduced. My nephew has only ever experimented with one beer shared with a friend, he drinks too much and passes out. While he is unconscious, the friend rapes penetrates him anally because the friend finds that arousing and the friend was horny.

You are saying that is not rape because the friend only wanted to get off. They didn't actually "attack" anyone or try to send a "violent" message. The message was simple "I want sex, your feelings do not matter and I will manipulate you to get it, regardless of the harm to you." Violent message or not, that is the action of a psychopath. It is also rape.

ETA: This was the most mild of the scenarios you presented.

[mijopaalmc]

Originally Posted by JJM 777

Half true: trying to find a way out for men who are accused but not guilty of rape.

There was no evidence that she was lying about the rape other than her own word, which is, in itself, suspect given that she claims that she was being intimidated by the rapist. And the above is a demonstration of how easy it to destroy an alleged rape victim's credibility, which should give you pause when exonerate the man.

[AvalonXQ]

Originally Posted by bookitty

.
You are saying that is not rape

No, I'm not. It absolutely is rape.

Your claim was that rape is an attack with sex as a weapon. What you described was rape; it was not an attack with sex as a weapon.

What you described was a rape motivated by sex, not by power or hatred. And that was my point -- with acquaintance rape especially, the usual "rape is an attack" or "rape is about power rather than sex" narrative just isn't accurate. It's not in the situation you gave.

[AvalonXQ]

Originally Posted by mijopaalmc

There was no evidence that she was lying about the rape other than her own word, which is, in itself, suspect given that she claims that she was being intimidated by the rapist. And the above is a demonstration of how easy it to destroy an alleged rape victim's credibility, which should give you pause when exonerate the man.

It should certainly give you pause when you consider destroying his life based only on that word.

[mijopaalmc]

Originally Posted by AvalonXQ

No, I'm not. It absolutely is rape.

Your claim was that rape is an attack with sex as a weapon. What you described was rape; it was not an attack with sex as a weapon.

What you described was a rape motivated by sex, not by power or hatred. And that was my point -- with acquaintance rape especially, the usual "rape is an attack" or "rape is about power rather than sex" narrative just isn't accurate. It's not in the situation you gave.

Wow! Just wow!

You don't see how someone taking sex by deceit is an act of power, if not violence?

[truethat]

Originally Posted by bookitty

My nephew is 18 and went to a very Christian high school which didn't teach any sex ed. Now he is in college. Let's say a new friend invites him back to a dorm room and pulls out some beer. They drink. The friend hits on him gently. My nephew politely declines but doesn't want to seem provincial so he doesn't storm out and he doesn't refuse the next beer that is handed to him.

Vodka mixed with soda is introduced. My nephew has only ever experimented with one beer shared with a friend, he drinks too much and passes out. While he is unconscious, the friend rapes penetrates him anally because the friend finds that arousing and the friend was horny.

You are saying that is not rape because the friend only wanted to get off. They didn't actually "attack" anyone or try to send a "violent" message. The message was simple "I want sex, your feelings do not matter and I will manipulate you to get it, regardless of the harm to you." Violent message or not, that is the action of a psychopath. It is also rape.

ETA: This was the most mild of the scenarios you presented.

Excuse me. That is rape but that is not what I am pointing out. Most date rape isn't roofies or anal penetration of a passed out victim.

The most mild? GMAFB The most mild of the scenarios is that a guy meets a girl at a club, they get wasted and then go home and have sex. Only she wasn't in her right mind, she may have even had unprotected sex with the guy.

This is rape and it occurs much more often than your scenario. The guy isn't being a "rapist" and using violence or sex as a weapon. He is not in control of his judgment.

Nonetheless, as I've pointed out before, being drunk doesn't get you off of another crime. He is the one committing the crime.

Its not the schools job to educate kids about sexuality. It's the parents job and society as well. Here we have on this very site many young men who may have done exactly what I described above. And are you taking the time to educate them? No you are creating melodramatic stories of guys being sodomized with a guy who plied him with vodka.

So very typical of your comments and why I have less and less respect for your comments.

[mijopaalmc]

Originally Posted by AvalonXQ

It should certainly give you pause when you consider destroying his life based only on that word.

So all a rapist needs to do is get his victim to recant is to sufficiently intimidate his victim so that she claims the rape. Seriously, you really seem to being trying to hard to exonerate the rapist with absolutely no consideration to how the rapist can affect the course of the rape investigation.

[bookitty]

Originally Posted by AvalonXQ

No, I'm not. It absolutely is rape.

Your claim was that rape is an attack with sex as a weapon. What you described was rape; it was not an attack with sex as a weapon.

What you described was a rape motivated by sex, not by power or hatred. And that was my point -- with acquaintance rape especially, the usual "rape is an attack" or "rape is about power rather than sex" narrative just isn't accurate. It's not in the situation you gave.

I describe an attack on a body using sex. The intent of the attacker doesn't matter. Intent is not magical. It doesn't turn rape into "something that's just selfish."

[AvalonXQ]

Originally Posted by mijopaalmc

Wow! Just wow!

You don't see how someone taking sex by deceit is an act of power, if not violence?

You don't see how an a horney teenage idiot taking an advantage of her friend may be motivated by sex rather than violence?

You really think bookitty's nephew's rapist, in the situation described, is thinking about power? I don't; I think he's horney and not considering anything else, including the harm he's doing.

[bookitty]

Originally Posted by mijopaalmc

Wow! Just wow!

You don't see how someone taking sex by deceit is an act of power, if not violence?

I have yet to see evidence that they believe sex by deceit is all that bad. It keeps being described as...I don't know what...hijinks?

[AvalonXQ]

Originally Posted by bookitty

I describe an attack on a body using sex. The intent of the attacker doesn't matter. Intent is not magical. It doesn't turn rape into "something that's just selfish."

I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying.

But, anyway, your statement here is clearly not true: the intent absolutely matters. The act itself may be exactly the same; only the intent determines if sex is consensual or not.

Since when does the definition of "attack" include acts done without intent to harm?

[bookitty]

Originally Posted by AvalonXQ

I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying.

But, anyway, your statement here is clearly not true: the intent absolutely matters. The act itself may be exactly the same; only the intent determines if sex is consensual or not.

Since when does the definition of "attack" include acts done without intent to harm?

When harm occurs and the act is without the victim's consent.

and btw, this is exactly the sort of thing that creeps me out. "Well, they didn't mean to hurt anyone. They took advantage of them, drugged them or ignored a friend's refusals. It's not like they're bad people!" Ugh, creepy.

[mijopaalmc]

Originally Posted by AvalonXQ

You don't see how an a horney teenage idiot taking an advantage of her friend may be motivated by sex rather than violence?

You really think bookitty's nephew's rapist, in the situation described, is thinking about power? I don't; I think he's horney and not considering anything else, including the harm he's doing.

If somebody turns you down for sex and then you incapacitated them so that you could override their refusal to have sex with you, your act is an act of power. You have demonstrated that your desires overwhelm the other person's will.

The fact that the actor didn't intend to exercise power over the acted upon dosen't mean that the actor didn't in fact exercise said power.

[AvalonXQ]

Originally Posted by bookitty

I have yet to see evidence that they believe sex by deceit is all that bad. It keeps being described as...I don't know what...hijinks?

First of all, don't describe me with "they". I don't agree with them.

Second, sex without genuine consent by all parties is rape. I have never said otherwise.

Finally, just because all rape is evil doesn't mean all rapists are motivated by power or the intent to harm. If we want to address the real causes of rape, we need to recognize the real attitudes of rapists - which are often a desire for sex combined with a lack of concern for the victim, NOT a desire to harm the victim.

[mijopaalmc]

Originally Posted by bookitty

I have yet to see evidence that they believe sex by deceit is all that bad. It keeps being described as...I don't know what...hijinks?

Yep, teens will be teens.