Not blaming her directly
More from the Brock Turner file. Via Stanford law professor Michele Dauber, who attended the trial, on Twitter:
#brockturner "reference" letter to judge: stop being so "politically correct" about rape thing,ok? @thehuntinground pic.twitter.com/0zUyr4eVve
— Michele Dauber (@mldauber) June 6, 2016
A reference letter to the judge.
I don’t think it’s fair to base the fate of the next 10+ years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn’t remember anything but the amount she drank to press charges against him. I am not blaming her directly for this, because that isn’t right. But where do we draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campus isn’t always because people are rapists?
I know, right? It’s so annoyingly politically correct to think that fucking an unconscious woman behind a dumpster is rape. It’s not rape at all: it’s post-dancing alcohol-lubricated joyous sexy fun times!
The problem is, the letter-writer goes on, universities encourage this party atmosphere and all this drinking. It’s all their fault, not the fault of the innocent boys who drink a lot in this party atmosphere and then totally accidentally rape some bitch behind a dumpster.
This is completely different from a woman getting kidnapped and raped as she is walking to her car in a parking lot. That is a rapist. These are not rapists.
There you have it, wims. Rape is when a stranger jumps out at you and pulls a knife. End of definition. Rape is not when a stranger finds you drunk and pulls you outside and behind a dumpster, at least not when that stranger is a very nice clean-cut white boy on the swim team at Stanford – I mean duh. Who wouldn’t want to have sex with that boy? If some slut drinks so much at a party that that nice clean-cut white boy can pull her outside behind a dumpster, then she deserves whatever he does to her, and he is in no way at fault. She’s a slut and a sloppy drunk and if she presses charges she’s a bitch besides. It’s political correctness run mad to say otherwise.
“rape on campus isn’t always because people are rapists”
What is the sense of this sentence?
Similarly I’m not sympathetic to the parole officer’s assessment that “this case, when compared to other crimes of similar nature, may be considered less serious due to the defendant’s level of intoxication”. (http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2016/if-a-girl-falls-down-help-her-up/). Apply this to a careless driving conviction. If you were drunk then is the careless driving offense less serious? As SV#1 said “I don’t buy for a minute that he didn’t know what he was doing. This wasn’t a grey area.”
There is a very limiting case (in some justice systems) for diminished criminal responsibility because of mental disorder. Even this has consequences. Drunk people, sociopathic people, socially alienated depressed people are held criminally responsible.
A drunk rapist is a rapist.
His attempt to flee the scene certainly suggests consciousness of guilt.
Another thing about the DUI – it is very possible, and in fact happens every day all over the driving world, that people who drive drunk may get safely home without hurting anyone (this doesn’t make it OK, mind you). A person who rapes drunk cannot, by definition, get safely home without hurting someone, because in rape there is always another person involved. Yet society is harder on someone who is driving drunk who has not hit a tree, a car, or a person, but who has just weaved in and out and can’t walk a straight line, than on a young man who uses his drunkenness as an excuse for sexual activity with a woman against her will.
Part of this is the force of things like M.A.D.D. which has focused on the children that might be hurt if you drive drunk, and the innocent young things that get killed by drunk drivers while they are playing in the yard or riding their bike. Campus rape, on the other hand, happens to grown women, women who are in college by choice, and by definition have given up the right to be considered innocent young things simply because they are on a college campus, and therefore behaving in a manner not suitably womanly.
Promising young woman raped in the prime of her life, perhaps depression or pregnancy prevent her from completing her degree and reaching her full potential because someone else chose to violate her rights. Versus. Promising young athlete jailed and suspended, unable to finish his program and compete in the Olympics because (a) he chose to commit a heinous crime; or (2) promising young woman took a drunken revel too seriously, and ruined his life by going into hysterics and refusing to acknowledge her own role in the crime (strike that) action that was committed against her person. Which story does society prefer? The second, of course.
If we acknowledge the ongoing reality of the first, and the ubiquitous nature of rape culture, we will be morally obligated to change our own behavior to help prevent such horrible things from happening. That’s real work. Blaming the woman already has the structure in place. We don’t have to change anything, just shrug our shoulders and accept that, in some way, she was asking for it, and maybe she even liked it.
Society can make those changes. It just doesn’t want to.
[…] a comment by iknklast on Not blaming her […]
I always wonder how many times the rapist raped women before they finally got caught.
Rape – the man only does one thing wrong but the woman does a million things wrong.
Unfortunately this sentiment gets repeated by faux feminists all the damn’ time:
‘it’s post-dancing alcohol-lubricated joyous sexy fun times’
Never ever suggest that alcohol is a dangerous drug. Never acknowledge that rapists use alcohol to incapacitate victims. If Bill Cosby gives you a pill, why TAKE IT. It’s up to Bill Cosby not to rape you.
And again, the fact that Swimmer Boy hasn’t been arrested before means nothing. Any honest person who’s been arrested for DUI will know that they got away with it dozens or hundreds of times before being caught.
‘In a study of 1,882 university men conducted in the Boston area, 120 rapists were identified. These 120 undetected rapists were responsible for 483 rapes. Of the 120 rapists, 44 had committed a single rape, while 76 (63% of them) were serial rapists who accounted for 439 of the 483 rapes. These 76 serial rapists had also committed more than 1,000 other crimes of violence, from nonpenetrating acts of sexual assault, to physical and sexual abuse of children, to battery of domestic partners. None of these undetected rapists had been prosecuted for these crimes.’
Lisak, D. & Miller, P. M. (2002). Repeat rape and multiple offending among
undetected rapists. Violence and Victims, 17, 73-84.
And remember these criminal histories were self-reported.