I’m grossed out all over again. A famous male porn star has been accused of rape by multiple women, and guess what clueless men are saying now?
(Trigger warnings all over the place…it’s ugly stories all around)
Jesus, why not file a fucking police report instead of tweeting this? You're fucking disgusting, what a fucking idiot. @stoya
— Steven Bonnell II (@Steven_Bonnell) November 29, 2015
Jesus, why not file a fucking police report instead of tweeting this? You’re fucking disgusting, what a fucking idiot.
So familiar…we got the exact same noise when women stepped forward to accuse Michael Shermer of rape and sexual harassment. The same crap about conference anti-harassment guidelines. You aren’t allowed to say anything — you’re supposed to sit back and wait for Official Law People to do everything, despite the fact that years may have passed, those Official Law People did nothing, the Official Law People have a reputation for trivializing sexual offenses against women…and women who actually had sex? Those sluts had it coming.
It gets worse.
Wtf is this shit?! A sex worker's body is no less their body. She's a human, not a commodity #standwithstoya pic.twitter.com/htTXAUud5Y
— Tilly lawless (@tilly_lawless) November 29, 2015
Once a woman has had sex, apparently her “cavities” are all public property, not belonging to her anymore. There’s another, similar case going on: ex-fighter War Machine is in court, claiming that his brutal assault on ex-girlfriend Christy Mack wasn’t rape, because she was a porn star who liked rough sex. He broke her face and left her hospitalized, but he doesn’t think that was anything she should have objected to.
You can’t win. If women have sex, they become sexual property. If they don’t have sex, if they mention that they don’t want children, then failure to perform certain physiological functions is grounds for harassment.
Why aren’t all women throwing open their windows and screaming at the world? None of this makes any sense.
Ooh, also: I learned a new metaphor, the missing stair. That’s useful and powerful.
There sure are a lot of missing stairs in the atheist/skeptic communities, but we’re getting better about pointing them out. It’s too bad the landlords don’t do anything about actually fixing them.
Apparently, recieving money for sex means you are no longer a person, but a commercial property? What a vile moron.
Because you know what happens to women who open their windows…
Or governments and law en-farce-ment waste billions of dollars prosecuting and imprisoning marijuana users, but wait for public outrage before coming up with $8million to process rape kits.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/mexico-lawmakers-address-backlog-untested-rape-kits-35500275
To which the usual feeble excuse is, “But those are federal dollars, not state or local….” Then stop taxing so high federally and save the money for local prosecutions. The money is obviously not being used productively at the federal level.
This story was on the TMZ TV show that was on in the break room at work. In addition to all the “why not go to the police” crap, the hosts were also misstating the facts about the complaints. They tried to say that the complaints from women other than Deen’s ex were the result of Deen not knowing when the cameras were rolling and mistakenly playing his onscreen rough, aggressive persona. Now I find out that one of the other two complaints involved someone he wasn’t performing with, though it was on set, and the other took place away from the cameras. It looks like the media’s initial reaction may be to come to the defense of the male, even if the male is himself a pornstar.
left0ver1under @3:
If they process them at all.
Bear in mind, rape kits are a very effective tool for justice.
But the police don’t care about sexual assault. Hell, they consistently overestimate the false report rate, despite being in the best position to accurately measure it.
Anyone who asks “why didn’t you go to the police?” doesn’t know a damn thing about sexual assault, and can be safely ignored.
[1] Jordan, J. “Beyond Belief?: Police, Rape and Women’s Credibility.” Criminology and Criminal Justice 4, no. 1 (February 1, 2004): 29–59. doi:10.1177/1466802504042222.
Oh what a timely article.
I was looking for a reason to avoid snacking before bed, and nothing kills my appetite quite like reading about a bunch of assholes rushing to attack a woman for daring to say in public that someone raped her.
“commercial cavities”?
I just no words can’t even. Fuck.
From the OP:
Um, I can’t read that quotation other than Tilly is unequivocally endorsing the same view as you, PZ. Perhaps you intended to quote one of the responses to that?
Been there, done that. The world told us to shut the fuck up, stop whining, and remember that women in Afghanistan had it worse. No point in screaming any more.
John Morales @9:
Read the Dolo post above it that Tilly Lawless was responding to.
Twitter screenshots always look weirdly formatted to me. Easy to get lost.
@ John Morales:
The Tilly Lawless tweet is quoting the horrible shit. PZ is clearly not disagreeing with Lawless, he’s sharing Lawless’s shock and horror.
@ Elladan:
I blame you for my failure to refresh before posting… ahem.
Elladan, it was Tilly who was Gumby-quoted, but you’re right — I don’t do twitter, and now see that it was Tilly who was responding, rather than the other way around. Nonetheless.
Actually, isn’t opening her window and screaming at the world just what Stoya is doing? And look how well that is turning out.
Absolutely right. Women should never report sexual assault or rape to the police. They should just tweet about it.
I get that there are many reasons women may not choose to report a sexual assualt. It is, ultimately, our decision, as is every decision about our body. But Stoya should not be surprised to find out that this monster has other victims. I’m happy she’s speaking out now. I’m sad that she couldn’t find her voice in time to perhaps prevent this from happening to someone else. And maybe now this monster will see some real repercussions – like jail time – for his horrific actions.
All signs point to ‘she would have been resoundingly ignored’ and his victims would have continued to pile up.
Also, the famous male porn star is not a monster – he is a horrible human being, yes; he has done monstrous things, yes; but he is not a monster. He is a human being who has taken advantage of the surrounding rape culture to indulge his own unwillingness to learn respect for the autonomy of other human beings. Don’t dehumanize him by calling him a monster; it’s a form of othering that does nobody any good.
How many women have to report a rape before they are believed?
We don’t know as it has never happened.
Penny L, either you suck at reading, or you’re being extremely dishonest. Which one is it?
I know that this has no value whatsoever, but he has always creeped me out whenever i’ve encountered him in internet explorations during “personal fun time” (which admitedly is very rarely as that kind of porn is not my cup of tea)…there’s just something in his expression that to me says “keep away”. He is apparently known for having a rough “style”, and the brief glances that i’ve seen of him definitely created the impression that he is forceful and detached, or even punitive. Even if this were 100% faked, i find it disturbing as fuck that this is appealing to so many people, but to be honest, i have a seriously hard time believing it can be faked. Regardless, someone who is glorified and idolised for treating women in a way that mimicks sexual violence and the whole “pussy punisher” horseshit, turns out to be a sexual predator who sexually abuses women….so very surprising…
Not that i necessarily have a moral argument against BDSM or consensual forms of simulated non-consensuality…
I would complain that this piece of shit is making me think about him, but I perform intellectual work in exchange for money so apparently my brain is now public property.
Penny, can you just not comment on things anymore?
Penny L #16:
It’s not just a case of ‘finding her voice’. It is pretty much a given that victims of rape will have to, effectively, relive that rape repeatedly during the process of investigation, prosecution and conviction – and that’s if the police, et al, actually do their job correctly. That alone has a pretty effective chilling effect for people reporting rapes. However, what is pretty damn common is that the police will start by assuming the victim is lying, and effectively start trying to build a case against the victim for lying to the police and making false allegations.
Also, according to the CATO institute, 10% of police misconduct reports are sexual assault by the police officer. And that’s only the reported cases – how likely is it that a woman feels confident enough to report sexual assault by a police officer back to that officer’s precinct?
And notice the amount of excessive force complaints. If a woman has encountered the police before, especially if she’s in a marginalized group, she might have her own solid evidence that she will not be treated well if she tries to report a rape.
We are. That’s why we’re targets for harassment.
And rape kits help only when they’re tested, which more often than not, they aren’t.
Trespassed? Commercial cavities? I really didn’t think it was possible for things to get worse, but I am proved wrong yet again. Sounds like 1979.
PZ:
Yes, yes, yes. Also, if a woman is raped, she ends up in a super slut category, often considered fair game afterwards, because good girls don’t get raped, why everyone knows that. As someone who started seeking sterilisation at 17, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard every nasty thing which can be said about that personal choice, all variations on the “that’s unnatural” theme.
I’ve been screaming for over 45 years. Hasn’t helped much.
Oh, yes it does. What you hear, what you read, what you see – it’s the crack of the ongoing backlash, the primal scream to put women back in their place, heads bowed, quiet, submissive, on their knees in the fucking mud. Incubators. Little dumplings with a hole in the middle. Property. Objects. Owned.
Penny L @ 16:
Deen is not a monster. He’s a human being, just like every other human being out there. There are no monsters, and they don’t rape. People rape. People just like your friends, acquaintances, colleagues, students, family members and so on. Pretending that ordinary people don’t rape doesn’t help anyone, ever. Don’t fucking other, and don’t carry on doing it in this thread.
Oh, and ever so sweet of you to remind us all that it’s not just a woman’s responsibility to not be raped, but if it does happen, by golly, she better turn into superwoman and prevent that rapist from getting to yet another woman. Yep. Nothing like making sure there’s another pile of guilt. You might try to turn your focus where it’s needed: on those who rape, or would be willing to rape. Focus on those, mostly men, who do not speak up when someone they know makes rape jokes, or talks about rape, sluts, and so on. There is a lot which could bring about change, if more men spoke up, to other men. Continuing to blame victims does not help.
Meet the Predators
http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-predators/
Predator Redux
https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/predator-redux/
Rape Culture 101
https://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/rape-culture-101/
Arguments From Analogy in Victim Blaming
http://freethoughtblogs.com/nirmukta/2013/10/12/arguments-from-analogy-in-victim-blaming
The Enjoyment of Sexist Humor, Rape Attitudes, and Relationship Aggression in College Students
http://www.springerlink.com/content/g451601664828vh1/
Exposure to Sexist Humor and Rape Proclivity: The Moderator Effect of Aversiveness Ratings
http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/25/12/2339.abstract
http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/mythcommunication-its-not-that-they-dont-understand-they-just-dont-like-the-answer/
http://www.nsvrc.org/projects/bystander-intervention-resources
Rape Prevention Aimed At Rapists Works
http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2013/01/08/rape-prevention-aimed-at-rapists-does-work/
Additional coverage:
“Porn World Cuts Ties with James Deen and Stands with Stoya”
“James Deen, the Bill Cosby of Porn? A Third Accuser Comes Forward”
One particularly disturbing account among many is Deen coming to a porn set when he was not a part of the shoot and assaulting an actress in front of a crew who not only failed to do anything, but also continued to allow him to work at that studio.
Regarding police handling of rape cases: keep in mind that, in rape cases, presumption of innocence equals presumption that the victim is lying when she identifies an assailant.
Not sure what to do about that. Presumption of innocence is critical in criminal justice; but it does lead to huge problems in sexual assault cases.
(I’m not justifying the cavalier and callous attitude that cops have towards rape victims, nor the backlog in untested rape kits, etc. But apart from those things, we have what might be an intractable problem.)
It is deja-vu all over again.
Is it not possible to do both?? Teach men not to rape AND (!!) report this very serious and heinous crime to the proper authorities? People, not monsters, are rapists, you’re right. By the same token people, not helpless waifs, are rape survivors. You don’t have to be a superwoman – and it’s more than a little bit sexist to suggest that’s what a woman needs to be in order to report a sexual assault to the police.
Maybe Stoya could have prevented those other women from being assaulted, maybe not (I’m unclear on the timeline). Maybe if one of Bill Cosby’s victims had come forward much earlier he’d have been in prison long ago. We’ll never know. They decided to remain silent. That was their choice, but in making that choice they were also making the choice that they would allow their rapist the opportunity to do it again.
So my argument is let’s do both – teach men not to rape while at the same time prosecuting those who do (which has to be one of the least controversial arguments I’ve ever made).
Penny L, do you acknowledge any of the reasons people have given for why a woman might choose not to report?
Penny L
What are you DOING to ensure that the “authorities” take rape accusations seriously? Nothing I bet. Then you have nothing but empty rhetoric.
Joel @ 34:
Bullshit. There’s a fucktonne of bias when it comes to sexual assault and rape. It wasn’t until recently that cases of child rape were taken seriously, FFS. I’ve told this before, too many times, but back in the ’70s, when I met the D.A. who would be prosecuting my case for the first time, he took one look at me and said “what the hell were you thinking, being out alone, after dark, wearing a dress?” I was one of three survivors of a rapist murderer, but guess what was important to the D.A.? Everything I had done “wrong”, acting as if I was a regular person, a 16 year old having an evening out with friends.
I spent seven years acting as an advocate for rape and sexual assault victims, women and men. Want to bet I could get you to vomit from all the shit we heard those seven years? Presumption of innocence my ass. There’s a presumption of lying, on the part of the victim. There’s a presumption of “eh, they were asking for it”, on the part of the victim. There’s a presumption of “what were you doing there, were you drinking/drunk, well, you were at a party” and so on, on the part of the victim, and so much more. When it comes to rape and sexual assault, there’s way more than a “presumption of innocence” on the part of the rapist by too many in law and justice. Rapists are often put up on a pedestal, as if they were a shining figure of right and goodness, golly, that girl was a fucking slut! (See Steubenville for quick reference) If you want to think there’s such a pure and wonderful thing in the criminal justice system, go right ahead, but don’t use it as yet one more obstacle placed in the way of those who have been raped.
Penny L, shut the fuck up. You are a major part of the problem. Just go away, the last thing anyone who has been raped or assaulted needs to see is your fetid bullshit.
Just want to say, as a survivor, I’m behind Caine all the way in this thread. Caine, you’re fierce, and you have all my respect.
Penny L@35:
Sure it’s possible to do both. The better question to ask is will the authorities help you? Emphasis mine:
CaitieCat @ 40:
Oh, right back at you, CaitieCat, all the way and always. If someone wants to understand what it’s like for victims, it’s not all that hard. Authoritarian asses like Penny L, though? No, they’ll just keep bleating along, acting as if they know what’s right, and all the while, piling on the blame and guilt, refusing to get the smallest fucking clue.
Qwints @ 33:
That doesn’t surprise me in the least, and that speaks volumes. Rape culture in action. Speaking of, I highly recommend Asking For It | The alarming rise of rape culture – and what we can do about it, by Kate Harding.
Fuck, I can’t let this go…
Joel, have you never once thought about what reporting is like for transgender or gay or lesbian people? Have you ever once considered what a fucking nightmare that is for them? Do you have any idea, at all, of how many people in law enforcement and the court system don’t really have a problem with the notion of corrective rape? Have you ever had to listen to hours of jokes about raping non-hetero people?
And you want to talk about presumption of innocence. Please, pull your head out of your intestinal tract.
I hope this shuts up the, “rape is not about power” crowd. Here is a guy whose job it was to have sex with women every day and he still felt the need to rape. But it probably won’t.
Jebus, the old presumed innocent bullshit. Only the judge and jury in a trial must presume innocence. Otherwise, nobody can be investigated or prosecuted for any crime. Get real.
These are two different issues and conflating them is dangerous.
Police departments certainly routinely disbelieve victims. See .e.g. New Orleans Police Routinely Ignored Sex Crimes, Report Finds or the paper H.J. Hornbeck cited. That’s a failure of the system, but it’s not a result of giving defendants due process. Among other things, there’s no presumption of innocence in criminal investigations. Until you start infringing on people’s rights, police don’t even need reasonable suspicion or probable cause.
The presumption of innocence is analogous to a null hypothesis. Just like having a null hypothesis doesn’t require you to ignore the subsequent experiment, the presumption of innocence doesn’t require anyone to ignore victims. It means that the prosecution has the burden of proof, aka the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. The presumption of innocence comes before any witness testifies to anything or any evidence is to be produced, it doesn’t require juries to ignore testimony or assume a victim is lying. Police can arrest, prosecutors can try and juries can convict someone on the testimony of a single witness – all without ever violating the presumption of innocence.
Penny L, I did report my stalker who tried to break into my house. But it took me 3 hours to call the cops because I took that long to get up the courage to come out of hiding. I truly believe that were it not for my dogs, I would be dead.
So, I called the cops, an officer was sent, I told my story.
And the response of this prevent future rapes entity?
“Well, because you waited so long to call, how do I know you just didn’t have an argument with your boyfriend? ”
We pointed it that the guy had been touching windows and his handprints were there.
The cop did nothing. They did nothing. Mom was the one who figured out it was the guy who registered me to vote. The cops did nothing. They never persued it.
So, Penny L, fuck you and your belief in magical wonderful police. Fuck you for putting blame on a victim and telling them is their job to prevent the rapist from choosing to rape again.
I considered sneaking my dogs into the backyard with the guy. They might very well have killed him. I was too afraid to move. I didn’t want the state to kill my dogs . And that man has doubtless gone on to rape again. I feel guilty sometimes, but more angry because even if I hadn’t told the cops, I am not in control of a rapist. Is not my fault. Would never be my fault. But then I have fucking asswipes like you trying to say that I am the causal agent of future rapes.
So fuck you. Fuck your attitude. Fuck your false beliefs in magic cops that believe victims and then do something. Fuck you, you odious shit pile of a human being.
Qwints @ 47:
You missed my points entirely. When it comes to rape, the whole system is skewed, and it skews in favour of the rapist/rapists. This can be see over and over and over and over and over and over. Perhaps you have to have been in the bowels of the system to understand all the shit, I don’t know. Even when it comes to juries, they are most often predisposed to judge the victim harshly, and so are too many judges, who refuse to do much more than slap a rapist’s wrist, even when a verdict is guilty. So, now the discussion can get happily derailed on minor points, which, by the way, will still make a tidy pile of handy victim blame, rather than focusing on something like rape culture, which allows someone to happily talk about commercial cavities and anal trespass, and that someone will have plenty of people agreeing with them. Or how women still have to rely on the missing stair tactic. I really don’t know why I bother anymore. I’ll leave you with this charming sentiment, expressed by Paul Elam:
You might want to ponder how common that attitude is, and not just with men, either.
Rowan @ 48:
Thanks to rape culture, and how much we’re all steeping in it, a lot of victims aren’t even capable of talking about what happened to them for years. Fucking years. It was decades before I spoke about the 6 years of rape when I was a child. Not until I hit mid-to-late thirties. Then there was the sexual assault I never spoke about, to anyone, until 2013, and then I spoke about it here, to help someone else, only took about 37 years to talk about it. All the hugs, Rowan.
I stand constantly in awe of all of the people who tell the stories of their sexual assaults here, to help others, to show the bullshit of ‘just tell the cops!’, to add another voice. You are all my heroes. All the hugs, right back.
@Caine, I agree that “the presumption of innocence” is different from the failures of the criminal justice system or rape culture. Like Nerd said at 46, it’s a non sequitur outside of the context of a trial. My point is that people shouldn’t buy into the notion that removing due process is the solution to a biased and oppressive system. Rhetoric like “the whole system is skewed, and it skews in favour of the rapist/rapists” has been and is being used to ruin lives when the powerful use it to remove protections. It’s not the rules that skew the system, it’s the biases of people running the system. All that will happen if you gut due process is that marginalized defendants will suffer more. That’s not a minor point.
Is it really rhetoric if it’s point blank the truth, though? No one said anything about gutting due process. It’s a simple fact that cops often do not believe victims of rape, but they typically believe victims of theft. Or at the very least, they treat victims of theft as IF they believe them, which is better than what they do for victims of rape and sexual assault.
When a bank is robbed, is there a presumption that the bank manager is lying when he reports it? If someone is mugged, do police assume the victim is lying when he files a report? If my house is robbed, will police assume I faked it for the insurance, and not bother to dust for fingerprints and run them against a database, or collate the MO with other reports of robbery in the neighborhood?
Rape is the only crime where the victim is commonly assumed to be lying from the get-go.
Hj Hornbeck @6,
This! Only one small quibble though… not sure if it really is safe to just ignore them as opposed to confronting them head on.
Amongst MRAs and misogynists this is often used as a form of meta victim blaming too. First the victim is blamed for being raped then the whole “why didn’t you go to the police” nonsense is tacked on as a means of blaming the victim for all of the rapist’s future victims as well. The implication seems to be that reporting it to the police will somehow protect future victims (if only) such that not reporting it somehow equates to being complicit in future rapes. Or something.
It’s gross and offensive in addition to being indicative of ignorance.
Qwints:
I’m aware. If you somehow thought I was referring to ‘the system’ as its own entity, perhaps you should re-read. I brought up more than one example of the people who make up the fucking system, from cops to lawyers, to the average Jane, to people who make up juries. No one is gutting due process, for fuck’s sake, yet you want to point rhetoric at me.
The system is skewed in favour of rapists, at least white male rapists, because of toxic sexism and rape culture, and it goes on everywhere. What comes to mind this moment is the Canadian case, where a man was found guilty of rape, but the judge in the case refused to do more than slightly tap his wrist, because (and he stated this publicly) of the way the victim had been dressed, and that she had a couple of cocktails. After all, if you’re gonna put on a short skirt, those slutty heels, and have a drink or two, why any young man is fucking entitled. Which puts us right back at those handy dandy mobile cavities – objects, things to own, things to use, things to discard.
Only two of the Steubenville rapists were found guilty, and neither one received much of a sentence. The judge chose to try them as juveniles, so more leniency could apply, and it was stated at the time, that they most likely would not be registered on a sex offender database or registry. One of the rapists supposedly apologized to the victim, but the apology was for taking a photo and video, not for rape. The whole community stood against the victim and her family, who found themselves dealing with harassment and death threats, which continued to amp up so the victim had to pull out of school, and the family was left trying to figure out if they could possibly move. There’s your fucking system, right there.
I’m speaking from personal experience of the system, and seven long years of advocating for other victims, which put me back in the system, over and over and over and over and over again. Change in attitude was truly rare, while change in behaviour, at least on the surface, was less rare. When you’re sitting in a cop shop with a victim, you get one earful after another of the boiling hot resentment a lot of cops have over having to be politically correct. I heard one cop opine that you just couldn’t call a slut a slut anymore, and shake his head over this dire state of affairs.
Plethora @ 54:
One of the problems which is frequently brought up, in regard to so-called rape prevention which depends on a woman (mostly) observing the endless laundry list of things to do, is that even if one woman doesn’t get raped one particular day, another woman will get raped. That’s why this so-called prevention crap is useless, because it continues to put the onus for not being raped on potential victims. Placing the spotlight on potential rapists works, and putting the onus on them works too. (Link @ # 32).
(trigger warnings continued for my post)
@35: Penny L said:
Have you reported every crime of which you’ve been a victim? Anything at all: car broken into, something stolen out of your bag, front door egged? If you’ve been victimized and not reported it, what was your reasoning? Now consider something way more traumatizing than petty vandalism or theft: does the reasoning still hold?
Yeah, no. There is exactly one person who we know could have saved any of Cosby’s victims AND THAT’S BILL COSBY. What gall to suggest that my choice means I’m to blame for someone else’s crime; that’s some weird victim-becomes-the-perpetrator-mobius blaming crap. You know that one time your friend/neighbour/family member complained about coming back out to a parking lot and finding their car had a big dent in it? Did they report that? No? Then when they “decided to remain silent”, they made “the choice that they would allow” someone “the opportunity to do it again.” See how stupid that sounds? And that’s for a CAR, not a fellow HUMAN BEING.
But that’s not what you’re suggesting. You actually moved in a single post from “Teach men not to rape AND (!!) report this very serious and heinous crime to the proper authorities” to “teach men not to rape while at the same time prosecuting those who do.” The first half is the same (and I agree with it; I really think more fathers need to have the “don’t rape anyone” conversation with their sons, like many mothers have the “try not to get raped” conversation with their daughters). What you actually spend time arguing for, though is “teach men not to rape, and criticize rape victims who make a choice Penny L doesn’t like.” And that’s…Jesus, I don’t even know what that is.
@56: Caine said:
I had this conversation with someone online once, and I was never sure whether I made myself clear: these tips aren’t crime prevention they’re crime displacement. Cops used to tell people to have lights on around their houses, no tall hedges, etc, if they didn’t want a break in. That doesn’t “prevent” anything; that just makes it someone else’s problem: the thief won’t NOT break into a house, they’ll just choose your neighbor’s over yours. Prevention is something entirely different.
Caine
And if the woman who faithfully observes the laundry list still gets raped there will be an item she missed. Usually by following another piece of “advice” that said the exact opposite.
Hey, Penny L
I’ve never been raped. But I had a close call once. Guy followed me to a dark car park, tried to close the gap, made a dash for me when i made a dash for my car. I never reported. What would I report, nothing had happened after all. When I told a friend I got a long “why did you park there”?
If the guy later raped another woman there, would it be my fault? To what percentage?
Good old Steven Bonnell II. Kicked off an e-sports team for leaking nudes of a woman, and then when she responded angrily, he tried to get her financial aid taken away. What great defenders this rapist has. (Just like every abuser / rapist)
It’s all about circling the wagons and trying to keep women quiet. Disgusting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/z1nv3/effort_destiny_parts_ways_with_root_gaming_his/
Caine @56,
Yes well put. It’s been said over and over but it’s worth repeating: the world needs to stop trying to teach potential victims how not to get raped and start teaching the rapists not to rape instead.
Those who refuse to put the onus on the rapists seem to be displaying their soft bigotry of low expectations as well. They act as if rapists are incapable of understanding consent and learning how to reign in their baser impulses and stop raping. Instead they seek to impose rules and limitations on women in the guise of so called rape prevention tips.
Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia @ 20
I know this isn’t the way you intended it, but I’ve seen a lot of comments like this all over the place and it’s pretty upsetting to me. Stoya was his partner. She’s open about enjoying the kind of roughness you describe here. When she consents to it. By implying that anyone who behaves the way he behaves on camera is obviously a predator, that taking on the role of a sadistic dominant cannot be “faked”, this edges really close to victim blaming. I’ve seen this same sort of thing offered in person to victims of domestic abuse, with the friend trying to be supportive talking about how obviously awful the abusive partner was from the start. But that doesn’t sound supportive to the victim: it sounds like, “I could see it, what’s wrong with you for getting into that situation?”
The problem is not how sadistic he is during a consensual scene. I’ve seen a hell of a lot worse in BDSM than what Deen dishes out and everyone was very happy about what they were getting. The problem is doing anything, anything at all, to another person without their consent.
There are sadist tops who are some of the most lovely, trustworthy people I’ve ever known. Meanwhile, I was assaulted by a guy who worked in a rape crisis center. And a family friend who brought my mom flowers for her garden. You can’t tell by looking at someone. You can’t tell by their kinks. What does a rapist look like?
There’s a Christian urban myth about that – reproduced here. (Might have been made into a Chick Tract, but couldn’t find that). In the story, a woman prays to not get raped and doesn’t, and finds out another young woman does instead. It’s presented as a great story about how protected she was – I always thought the other woman would probably not think it was such a great outcome…
In the 1970s Ted Bundy (the serial killer of women) served as assistant director of the Seattle Crime Prevention advisory committee and he wrote a pamphlet on rape prevention. Just sayin…
@63 carlie said:
Ew. Just…ew. Can’t bring myself to read that so I have to ask: did the authors also consider the case of devout Christians who prayed to not be raped, but were anyway? I’m going to go with “no”, although some part of me would be interested to see the brutal contortions of those particular apologetics.
Shikko @ 58:
That’s an outstanding way to express the problem, and I’ll use that from now on. Thank you.
MM @ 62:
Quoted for truth. There’s zero point in trashing anyone into various types of sex, and it does a lot of splashy damage when done. As usual, the particular flavour of sex is not problematic – people are problematic. The only reason a rapist can consider using “hey, she was a porn star and into rough sex, man!” as a defense is because of rape culture. It’s the same old slut business. It’s as well to note that the rapists in such cases can also be known for liking rough sex, but hey, guys are okay doing that sort thing, but women, oh no. Chambers, the Preppie murder case, that’s going back a while, too, (1986) is still known as the rough sex defense case.
The mere fact that many people think that any woman who enjoys kink of any fashion is tacitly agreeing to any and all assault and rape speaks volumes. Anyone speaking out against rape and rape culture really needs to think through what they are saying, and that they often end up representing women as less than human.
Like everyone else.
Hey Penny L,
I was abused as a child, and although I did tell adults about it, it never got reported to the police or ‘authorities’, and I certainly wasn’t believed, nor was I believed when abused again, as a slightly older child. Exactly what percentage of blame should I receive for later abuses committed by the people who abused me, and what percentage should be attributed to them?
Can you please explain more clearly why you think that the victims are responsible for their attacker’s behaviour?
qwints,
Am I wrong in thinking that the progressive end of the “porn world” has reacted way more swiftly to this scandal than most other industries/fields would? Sure, these companies are cutting Deen off largely because his assaults are now public knowledge, and plenty of people who should have blown the whistle earlier did not. But compared to the glacial reaction time of companies and academic institutions when a big-name comedian/athlete/professor/whatever gets exposed as a rapist…I feel like the porn producers are doing pretty well here.
BTW, Australian Family Courts work under the paradigm of “Parental Alienation Syndrome”*: Claims of sexual (and other) abuse by a parent are automatically treated as false.
Whenever a parent sues for sole custody and no contact because the other one abused the child, they are seen as “hostile”, and are presumed to be guilty of using the child to hurt their ex. They are threatened with losing the custody alltogether.
From the paper:
B*tches be lying…
Yeah, so why wouldn’t people report?
*Same medical category as “Abortion Regret Syndrome”
Yes, and I did so in my original comment.
No, I will not shut the fuck up. And might I suggest you are a major part of the problem. I wholeheartedly agree that there is a problem with the application of criminal justice in rape or sexual assault cases. Perhaps there should be a different standard of evidence, or perhaps there are other steps we can take to reform the system. But the fucking last thing we should do is not try to bring rapists into the criminal justice system in the first place. That is where we, as a society, mete out punishment for horrific crimes. We don’t do it on Twitter or Facebook. Is it a hard step to take for survivors? You bet, but it is also a necessary and proper one.
Yes. Yes. Not applicable. Yes.
And Jeffrey Dahmer is the only person who could have saved all of his victims, and so on…
I have had my car vandalized – earlier this year in fact – and did report that to the police. It was a smallish crime and could have been an accident and no one, to my knowledge, was caught. But the police had the information. They might have been able to connect dots that I, as a normal citizen, would not have known about. What’s stupid is NOT reporting a crime when it happens, because a failure to do so prevents the police from even trying to connect the dots.
Back to Bill Cosby – we now know, based on the sheer number of his victims, that he is a monster who gets off on drugging and raping women. He was never going to stop on his own, he knew what he was doing was wrong and he did it anyway. So who exactly is going to stop someone like that? Should we as a society teach women to wait years until several other victims come out and say something before we speak up? Should we teach them to wait until there is a critical mass of other rape survivors and we can get a hashtag trending on Twitter? You can argue that point if you’d like, I’m going to argue that they should report the sexual assault or rape to the police. What the police do with it from there becomes the problem, and I’m more than willing to agree that we should take some steps to reform that process.
You should receive zero blame for later abuses committed by those who abused you.
Victims aren’t responsible for their attacker’s behaviour. A victim does bear some level of responsibilty, however, if they do not share their attacker’s behaviour with authorities. How are the authorities supposed to prosecute that person if they are unaware of the attack?
That last question is something all of you criticizing me should answer, btw. How on earth is a rapist to be brought to justice if the survivors don’t alert authorities? And how on earth can a rapist be prevented from raping again if the survivors keep it to themselves?
PennyL
Clearly you don’t understand how many rape victims have tried to report their rape only to find that the authorities only make the situation worse. Many police departments are staffed by the lowest form of hateful scum that delight in hurting the victims of rape, especially if a famous male is being accused. THIS attitude is what you have to address first.
You mean authorities like these?
Please go on at length about how it’s people not reporting to your beloved authorities that are stopping rapists from being caught.
For the…
NO ONE is saying that rapists will be magically caught if people don’t report their attacks. What they are trying to drill through your dunning-kruger effect is that maybe we first need to make sure authorities actually treat their cases as credible and do something about them, instead of just further violating them with swabs for semen that sits festering in warehouses. Oh, and a side order of not socially shaming victims when they do speak out would also help fucking wonders.
It doesn’t matter how you dress up your belief, it’s still victim shaming. If it wasn’t, you’d be primarily concerned with addressing the actual issues that prevent people from reporting.
Penny L.
Fucking rape apologist. You want victims to pay whatever price it costs with no regard for the physial and emotional safety of somebody who has been raped. You’d rather have rape victims kill themselves (which actually happens) because police made matters worse, or lose custody of their children to their fucking rapist on the off chance that once in a while authorities might actually do something.
Congratulations, you have blood on your hands, but we already know you like it that way.
@62 The Mellow Monkey
I apreciate the criticism. I had issues with what i wrote immediately after posting it as my post @21 attests to. I didn’t mean to imply that anyone was to blame for not recognising him as an obvious predator. In fact, my comment about how he always ticked me off is almost certainly based on a fuck tone of my own prejudices mixed in with some unjustified inferences from personal experience, rather than any preternatural ability to identify shady people. And my difficulty believing that you can enjoy that kind of practice without some deeper impulses, is tied to the idea that the individual may be able to pretend otherwise VERY convincingly (if they are pretending at all, which is only my opinion). This probably is only making it worse, and to be perfectly clear, the problem may well be mine and based on prejudicial assumptions for why people may or may not enjoy certain practices, and this is just my uninformed opinion, but i do have trouble understanding how someone can engage in such practices like domination, humilliation, simulated non-consesuality or violence, etc, without a desire to experience those. As long as this is happening with full consent, i don’t have a moral issue with it, but i can’t disassociate the idea of someone desiring to engage in simulated domination, without a desire to dominate. That people can express that desire within the confines of a consensual relationship, i have no problem with, but that that desire exists, does bother me…Not in a fatalistic “if the desire exists it’s going to manifest” kind of way, but rather in a “here is someone with impulses that they may or may not be well equipped to manage in the right contexts”.
I don’t know, this is taking away from more important topics and i’m probably just saying really dumb things out of ignorance of a subject i’m ill equipped to even discuss. Sorry.
Ok, and immediately i recognise a huge problem with my last post. I don’t mean to talk about these impulses like they are some kind of obscure trait that only some people with “issues” have. If i have trouble disassociating the potentially dangerous nature of the impulse from the impulse itself is because i, like everyone else, experience some of those impulses myself. I don’t have any interest in what i understand to be domination or BDSM practices, but one impulse i have always struggled with is being cruel to people who have hurt me or somehow wronged me. Having an aversion to physical violence, this is my natural, go-to impulse, but it’s not a good impulse to have and it’s an impulse that takes effort to manage. If unchecked, it can lead me to be unnecessarily and disproportionately cruel to people, because the fact is, it feels good to retaliate. This is how i understand these kinds of impulses, anyway.
Alright, i don’t know what the fuck i’m doing doubling down on my stupid comment. Could a mod just delete my posts, please? Sorry everyone.
A mod? Haha, there’s only the Squidly Overlord and he deletes very little.
In a world where the majority of rape kits are unprocessed and are frequently destroyed without being processed, I would suggest that the failure of victims to notify authorities is not the major issue involved. When authorities vigorously and accurately prosecute all or even just the vast majority (say, greater than 95%) of cases reported to them, we can talk about the contribution that victim failure to report plays.
Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia @ 76:
Yeah, unlikely to have anything deleted.
Best you can do is apologize (which you’ve done) and disowned the things you’ve said you think, on reflection, are wrong (which you’ve done), and being more careful in future (which I presume you’ll do). Once said, it’s very difficult to get something unsaid here.
Just like in the rest of life.
(Even pretending, just for the moment, that police never rape or traumatize crime victims, that defense attorneys never force rape victims to discuss their sex lives in court, that “friends” of victims never shame victims for doing something when they “should have known better”, that no person has ever been too upset to go to the police or tell anyone at all…)
I thought the monitors had some thread cleaning powers, sorry.
Please ignore my crap, i don’t even know where the fuck i was going with any of it.
You were going, with the help of others commenting on the board, to a clearer understanding of the issues involved and the problems that women, men, and others face when trying to deal with sexual assault. That may not have been where you intended to go, but it’s where you got.
Penny L, thank you for kindly ignoring how my near rape was ignored by your beloved magic police officers, because it destroys your cherished narrative.
Also, fuck you you victim blaming asshole.
Penny, seriously. Just, like, stop posting. Ever. You’re just being a giant asshole.
Well, you can go and post in places where people share your generally abhorent views, and it’ll make us all happier to have you and your ilk segregated from the rest of polite, upstanding, and critical thinking capable humanity.
shoo, fly. shoo.
Penny L, do the police play any responsibility in this? Or is it enough that, in a perfect world, they would be the eternal defenders of justice?
You keep beginning with the faulty premise that catching rapists starts and ends with the victim despite that many here have indicated it keeps ending with the police who maintain a clear, undeniable pattern of doubting victims and subjecting them to further trauma after they’ve already put themselves out there and released very sensitive details. The problem isn’t that rape victims aren’t being shamed off of Twitter, the problem is the police responses to their reports typically range from hyperskeptic to outright hostile.
The police should play a role in sending the message that rape victims will be listened to, that their experiences won’t automatically be discounted, and that their cases will be treated with diligence. It’s patently idiotic to hold victims responsible for catching criminals when the police are throwing them out the door and ignoring/destroying their evidence! If you’re going to appeal to the warm fuzzies of justice, justice had better be in plain sight instead of in the space between your ears. Otherwise, you look like a victim-blaming fool.
Stop learning that you’re being ignored by the police, worthless sluts! Don’t you want justice?! *dangle dangle* Come on, you gotta want it! *dangle dangle* Oh well, I guess they don’t really care about justice…
Giliell @ 69:
Jesus Fucke. Abused children are already in a hellish situation, so here you have cases where a mother embraces, believes, and makes every attempt to protect a child, aaaand, yep, bitchez be lying. Too many women who do try to protect their child/children from abuse end up viciously abused or dead for the effort, too, but that shouldn’t sway anything, oh no. Sounds like a bloody MRA paradise. This also demonstrates, again, the absolute joke the supposed justice system is, all over the world.
Required reading for the excruciatingly stupid (Penny L):
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/01/16/nyt-women-cause-rape-by-being-too-scarce/comment-page-1/#comments
You can start with Paul “sometimes victims deserve a share of the blame” W @ #255, if you like. I expect you’ll think he’s absolutely right, but try to comprehend the 2 pages of responses.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/08/08/what-do-you-do-when-someone-pulls-the-pin-and-hands-you-a-grenade/comment-page-1/
The thread following the post is 9 pages long. Read the whole fucking thing, Penny. You might learn something, but I won’t be holding my breath.
Dreaming of an Atheisti Newtopia
dianne
Agreed. You apologized and thought deeper about the situation and your own feelings and reactions. That’s a good thing. Like I said in my first comment, I was sure you weren’t purposefully trying to victim blame or anything like that. That’s just a direction any of us can end up in when we don’t stop and consider. Now you have, when other people often double down after having something like that pointed out.
@70: Penny L said:
You’ve just contradicted yourself: both of those sentences cannot be true at the same time.
Your position is that victims are both not at all responsible, but also bearing some level of responsibility (you even use the same word twice!). You are arguing “A” and “not A” to be true at the same time. A contradiction necessarily implies that the most recent assumption in your chain of reasoning is false. If you want to maintain the idea that you have some intellectual honesty, you must either change your position or demonstrate how someone can simultaneously be “responsible” and “not responsible” for the same thing at the same time.
re 89:
not defending Penny L, but just waiting to hear Penny cry “ever heard of the crime: accessory-after-the-fact? gotcha”
3… 2… 1… *mic drop*
Caine @86
Yep. Life tells us in a million ways that we’Re not safe, that we’re at the mercy of those we trust and that the authorities are more likely to victimize us further than to help us.
In Penny’s world it doesn’t matter that reporting that our partner raped us and/or our children is more likely to end up with them getting sole custody than getting prosecuted.
“James Deen’s Alleged Assaults Were Ignored, Laughed Off by Casts and Crews”
Sadly unsurprisingly, the time at Kink where an assault was ignored by the crew wasn’t an isolated incident. The article is full of directors, crew and agents tolerating Deen’s rapes and assaults.
It is not a contradiction. No rape survivor ever bears responsibility for their own rape. If they decide not to inform anyone about the heinous crime perpetrated against them, then they do bear some measure of responsibility if their rapist decides to do it again to someone else. That is an undeniable fact.
I understand people here want to be an ‘advocate’ or an ‘ally’ but at the end of the day you’re not helping if your advice to a rape survivor does not include “go to the police.” I’ve acknowledged – a few times now – that there are issues with the way the police handle sexual assault cases. This is a separate question. A true ally would work toward changing the way police handle these cases, use/process rape kits, etc, not by trying to erect some parallel judicial system of Tweets and Facebook posts. Nearly every comment here says a variation of the following: the police don’t help and often make things worse, so don’t tell the police!
That is excruciatingly stupid. As a society we employ police officers to investigate crimes, we employ attorneys to prosecute those crimes, and we employ judges and jurys to adjudicate guilt. We consider rape second only to murder in terms of seriousness of the offense. No one would suggest not notifying the police if you saw a murder being committed, so why are we up in arms about the idea that rape survivors should go to the police?
You’re absolutely right, and you’re also right that the police have a lot of responsibility – my point from the beginning. Did anyone notice that The Smoking Gun released Kobe Bryant’s rape investigation file a couple months ago? http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/sports/kobe-police-file-released
Read through the police interview with the rape survivor – the police appear to have been very attentive, dilligent, and did ultimately arrest Bryant and were preparing for trial until the survivor decided not to testify. Even in a case involving a high profile sports star, with the possibility of fraud in an attempt to get a big payday (which may have happend, she settled a civil suit), the police appeared to completely accept the story she told and investigated it aggressively. It would likely have been better for the prosecution if she had decided to immediately tell the police – as she was correctly advised to do by the first person she told – but the fact that she waited until the next day apparently didn’t materially affect the investigation.
We can’t go back in time and know the counterfactual case, but to my knowledge Kobe Bryant hasn’t been accused of sexual assault in the decade since he raped that woman. It is plausible that her decision to report his crime to police saved a number of women from being raped in the years since.
Contrast that with the James Deen case we’re talking about. Six (!) women now are accusing him of sexual assault. What would have happened if his first victim had reported his actions to police? That’s another counterfactual, but because Deen faced no consequences for his abhorrent abuse, it’s plausible that he thought he could continue that behavior.
“Generally abhorrent views”…
I want to put people who rape in jail for a long time. Is that an abhorrent view? I want the criminal justice system to work for rape survivors. Is that an abhorrent view? I want to minimize the number of people who are sexually assaulted. Is that an abhorrent view?
We are much to quick around here to want to silence those who disagree with the means, but not the ends. We’re much to quick to want to march in lockstep – which is the opposite of critical thinking, btw.
Finally –
Magic police officers…never said or implied that. What you went through sounds horrific, but you did the right thing and reported it. Let me ask you something though – what would have been your alternative? What alternative other than the police do we have to deal with rapists?
I did the right thing and THEY DID NOTHING BUT TELL ME TO MY FACE THAT I WAS A LIAR. You did imply magic officers because your demand to report basically hinges on cops doing something about the assault as if they believed it. Most of the time they do not.
why the ever living fuck should I demand that a rape or assault victim risk go through that if it’s going to add to their trauma in a way they aren’t feeling capable of handling.
I could have released my dogs on the guy and thus caught him. Do you blame me for the rapes he’s doubtless committed since his failed on me?
If you do, you need to face the fact that you are, in actuality, a terrible human being.
Truthfully, being willing to place blame for future rapes on someone other than a rapist makes you a terrible human being .
Being not shitty requires supporting the victim in whatever choice they make with regards to reporting .
Hey, Penny L
The terrorist who shot up Planned Parenthood was accused of rape and violence against women. Victims went to the police. Guess what happened!
Am i missing something here? I don’t think i’ve seen anyone say that victims shouldn’t go to the police or press charges. What i’ve seen is people providing a shitload of data to warn victims about how doing so may produce no results and involve some serious sacrifices on their part (for lack of a better term). Which is not in any way “don’t go to the police” but instead “go to the police if this is the right thing to do for you and know the facts about what to expect before hand”.
It’s not just that going to the police may involve some terrible experiences for the victim or that it is statistically unlikely to have any results, but also that for an individual victim, going to the police or informing anyone at all may actually put them at further risk.
The blanket statement “a victim that doesn’t go to the police is responsible for the attacker’s continued behaviour” is not just disgusting victimblaming and displacement of responsibility, it’s mindbogglingly fucking oblivious of what reality is in many cases.
Can you help me with the maths, Penny L?
First rape: rapist 100%, first victim 0%
Second rape: rapist 90%, first victim 10%, second victim 0%
Third rape: rapist 70%, first victim 20%, second victim 10%, third victim 0%?
Does it work like that?
Penny L,
NOONE, as far as I can tell, has suggested that a rape victim should not report their rape to the authorities or that they should ‘just tweet about it’ and not do anything else. That is not what anyone is saying, and that’s certainly not what PZ said in the bit you quoted. You are being dishonest.
Rape as a pyramid scheme. The more people a rapist rapes, the less blame the rapist carries?
Giliell @ 97:
Oh, rape as an MLM, that would be about right, actually, given rape culture. Don’t be surprised if this pops up at some point in someone’s loathsome rape apologetics, Giliell – I can see this having appeal to many apologists.
I really wish people would actually read what I write. I never made that blanket statement. I have NEVER attempted to displace all responsibility for a rape from the rapist to the victim. And I won’t attempt the math that Giliell wants me to do, because Giliell knows damn well that the percentage of blame is above zero. I suspect all of you do, you just won’t admit it in a public forum.
Anyone who either witnesses or is a victim of a serious crime has a moral obligation to report what they know to the police. Full stop. Unless they’re planing to do their own form of vigilante justice, like turning dogs loose on the perp or some other action that may keep that person from victimising someone else (which I wouldn’t disapprove of). If you don’t report what you know to the police you are in some way complicit in any future attacks that perpetrator makes. Full stop. If you report what you know and the police don’t aggressively investigate or blow you off, the responsibility becomes theirs.
And not only do victims have a moral obligation to report what they know to authorities, they have a legal obligation as well: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title18/html/USCODE-2011-title18-partI-chap1-sec4.htm
Thankfully this hasn’t, to my knowledge, been applied to rape survivors. I would never advocate for putting a rape survivor in jail because they didn’t tell their story. But it does underscore the point that there are no viable alternatives.
@93 Penny L said:
First, it’s not remotely undeniable, because I am denying it (along with many other people). Second, you have changed your argument. What you wrote originally is what I am talking about, and it is absolutely a contradiction; objecting to describing it that way does not magic the situation away. Here are the lines I’m talking about again:
You are saying “person A is not responsible for person B’s behaviour” and then immediately following it with “Person A is somewhat responsible for person B’s behaviour.” In each sentence, the behaviour in question is the same, person A is the same, and person B is the same. There is no way around admitting this is a contradiction, unless you meant to write crimes instead of behaviour in those two sentences. Is that what you meant?
If that’s not the case, can you try to restate your position as clearly as possible?
If this IS the case, your position dictates the following:
P1) People who do not report their rapes are partially responsible for any future rape by the same person.
P2) Person A is raped by person B.
P3) Person A does not report the rape.
C1) Given P1-P3, person A is partly responsible for all subsequent rapes by person B.
P4) Person A is raped by person B again.
C2) Given C1 and P4, person A is partly responsible for their own second rape.
You are advancing a position where someone can be partly responsible for being the victim of a crime. That is the very definition of “victim blaming”, which you have been told your position entails repeatedly in this thread. If you care to defend that position, I’d love to see your reasoning.
No. The % is not above zero. It is absolutely zero. Just from that almost-rape, I have spend the last 16 years dealing with a huge fear and generalized distrust of men. It’s a major cause for severe anxiety and every now an then a full on panic attack. Being dismissed, or slut-shamed, or blamed for your rape, by the people whom you are supposed to go to for help, by family, by friends, by society at large is going to be even more traumatizing.
So the people, other than the rapist, to ‘blame’ for future victims is society, the cops, and people like YOU. People who insist that assault victims must go through the gauntlet of “Were you drinking? Why were you wearing that? Are you sure you didn’t lead them on?” without any thought to the effect this is going to have on this, either through goddamn willfull ignorance, the just world fallacy, or sheer indifference. The people who insist that cops are the answer, when clearly they are NOT as the vast majority are not investigated, of the miniscule few that are, fewer still result in an arrest, and of that microscopic amount, so few actually get convicted that you’d be better off trying to catch a neutrino.
So I’m trying to figure out where you stand; willful ignorance, or sheer indifference. Both are loathesome. I’m leaning towards indifference, because I refuse to believe that you are unaware of the hundreds of thousands of rape kits that have been shelved without testing, or even destroyed.
If the end result of someone reporting to the police, or not reporting, is pretty the same then your insistence on it shows indifference to the extra suffering that puts rape and assault victims through. You don’t give a shit, as long as the motions are made. Sure, the motions are as effective as prayer, but they must be made or else it’s the victim’s fault there are other victims!
You are an asshole, point blank. You should be *ashamed* of yourself.
PennyL@101:
Here’s a quote from an old law in Alabama:
Was a restaurant owner in 1950’s Alabama morally obligated to build a partition to segregate people by race?
Penny L
I don’t even know what to call this. Is it a lie? How on earth can you claim that I “damn well” know that the percentage of blame the victim gets is “above zero”? Because quite obviously I completely reject such a notion. You made that claim. I know you made that claim. I reject that claim. Therefore I most definitely don’t know that the percentage is above zero. You’Re sounding like the people who claim that of course atheists know that god exists, they’re just angry and in denial.
And no, you don’t want to displace all the responsibility. Just some. Just enough so the victim is seen as worse than the rapist.
Penny L, Rape Apologist:
You obviously didn’t do any reading, Penny (#87). Read. Try to learn something, I promise, it won’t kill you. Like all the other people immersed in rape culture who end up playing rape apologetics, you stick to your lines as if they were calcified in your brain. Stop it. Listen. Read. Learn. You are an obstacle and a moral wrong to every person who has been sexually assaulted or raped. You are an obstacle and a moral wrong to every person who has been very close to that happening.
Rowan brought up the 16 years, dealing with the effects. Me, 41 and counting. Giliell still deals with what happened to her. Many of the people in this thread have been raped, Penny, and you’re happily running roughshod over every one of us, telling us we’re wrong, and our experiences do not matter in the least. In one of the Steubenville rape threads, one person after another brought up the current time in their life sentence. You see, Penny, people like us, we get a life sentence. We’re never the same person again, everything changes. You have seen small glimpses of the aftermaths, whether people report or not. I assigned you that reading for a reason, Penny. It’s so you can learn, just a little, about what people go through, so you can have the opportunity to learn empathy. We all have stories, and We Are Legion.
You have not clicked links, you have not read the studies, you have not read our stories, you have not felt our experiences, you haven’t done one fucking thing except point a finger of moral judgment on us. Well, Penny, the finger points right back at you.
All over the world, law enforcement and the justice system have failed those who have been sexually assaulted and raped. Not just failed, failed spectacularly. A great many people who have reported have been sent home with a shrug, told that their is no way to try their case, it’s “your word against their word”. Those people went through hell again, for nothing. The majority of rapes are committed by acquaintances, partners, or family members when it comes to children. Rape culture ensures that rapists will always have the weight of people on their side, and you are one large, noisy, insistent part of rape culture. It’s more important to you to find some way to place the responsibility for rape on the victims, rather than the rapists. Oh yay, pat yourself on the fucking back, Penny, for doing the same thing every other person out there does. You see, if you had done the assigned reading in #87, you’d be reading a whole fucktonne of assholes just like yourself, Penny. You’d get to see just how much they fail, how much they shore up rape culture, and the shocking (well, to those of us with empathy) amount of people ready to take a rapist’s side.
You are a failure of a human being, Penny. You exhibit depraved indifference to life, to people, even though you attempt to excuse that failing as “only some people. You know, those people.” The only person here with any moral and ethical failure is you, Penny.
Just wanted to delurk to say I appreciate Caine, Rowan, Giliell and others for their attempts to talk some sense into people like Penny L and for sharing their experiences. I literally can’t imagine what it must be like.
Back to lurking, listening, and learning.
Penny L @101,
*Actually reads what you actually wrote*
*Vomits*
The legal eagles here can surely speak to this more authoritatively but it seems you are quite wrong about this as compared to how this law is interpreted/applied in modern jurisprudence. Seems that in actuality mere failure to report is not a crime unless there is an element of active concealment (“affirmative steps to conceal the crime”).
Note for e.g., United States v. Johnson, 546 F.2d 1225 (5th Cir. 1977) which reads in part (emphasis added):
Thankfully this hasn’t, to my knowledge, been applied to rape survivors. I would never advocate for putting a rape survivor in jail because they didn’t tell their story. But it does underscore the point that there are no viable alternatives.
Sure there are viable alternatives. Such as those exemplified previously by Professor Myers and more recently by those speaking out against James Dean on Twitter.
Borked up the last quote. This part was Penny L’s:
Jimb @ 107:
Hey, good to read you! Don’t stay completely in lurkdom, ok? Thank you, very much. It’s always a good shot of warmth, knowing anyone is listening, and especially learning. Helps to keep everyone going.
Plethora @ 108:
And from that thread (which was one of Penny’s assigned readings which is being ignored), the ever wonderful SallyStrange summed up Penny’s behaviour to a T:
The Rape of Mr. Smith.
Penny
This demonstrates that you haven’t understood a word anyone has been saying to you. Even if we agreed that in this one particular case the police conduct was unassailable, how would this dispel rape culture? Hell, we’re not just talking about a pattern of the police themselves. We’re talking about an entire society that at large demonstrates extreme hyperskepticism towards rape allegations, holds women responsible for their own rapes, and regards false reporting as the default as exemplified by the abysmal conviction rate. The fact that you can cite individual outliers does nothing to refute the norm nor the legitimacy of expectations based on it.
And when I say the police should send a message I don’t mean that once every 5 years they should have Officer Do-Goody Goodman do their fucking job.
A true ally wouldn’t shame rape victims for uncaught criminals when the people actually responsible and paid for it demonstrate a pattern of not only not doing their fucking jobs but ignoring and chasing away the victims who come to them. A true ally would appreciate that rape victims are being asked to put themselves out there to relive their rapes, share the details of their violation with strangers, have their entire sexual histories probed, and potentially ruin their own lives to do so (sustained harassment, loss of child custody, alienation from the community, etc.) and thus consider that the victims shouldn’t be further victimized to satisfy the self-entitled self-righteousness of people who can judge them from the safety of their internet anonymity.
But why should their lives take priority over the purity of your Twitter feed?
Penny L
Let me continue with what mesh is getting at:
Do you think that people have to put themselves into danger of suffering serious harm for the benefit of other?
Do you have to jump into a gushing river to save somebody who’s drowning?
Do you have to dress somebody’s wound when they’re bleeding all over the place and there are no gloves anywhere?
Do you have to stop your car at night on a lonely country road because there’s another car in the field signing for help?
No?
Then why should a rape victim have to put themself into harm’s way by reporting? People have shown you that reporting comes with the serious risk of making things much, much worse for you. The risks being dismissed, being slut shamed, being called a liar, having to relive their trauma, losing custody of their kids, getting death threats, being killed.
If you don’t think that somebody has to jump into the whitewater river, why do you think they have the obligation to report their rape when there’s an actual 98% chance that no fucking justice will come of it (that’s the percentage of reported rapists who don’t ever spend even a single night in jail), but an almost 100% chance they will be further harmed?
No, I didn’t report the guy in the car park. If it happened to me again, I’d still not report. I had a creepy phone stalker once. Somebody who had my phone number, my address. I actually asked a friend of mine who’s a cop if I could report the guy and what they could do. He shrugged and said “Nothing. Save yourself and us the time.”
Caine et all.
I’ve read your comments. I’ve read your stories. I’ve learned quite a bit, but in the end I am not convinced.
I’ve been called a rape apologist, a failure of a human being, an asshole who should be ashamed of myself, and many, many other things. My words have been twisted, misread, and very few commentors have actually tried to address my core point.
What is my crime? Suggesting that rape survivors have an obligation to tell their story to the police.
Is this what our discourse about rape has deteriorated into?
We’re not going to help dismantle the rape culture doing what you suggest. Writing blog posts and Facebook posts and sending Tweets does not put rapists behind bars (where they fucking belong!).
I also sincerely believe that you all are hurting the cause instead of helping, and that saddens me because we all want the same thing. I believe the best thing we can do is to reform the criminal justice system to address the points that have been brought up repeatedly on this thread. I believe the worst thing we can be doing is advising rape survivors not to go to the police.
It also saddens me that we can’t have a discussion. We’re at an impasse. I refuse to consider the idea that a rape survivor should stay silent. You (the collective you) refuse to consider the idea that a rape survivor should tell their story to the police. You refuse to discuss ways to reform the way police handle rape cases. You want to silence those with diverse views (Caine @39: “Penny L, shut the fuck up.”).
I don’t know where we go from here, but I will continue to work and advocate for common sense reforms that help put rapists behind bars.
PennyL, if you ever figger out how to make the police interested in justice for rape victims, be sure to let us know. It may involve campaigns through social media, who knows.
Penny L:
You didn’t suggest, you asserted.
What do you imagine you have heretofore been doing, if not discussing?
Perhaps consider the idea that has actually been put to you: that a rape survivor may have good reason to stay silent.
Way to euphemize blaming victims for their rapists’ crimes. Incredible job, really.
After all, you’re just making a simple suggestion of obligation, so someone obviously hacked your account and posted stuff like this without your knowledge:
Might I suggest a stronger password? Be sure to mix numbers with letters. And the longer the password the better.
Penny was just trying to stimulate a civil conversation about the unassailable logic of blaming rape victims! Why did everyone turn so hostile? Especially the rape victims in this thread, they really need to lighten up. /sarcasm
How could we ever enjoy high level discourse on the rich subject of rape if we can’t discuss victim-blaming without people getting all emotional?
Ooh, I have a thought! Maybe we could push reforms in some department that’s supposed to be actually fucking responsible for that?
Nah, you’re right, that might be a little too out of left field. Clearly the common sense approach is to hold the victims responsible for devoting their lives to crusading for justice. After all, it’s not like rape victims have anyone else to turn to that would bear the responsibility.
And those women who wanted to report their rapes but were turned away at the door? Their mistake was that they didn’t go far enough. Clearly the policemen needed to be persuaded at gunpoint. Victims these days just don’t have any commitment. /sarcasm again
But at least they have you. You’re not ashamed to admit that you’re bruised and battered, having been called an asshole and a rape apologist for your conduct, because the important thing is you’re not out! You’ll make that long trek up that cross just for them because you still believe in a little thing called justice! They may have been violated, brutalized, possibly even subjected to further trauma by having tried to report their rape or even advance a case, but it all fails to compare to being a victim of harsh words on the internet! Fortunately, all this pain and suffering you’ve weathered has only made you all the stronger and more dedicated to the cause of righteousness!
——–>
See that? This violin was custom made in honor of your contributions in catching rapists and keeping people across the country safe! If you stare at it long enough, you might see the molecules of blood slipping out of its tiny purple heart just for you.
For your continued service to the criminal justice system and rape victims everywhere, we salute you!
Penny L,
Person A gets raped. Thinks about what to do and in the end doesn’t report it.
Person A gets robbed. Reports it immediately.
Have you stopped to think if there could be a reason for that? Or are you starting with the assumption that Person A is an idiot who can’t analyze their own lived experience and make a decision that’s right.
Hurting the cause….Jesus fucking christ…
Penny L
Fuck you and the horsey ou rode in on.
No, we don’t want the “same thing”. You want to shame and blame survivors, to hurt them further. You are the fucking problem. I want survivors to be safe, to start healing and to be able to live their lives. I don’t want them to be sacrificed on the off chance that somebody might do something.
Don’t be sad, be ashamed.
Declaring that victims are to blame if they don’t report, regardless of why that may be. Yes, that makes you a gigantic fucking arsehole.
Oh, people who focus on blaming the victims and doing fuck all about the attackers, like you, are not even remotely new. Unfortunately, you keep slowing and preventing progress. You are the deterioration.
What is that exactly? Informing people, supporting victims, providing them with advice, information, alternatives, fighting rape culture. None of that is helpful in your view. Blaming victims, though, superhelpful.
According to the statistics, neither does reporting in a surreal number of cases. How do you know that calling public attention to a problem is not going to help further discussions about this very real and very serious problem, prompting change? Maybe even lead to specific cases being taken seriously when they were previously dismissed.
Fuck you.
No we don’t, see Giliell’s @121
And yet, the only thing you have suggested is that reporting is the only way, even though you have been shown the enormous problems with that.
Nobody has done that.
Good. Then why are you so intent in keeping them silent unless it’s through a particular, but very problematic route which is very unlikely to lead to results?
Also, who in the fuck has even remotely suggested that victims should stay silent? What is fucking wrong with you?
No. Is the sky green in that imaginary planet of yours? Are there unicorns?
You haven’t suggested any whatsoever.
Penny L:
You don’t know where we are.
Bullshit. You aren’t doing one fucking thing, Penny. Not one thing. The only thing you’re doing is holding judgment on victims, and having a great time castigating them, while pretending to be all sad.
Penny L, what are you actively doing (posting here isn’t actively doing anything) to make police and prosecutors take rape cases seriously while not shaming the victims, and get punished if they do engage in victim shaming? My money is on nothing. Don’t talk the talk if you won’t walk the walk.
Also, I’d dearly like to know what
common senseidiotic reforms you think will magically make most sexual assault / rape cases prosecutable, especially inside the hothouse climate of rape culture, Penny. Please, tell us about these magical reforms, and exactly what your work and advocacy consists of – where are you working, what organizations are involved, and who is requesting donations and workers? Do tell, Penny.I was an advocate for seven years, Penny. I went with sexual assault and rape victims to the cops, to the D.A., to court, and so on. I know you aren’t doing that, because it not only requires training, it’s kinda of important you aren’t the sort of asshole who gets off assigning blame to the victims.
The majority of rape victims know damn well they won’t get anywhere with cops or lawyers, but interestingly enough, especially when it’s a case which would be declared not prosecutable, there’s media. It has become a way to strengthen the warning network, to advertise missing stairs, and most importantly, to prevent rapists from being able to rape anyone else, which is what you’re so all-fired upset about – victims are doing just what you want, you fucking idiot, they are preventing other people from being raped, but no, you don’t like that at all. Nope. The only acceptable way to prevent more rapes is by going to the cops – do you have even a glimmer of how stupid that is, and how stupid you are for clinging to that idea? Using social media, a person who has been raped can warn hundreds, thousands of people, who in turn, can warn more. That’s not bad, for a case considered non-prosecutable, and one where a rapist wouldn’t even be arrested, let alone end up “behind bars”.
See (and click and read) the link provided by Qwints @ 33: “Porn World Cuts Ties with James Deen and Stands with Stoya”
You see, the tools that are available to victims are effective ones. We use what’s there, and we use what’s effective. Cops and the justice system aren’t effective.
Saad –
Person A gets raped by person B. Thinks about what to do and in the end doesn’t report it.
Person C gets raped by person B. Thinks about what to do and in the end doesn’t report it.
Person D gets raped by person B. Thinks about what to do and in the end doesn’t report it.
Person E gets raped by person B. Thinks about what to do and in the end doesn’t report it.
Person F gets raped by person B. Thinks about what to do and in the end doesn’t report it.
Person G gets raped by person B. Thinks about what to do and in the end doesn’t report it.
Person H gets raped by person B. Thinks about what to do and in the end doesn’t report it.
Person I gets raped by person B. Thinks about what to do and in the end doesn’t report it.
Should person A feel any responsibility for person C and person D and person E and person F and person G and person H and person I? Should person C feel any responsibility for person D and person E and person F and person G and person H and person I? Should person D feel any responsibility for person E and person F and person G and person H and person I?
And so on.
If none of these people – A through I – report anything to the police, how do we ever catch person B and stop them from raping?
Caine –
I’ve never said media, social or otherwise, wasn’t a tool in the fight. But your last clause is absolutely false. Media does nothing to “prevent rapists from being able to rape anyone else”. It can warn potential victims – if they’re paying attention. But social media cannot put a rapist in jail, put them on a sexual offender list, or any of the other serious consequences involved with a sexual assault prosecution or conviction.
In fact, your social social media strategy can have adverse consequences – many high profile sexual assault allegations in recent years have turned out to be false, most notably the one at the University of Virginia. For all of their faults – and they have many – the police are trained to conduct investigations and have forensic capabilities and subpeona capabilities that social media will never and can never have.
@126, PennyL: we all bear that responsibility. We, as a society. We have to hold police accountable for constantly and prejudicedly rejecting most survivors’ statements. We have to stop contributing to rape culture by blaming survivors for their assaults. We have to hold rapists accountable for their actions. We have to have courts and prosecutors who will pursue rapists for their crimes.
What you’re being asked is where you’re doing anything to accept your share of that societal responsibility, beyond singling out victims from all of society as the ones suitable for blaming? Are you pushing at police to take seriously those of us who do report? Advocating for more funding to clear the backlog of untested rape kits? Are you helping to support victims with their ordeal in front of the justice system?
What do you do, other than blame us for our assaults? Why should we listen to your uninformed opinion? Why shouldn’t we just shake you off like a fly, knowing you know nothing about the thing you’re speaking of?
Is it possible you’ve been opining about something where you’re woefully ignorant of reality, and arguing against people who’ve LIVED it? And that maybe you’d do well to shut up until you get acquainted with the realities you are so deeply ignorant of?
Or you could bluster on and keep telling us how much we are to blame, and not the system which so drastically fails in its task. I know where my money is, sadly.
Cops care, oh, they care soooooooo much!
This was linked upthread. As you’re such a tireless worker for justice, Penny, I’m sure you clicked on it and read it. No? Oh, well as you’re truly paying attention to all the comments, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding it.
What if the rapist is muslim? :O
@129 Caine
But to Penny that just means that now the blame is on the police, not on the victim, and having a new subject you can blame for everything, who isn’t, you know, the rapist, makes it all ok, even if nobody has done anything and the rapist is still out there raping. Unless the victim also uses other channels to try and do something about it, in which case they regain the status of awful people because that’s not proper and the public assuming the role of judges and blablabla…
ENOUGH SAID – Enough Sexual Assault In Detroit is still live, by the way, for anyone who can drop a dollar or three.
http://www.miwf.org/enough-said/
Dreaming @ 131:
Yeah, I know. Penny is a complete failure as a human being, a knot of bigotry and sophistry, with a fucktonne of ignorant judgment mixed in. That said, I’ll push the one program that actually works again: The Don’t Be That Guy Campaign.
@ Penny L
Your questions have already been answered, you are either not reading with comprehension, or you don’t care about the answers you are getting and simply want to exhaust the people here.
No. NO. NO. When the social institution responsible for holding rapists accountable the problem is corrupt, biased, ineffective, counterproductive and actively harmful Person A should feel no responsibility whatsoever.
Not only did PZ touch on this in his post, this was answered by rq all the way back up in #17.
This was supported by Zmidponk in #24.
…and carlie in #25 and #27 (police rapes and untested kits indicating institutional opposition to investigating rape), Caine in #38 (institutional bias against rape victims), quints in #47 (routine disbelief of sex crime victims), Rowan vet-tech in #48 (routine disbelief, institutional bias, trauma from the process ), <Caine in #49 (irrational hyper-skepticism, institutional bias, overt active bias against rape victims in public, probably covert on a jury)…
And that is just the first 50 comments. When the system is as painful or even more painful than the rape, not only should the victim no feel responsible for avoiding that system, avoiding the system is rational.
So many formatting errors. I really need to use preview consistently.
Penny L, #126
You didn’t answer the question. Predictable.
The police and our society should feel the responsibility for victim-blaming rape victims A through I into silence.
You just can’t listen or learn, can you? Many people have been describing this to you in varying levels of detail.
The correct question is “if the police, authority figures and the society at large doesn’t start treating rape reports like other serious crimes, how do we ever catch person B and stop them from raping?”
#IDidNotReport.
I didn’t report the rapes which took place for 6 years, ages 3 to 9. I didn’t even talk about that until I was in my mid-late thirties. I already mentioned the assault I never reported, which happened when I was 19. Never said a word about it until someone here needed help with what happened to them, and that was only in 2013. I finally found the courage to tell my friend, partner, and husband of 34 years about it, after writing it out here, in the wake of the Steubenville rape. So, how much should I be punished for that?
When I was 9.5 or so, I was moved out of the family house I had been in, went to live with a different family member, also abusive, but not a rapist. I lived in a duplex. One of the people living in the front house attempted to get me in a position to assault or rape me. I recognized what was going on immediately, and had one thought: get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out. I got out, nothing happened that time. That person tried once more, but I kept a serious distance and stayed safe. Many years later, when I was in my 20s, that memory was brought back in force by events which don’t need to be detailed here. I was punched with guilt so hard it damn near left me crippled. I collapsed to the ground, shaking, crying. Then I vomited, and I couldn’t stop retching. This was on a public street, mind. All I could think about was how many children that fucking rapist got his hands on over the years. The thought consumed me for months. I remember what he looked like, in 1966. I vividly remember the butterfly patch on the crotch of his pants. I vividly remember his attempts to get me in the garage. Oh, I remember. I’ll always remember. I never told anyone about it. I already had 6 years of rapes behind me, and people knew about that, but it never stopped. What did stop it was my reaching an age which was too old for the taste of my rapist. I was still in an abusive situation, and I had no trust at all, in anyone. I knew if I said anything, I’d be questioned and accused, and nothing would happen to him, after all, nothing did happen. I just knew what would happen if I had listened to him. Even so, the guilt I feel still threatens to eat me alive, 49 fucking years later, and you, Penny, want every single victim to bear blame and responsibility, because you think you know fucking better than all the people who have been assaulted or raped. All I have for you, now and forever, is a fuck you. You happily spread bigotry, lies, willful ignorance, hatred, and judgment, and pat yourself on the back for being a righteous person. You have no idea, and even when it comes to you, I hope to hell you never do.
@126: Penny L said:
For one second, let’s disregard ethics and analyze what you said logically. The problem is you are claiming global applicability of your premise without testing it globally. Since I know you’re at least somewhat familiar with how people frequently write out chains of reasoning like I did @102, care to tell me how your post fits in with it? Just to make sure we’re on the same page: a “P” is a premise statement; it means “assume the following sentence is true”. A “C” is a conclusion statement, something that is necessarily true given the previous premises are also true. In the below, P1 is the position you assert. P2-P4 are events in temporal order. One correction: C1 should read “Given P1-P3, person A is partly responsible for any subsequent rapes by person B.”
Me @102 (with the error I noticed uncorrected):
So how about it? Can you explain to me how the premise of apportioning responsibility for future crimes to a past failure to report does not inevitably lead to a situation where a person is partly responsible for their own subsequent rape? If I made an error in reasoning or have misstated any premise, please tell me.
Or did you not respond to this for some other reason? It’s not like you’re obligated; I’m just curious as to why you didn’t.
Back to ethics:
No. That wasn’t so hard, was it?
Same rule, different scenario: person A assaults (slaps them, e.g.) person B, a stranger. Person B does not report the crime. Person A assaults (again, slaps) person C, A’s three year old child. Person B is now partially responsible for the assault of person C. Please explain to me how person B has either legal OR ethical culpability for the assault of C by A.
You have spent at least one post strawmanning our position. I’m guessing you’re mostly unaware you’re even doing this, possibly because you haven’t thought through the implications of your position (many people don’t, it can be difficult), or you need more practice at reasoning rigorously (everyone does; it’s a skill that must be practiced).
NO ONE IN THIS THREAD HAS CLAIMED A RAPE VICTIM SHOULD NEVER GO TO POLICE. But you have claimed that is what we are arguing (@115: “You (the collective you) refuse to consider the idea that a rape survivor should tell their story to the police.”) Is your misunderstanding the whole problem here?
We are claiming that (and please, if I’m misstating this on anyone’s behalf, correct me) apportioning any responsibility to a victim of a crime for any crime they did not themselves commit is ethically indefensible.
Argue against that.
PennyL @115:
And yet to fail to show any comprehension of them. Your only value has been to show that your view can only be defended by denying reality and denying its internal contradictions.
Suuure, you’re the new Mary Koss or Liz Kelly or Antonia Abbey. Shine on, delusional troll, and maybe someday you’ll touch the shadow of David Lisak or Eugene Kanin.
Penny L. I’ll use small words and small sentences so maybe you won’t get lost.
We are NOT saying “Don’t go to the police”.
We ARE saying “We understand if you do not want to go to the police.”
We ARE saying “You are not to blame.”
We ARE saying “Going to the police can be emotionally harmful.”
We ARE saying “Cops often don’t believe you or say you are at fault.”
We ARE saying “Most reported rapes don’t end up with a rapist in jail.”
If someone decides to go to the police, we will have their back, 100%. If someone does not decide to go to the police, we will have their back, 100%.
You do not support rape victims. You want them to bear part of the blame for a rapist’s behaviours. You think cops are magical entities that respond appropriately to rape and that therefore rapists get locked up. This is patently false, and a fairy tale you are clinging to. Stop it.
Shikko:
No shit. I’d love to know how being an advocate, which entails going with victims to cop interviews, to lawyer interviews, being with them during hospital examinations and evidence collection, and so on, gets interpreted as “don’t ever report!”
(You know you’re doing something right when MRAs feel the need to discredit your academic research.
Sorry, got lost on a tangent there.)
shikko, #138
Nice. Never thought of it that way.
Don’t be surprised if that question is completely dodged.
As you want reporting so damn much, Penny – go and read the fucking reports linked in #30 – Meet the Predators and Predators Redux. More on those studies here: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2010/03/25/predator-theory/
Who is reporting? Rapists. Go ahead, read.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/judge-calls-victim-13-a-sexual-predator-outcry-as-41-year-old-man-walks-free-after-admitting-sex-8748494.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/09assault.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/nyregion/at-rape-trial-of-officers-woman-tells-of-hazy-violent-night.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
Penny L,
Can I tell you my story? I was sexually assaulted when I was still a small girl in school. I did report what happened to the police. Because I was just barely too young for the police to consider me a sl*t, I was not mistreated by them at all (which happens to so many others). However, my rapist found out about it when brought in for questioning. He wasn’t charged in the end, but I knew him. He lived in my neighborhood. All of my friends knew him. All of them found out. I lost my entire social circle and spent middle school and high school almost completely friendless. Reporting the rape cost me more emotionally than the actual rape did.
I’m doing ok now, but because of what I lost in reporting, I would never blame someone for not reporting. It’s not just the risk that law enforcement will mistreat you (as bad as that is in itself). It’s that your interactions with family, friends, everyone can change permanently as a result. Harassment and bullying is a common punishment for young women who report their rapes. I would also never discourage anyone from reporting their rape, and I want to work on fixing the justice system and advocating for rape survivors in public spaces, but I’m not going to make the decision for anyone else on how to handle their rape. The cost can be high no matter which avenue you take, and there’s no right or wrong decision when it comes to reporting. I trust rape survivors to be sensible enough to examine their own trauma and their own life circumstances to decide the right choice for them, and if they’re terrified that reporting will ruin their lives, I accept that. It ruined a good chunk of my life, and I still can’t visit my hometown without feeling isolation, anxiety, and severe depression. Existing there feels like I’m hated by everyone all over again. I won’t tell anyone they have a moral obligation to go through that.
Rehtaeh Parsons. A young woman who was gang-raped. The bottom line from cops? Insufficient evidence. Rehtaeh went through intense bullying and harassment, to the point that she died. You can read about her story, Penny, here.
What you need to get through that thick fucking skull of yours is that people already scorn and blame rape and sexual assault victims. As I said, rape culture and toxic sexism ensure this, which means that social change is more effing important than fucking reporting to the cops, only to be dismissed. You’re a small bit of society which needs to change. It would be great to think you were actually up to that challenge.
Toska:
All the hugs, Toska, always.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2011/09/18/rape-myth-1-shes-probably-lying/
Both the Lisak and Kelly papers include multiple studies that compare actual police classification procedures to international standards. To put it briefly, they don’t measure up. Depending on the location, any of those other classifications, aside from reports ending in convictions, might end up being included in official figures on false reports.
Some of this may be sloppy paperwork or coding, but part of the problem is the officers themselves. Kelly reports that even among those who are supposed to be experts in rape, the following attitudes can be found:
In addition to finding that coding procedures weren’t followed, the attrition studies Kelly reviewed also uncovered investigation techniques that violated international standards. The most egregious of these was offering lie-detector tests to victims, a practice widely viewed as hostile and accusatory toward victims. Using procedures such as these is one way to inflate the number of cases in which victims stop cooperating.
The prevalence of rape myths among the police forces coding reports as false should also be cause for concern when looking at their uncorrected numbers. When the women they consider untrustworthy match the profiles for those most at risk of rape (mentally ill, developmentally disabled, intoxicated, previously victimized–although the papers don’t mention it, racial and sexual minority status fall here too), or those exhibiting rape trauma (scattered, faulty memory, embarrassed, ashamed), they are making decisions that push these cases out of the system on a prejudicial basis, not a factual one.
@143, Saad said:
Yeah, this is me holding my breath: ಠ_ಠ
You might be interested in this one, Caine: Lisak’s 2004 study has been quoted widely, including me and that “Meet the Predators” blog post. One issue that’s arisen from it, though, is the emphasis on serial offenders. Lisak found that more than half of those admitting to sexual assault committed it multiple times. Combined with the low numbers, it’s fed into a perception that offenders are rare and depraved, at odds with much of the literature since.
This year, the notorious Mary Koss and a number of other authors published a study which took aim squarely at that theory.
She also found higher rates of offense than Lisak (2004).
Note too that this study focuses just completed rape, a subset of all sexual assault, thus is an underestimate of the problem.
Swartout KM, Koss MP, White JW, Thompson MP, Abbey A, and Bellis AL. “Trajectory Analysis of the Campus Serial Rapist Assumption.” JAMA Pediatrics, July 13, 2015, 1–8. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2015.0707.
More on topic, though, my go-to study discussing police and sexual assault comes from Liz Kelly over in Britain. They have something of an obsession with case attrition over there, and it’s led to a lot of good reporting. Kelly’s contribution is a bit old, but still the best I’ve found.
The entire report is worth a read, it has a tendency to swerve into eyebrow-raising asides like this one:
While this group is almost certainly a minority, it is worth pointing out that other research backs up this finding: a minority of sexual assault perpetrators deliberately use alcohol as a date rape drug, taking advantage of the myths surrounding it, the prevalence and legality of it, and our body’s haste in flushing it out of our system.
Kelly, Liz., Jo. Lovett, Linda. Regan, Great Britain., Home Office., and Development and Statistics Directorate. Research. A Gap or a Chasm?: Attrition in Reported Rape Cases. London: Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate, 2005.
There is a person that I am actively strategizing against on the internet, the rapist.
The rapist has allies, knowing and unknowing. The cries of “be charitable” set up an obstacle that I have had to figure out how to work against as I create a profile of the rapist and learn to use it. Like any other human being the rapist will work towards their advantage in social situations of all sorts and make use of any social tool that exists to continue to live as they have. So in order to deal with that demand for charitability I have several profiles for the rapist and their allies: the rapist who does not know they are a rapist, the knowing and unknowing friends and family of the rapist, and people used to society working a certain way that misguidedly act in the interest of the previous.
So while I keep those profiles in the back of my head, I ask reasonable questions of a person who is acting in a way that benefits a rapist so that I can start eliminating options. A rapist has social tactics for attack, defense, deception and obfuscation. Those are used to maintain a system that allows them to rape and escape consequences. I ask myself “does this person’s actions benefit or disadvantage a rapist?”
Actions and communications that place the responsibility of avoiding rape on the victim, victim blaming, are advantageous to a rapist, and disadvantageous to a victim of rape.
Actions and communications that represent or maintain the societal and intuitional irrational hyper-skepticism of claims of rape are advantageous to a rapist, and disadvantageous to a victim of rape.
Actions and communications that represent or maintain societal and institutional bias for rapists and against victims are advantageous to a rapist and disadvantages to a victim of rape.
*Pressuring a rape victim to use the law enforcement system that exists is victim blaming that forces the rape victim to deal with the institutional bias and hyper-skepticism that exists. This is advantageous to rapists and disadvantageous to rape victims without other factors that will ensure the societal and institutional problems are effectively dealt with. This is our responsibility to create, and a reasonable demand of the person victim blaming.
*Reducing a rape victim to property or body functions represents and maintains institutional bias against rape victims. This is advantageous to rapists and disadvantageous to rape victims. The people doing this should be publically called out for the advocates of social slavery that they are.
*Neglecting social obligations in law enforcement represents and maintains social and institutional bias and hyper-skepticism of rape victims. This is advantageous to rapists and disadvantageous to rape victims The people neglecting their duty should be fully investigated and considered to be engaging in criminal neglect. The lay public should be looking to see why these people were motivated to be biased and hyper-skeptical.
*Telling a rape victims to or allies to stop talking about a rape, or an investigation into a rape accusation, is victim blaming. This is advantageous to rapists and disadvantageous to rape victims. This cuts off normal human communication that people in distress have a right to and is a literally dehumanizing demand to stop doing what people in distress get to do. The lay public should be looking to see why someone would be biased to tell another to stop reasonable communication.
*Similarly to the above, demanding that rape victims or allies talk about what another person wants to talk about is victim blaming. This is advantageous to rapists and disadvantageous to rape victims. The lay public should be wondering what would bias a person to want to make a rape victim change the subject.
*Demanding that social communication outside of legal institutions abide by the rules of communication inside of legal institutions is victim blaming. This is advantageous to rapists and disadvantageous to rape victims. This is literally a toxic flow of legal bias and hyper-skepticism in support of rapists and against rape victims to places outside of the legal realm. The lay public should be asserting that they will not play pretend games of “court room”, and they should be looking to see why someone would be biased towards an environment that treats a rape victim like they would be treated by legal institutions. The public looking at and talking about the situation as it exists is not “guilty until proven innocent” because the public outside of legal institutions is not a court room. Additionally the public looking at and talking about the situation as it exists is a neutral at a meta level.
*Since humor acts to make a person feel better about something, rape jokes are:
– Advantageous to rapists and disadvantageous to rape victims when they occur at the expense of rape victims or allies or merely make a random person feel better about rape as a general subject. We should not be feeling better about rape as a society on a general level. This supports social and institutional bias.
– Advantageous to rape victims and disadvantageous to rapists when they occur at the expense of rapists and their allies.
I take social conflict very very seriously
If we’re talking about why people don’t report, we can’t leave out the subject of hidden rape victims. They’re consistently listed as one of the most common reasons people don’t report.
A large number of victims refuse to call their sexual assault a sexual assault, despite meeting the legal definition. Some of this may be a coping mechanism; denying a traumatic experience happened, or waiving it away as something minor, means you don’t have to relive the event as you try to cope with it. Some of this comes from the myths surrounding sexual assault; if you’ve been told, over and over, that rape happens in a dark alley after some stranger follows you from a bar, there’s a good chance you won’t think your boyfriend pushing himself on you during a necking session is a sexual assault. It doesn’t fit the victim profile you have in your head, ergo you must not be a victim, even though the later case is the most common sexual assault scenario.
[1] Koss, M. P. “Hidden, Unacknowledged, Acquaintance, and Date Rape: Looking Back, Looking Forward.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 35, no. 2 (June 1, 2011): 348–54. doi:10.1177/0361684311403856.
[2] Koss, Mary P. “The Hidden Rape Victim: Personality, Attitudinal, and Situational Characteristics.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 9, no. 2 (1985): 193–212. doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.1985.tb00872.x.
[3] Koss, Mary P., Thomas E. Dinero, Cynthia A. Seibel, and Susan L. Cox. “Stranger and Acquaintance Rape: Are There Differences in the Victim’s Experience?” Psychology of Women Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1988): 1–24.
National Ugly Mugs (NUM)
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Sign up to NUM for free to report incidents and receive warnings about dangerous individuals. If you report to National Ugly Mugs we will use the information to warn other sex workers and potentially save their lives.
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And to head off an objection: yes, Koss has been at the forefront of studying hidden rape, but her findings have been thoroughly backed up by other researchers.
Littleton, Heather L., Deborah L. Rhatigan, and Danny Axsom. “Unacknowledged Rape: How Much Do We Know About the Hidden Rape Victim?” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 14, no. 4 (July 12, 2007): 57–74. doi:10.1300/J146v14n04_04.
HJ Hornbeck @ 151:
Yes, I am. Thank you for posting.
#154:
Oh hells yes. I can’t count the amount of times this has come up here, and person after person coming to a realization that yes, they were assaulted / raped. A lot of this goes right back to all the shit poured into our heads all our lives – the idea that rape / assault prevention is on *you*, that somehow or another, you didn’t obey all the rules; good girls don’t get raped, yada, yada, yada. There’s a much higher incidence of self-blame, feelings of shame, and psychological problems in acquaintance and date rapes. We are told, from the time we’re small, that if such a thing happens, it absolutely has to be our fault. How were you dressed? Why did you let him into your house / room / apartment? Why were you drinking? Did you flirt with him? Isn’t this a case of simply regretting having sex? And so on. I know I don’t have to detail all this to you, HJ.
HJ:
The use of alcohol to facilitate rape has been going on for a very long time, and alcohol loading is the most popular tactic of rapists these days.
This is its own problem, and I’d like to see you fix this one, Penny – there are a number of rapists walking about, free, who have authority and weapons. Cops. Yes, there are rapists in cops shops all over the place. Plenty of them have been reported and tried, however, much like when a cop decides to murder a person of colour, people come out of the woodwork to support the cop, not the victim. Sometimes there is a conviction, but most of time there isn’t.
After you’ve fixed that one, perhaps you can tackle all the penal LEOs who either ignore rape or indulge in it themselves.
Hj
This is exactly how Stoya described her situation.
Trigger Warning: Descriptions of rape, mental abuse, and gaslighting.
Her bravery in putting her story out there has inspired other victims to come forward, but that article talks about the hurdles sex workers have to face in disclosing. Going to the police is a whole extra level of hard for a sex worker assaulted by her partner beyond that of the mundane ridiculously fucking hard of survivors who aren’t sex workers and are assaulted by a mere acquaintance.
The good Stoya accomplished–something she as a survivor was never obligated to do–goes far, far beyond what would have happened if she’d gone to the police and been treated like shit as a sex worker abused by her partner. We can fight rape culture and make things better for everyone, but not by shaming people who choose their own safety and well-being over talking to cops that won’t take them seriously and are likely to re-traumatize them.
No prob! One minor nitpick, though: alcohol and sexual assault isn’t a “these days” problem, we’ve only become aware of it in the last few decades. There’s good reason to suspect it’s been a date rape drug for millenia.
I see what you did there, PZ.
=======================
Thank you to everyone who did awesomely heavy lifting in this thread. Law School is keeping me down right now, but I do get around to reading.
Tom Foss on non-reporters supposedly shouldering blame for a rapist’s actions: http://dubitoergosum.net/2012/06/20/pascals-reporter/
HJ @ 161:
Oh, I’m aware. When I commented, I was thinking of the shift away from using rohypnol (and other drugs) to alcohol loading, which makes it much more likely that there will be no reporting, and even if there is a report, pretty much guarantees no arrest or conviction.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2012/06/20/why-ididnotreport/
In the spirit of Caine’s #145:
I wrote more extensively on this earlier, so I won’t comment here now save to say this: John Morales @117, Dreaming of an Atheist Newtopia @122, and Shikko @138 hit the most important part of your misfeasance in this conversation: the insistence that resistance to the idea that in the current world in which we live, we should tell rape victims that they bear moral responsibility for future rapes if they do not effectively report to law enforcement is synonymous with rapists should remain silent.
When will you, Penny L, take moral responsibility for the injury done to all the rape survivors – including this Argentinian child – that was only possible because those survivors reported their rapes to law enforcement?
CD @ 166:
Jesus Fucke. I feel sick. Oh, those awful children, seducing innocent adults! *spits*
:Suspirio de profundis: I truly wish I could say this rotten justification was rare, but it isn’t.
HJ Hornbeck:
Speaking of using alcohol to facilitate rapes, just came across this comment on an old blog post about various ways to alcohol load. Never came across this one before:
Caine @164:
Ah, now I get you. I’ve looked into that one, and so far I can’t find any evidence for a shift towards rohypnol or non-alcoholic drugs.
Note that just because pot was found in roughly one in five samples tested, it shouldn’t be counted as a date-rape drug. Recreational drug use mucks up a lot of these studies, simply because many of these drugs tend to linger. Weed can be detected anywhere from half a week to months after use, and cocaine is similar, making both poor choices for spiking. It doesn’t help that many date-rape drugs are based on medications or common party drugs. So a better measure are studies which limit their testing to cases of suspected drink spiking.
GHB is a bit of a wild card here. It’s an odorless salt, easy to make and quick to flush out of our systems, so it’s likely the number of detections are an underestimate of its prevalence. Of course the same can be said for alcohol, and if GHB were more widespread you’d expect more than a handful of detections.
I think it’s more likely there was a Satanic Panic around date-rape drugs. A few high-profile cases, such as Samantha Reid, were spread far and wide by the media. Ignorance of alcohol’s relation to sexual assault led people to suspect something else was responsible for making them so groggy. Government officials tried to bundle them into the War on Drugs. Rumours spread, which the media picked up on and helped fan the panic.
[1] ElSohly, M. A., and S. J. Salamone. “Prevalence of Drugs Used in Cases of Alleged Sexual Assault.” Journal of Analytical Toxicology 23, no. 3 (May 1, 1999): 141–46. doi:10.1093/jat/23.3.141.
[2] Elliott, Simon P., and Victoria Burgess. “Clinical Urinalysis of Drugs and Alcohol in Instances of Suspected Surreptitious Administration (‘spiked Drinks’).” Science & Justice 45, no. 3 (July 2005): 129–34. doi:10.1016/S1355-0306(05)71646-4.
[3] Hindmarch, I., M. ElSohly, J. Gambles, and S. Salamone. “Forensic Urinalysis of Drug Use in Cases of Alleged Sexual Assault.” Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine 8, no. 4 (December 2001): 197–205. doi:10.1054/jcfm.2001.0513.
If you’re more interested in alcohol and sexual assault, Caine, this is my go-to paper. Some highlights:
Also, I recommend reading up on the literature around AMT.
[1] Abbey, Antonia, Tina Zawacki, Philip O. Buck, A. Monique Clinton, and Pam McAuslan. “Alcohol and Sexual Assault.” Alcohol Research and Health 25, no. 1 (2001): 43–51.
[2] George, William H., Kelly Cue Davis, Jeanette Norris, Julia R. Heiman, Susan A. Stoner, Rebecca L. Schacht, Christian S. Hendershot, and Kelly F. Kajumulo. “Indirect Effects of Acute Alcohol Intoxication on Sexual Risk-Taking: The Roles of Subjective and Physiological Sexual Arousal.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 38, no. 4 (August 1, 2009): 498–513. doi:10.1007/s10508-008-9346-9
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-23653172
Caine @171:
Wait, this guy was just “cleared” on charges of raping a schoolgirl, and he’s being interviewed for his stance on rape? What next, is OJ Simpson going to get interviewed about domestic violence?
HJ, thanks – I’ll read up tomorrow. The problem with GHB is as you stated, it’s very difficult to detect, so it’s not likely it will ever be known how much it was or wasn’t used. The reason I brought it up was because back in my advocacy days, I dealt with a number of cases where amnesia was outstanding, given that any alcohol consumption was from 0 to 2 drinks. These cases came up frequently for a while, then I noted they were quietly disappearing, and it was more alcohol loading than anything else. Of course, that’s anecdotal, which is all I have on that score.
Microraptor:
The Shah case was in 2013, and I’m afraid the answer is yes. The whole article screams of the rape culture stance that is most common with reporting on rapes. Shah was also asked about Operation Yewtree:
I’ve linked to public PDFs when I was aware of them; if Google Scholar fails, you’ll either need academic access or #icanhazpdf.
More for Penny L, in the category of “Justice, ain’t it grand!”
Cited in Asking For It, by Kate Harding.
*It sure as fuck doesn’t demean me in the slightest, while the sickening attitude and behaviour of Deni most certainly does.
Penny L
You still have not answered my question:
Does a person have the duty to risk serious harm for the benefit of others?
On the topic of victims of serial rapists, I figure I ought to throw in my own experience. CN: rape and manipulation
We have a dude, let’s call him B. B is kinky. B is capital-D Dominant. B likes to be the first person to welcome you to one of the local kinky clubs. B comes highly recommended from the leaders of said kinky club. B offers you the chance to try a few kinks you’ve expressed curiosity in, goes so far as to coach you into having a safe call, tells you about all the things you need to do to prepare to try kink with someone new. B’s advice is good, too. B has a roster of regulars who endorse him.
B promptly ignores your protests to slow down. B says, I thought you were a masochist. B doesn’t ask if you want to touch his dick, but he’ll move your hands for you. If you start crying and ask to stop, B will–momentarily, long enough to insist he continue after the worst tears are over.
B has over 40 victims. I checked the timeline that was constructed during his eventual trial. I’m #27. He was my first attempt at a relationship after I transitioned, and took advantage of the fact that I was feeling completely unloveable by saying my pre-op status wasn’t an issue.
Victim #7 came forward with an anonymous post in the kink community stating that she had been molested by an unnamed community member. No details were disclosed about who this person was, to the point where the anonymous post didn’t even use a gender pronoun, yet dozens of us connected the dots and sent our stories to #7.
#7 goes to the police with her collection of accusations and beseeches the rest of us to go, too. The accusations range from harassment to sexual assault.
B is eventually charged (two more victims rack up in the mean time).
B is eventually tried. B’s defense attacks my credibility as a witness by implying gender variance is a mental illness that affects perception. My little price for going on trial was having a member of law tell me I’m crazy and therefore can’t be trusted. The rest of the victims get blasted because the law courts have a poor understanding of BDSM. The boundaries of consent, while clear to savvy feminists, become blurry in court because sadomasochism is incorporated.
B is eventually found Not Guilty on all counts.
So there you have it, Penny L. Multiple victims. A lot of us reported it. We got a trial. B is still free to this day, though he is no longer tacitly endorsed by the kink club, so his primary channel of finding new victims is hampered. By your argument, we did everything right, and yet sweet fuck all occurred. It’s not even just a matter of police abusing victims further–although that accounts for a monumental amount of the reasons rape victims don’t report. We had our month in court and we have nothing to show for it except the scorn of the kinky club B came from. So even if, and that’s a big IF, someone endures all the bullshit with law enforcement, there’s no guarantee there will be a conviction in court.
Am I still responsible for B’s further rapes?
Lesbian Catnip #178
That was waaay too messy and complicated (like real life).
Penny L #126 was much easier to understand (like .. dunno .. a 45 minute TV cop-show)
Oh, I might as will chip in one last thing too. I don’t think anyone’s posted this:
When the system is broken, saying “you must follow the system!” just promotes more injustice. It’s far better to work to repair the system, or route around the damage by supporting victims in other ways.
Hey Penny L., where’d you go?
http://news.yahoo.com/oklahoma-ex-policeman-preyed-women-no-one-cared-192712110.html
Content Note: Rape by police officer. Victim blaming.
He (Holzclaw) also used misogynoir to his advantage, he deserves a sentence as long as they can give him for rape and abuse of power.
Penny @ 70,
“You should receive zero blame for later abuses committed by those who abused you.
Victims aren’t responsible for their attacker’s behaviour. A victim does bear some level of responsibilty, however, if they do not share their attacker’s behaviour with authorities.”
So I’m *not* responsible but I *am* responsible a bit, somehow. I thought it was all my fault for a long time, so I’m not terribly suprised or even appalled when other people think that way.
Please though, do break down how much responsibility I bear, and how much the abuser bears. If you could also explain how much responsibility I bear for each instance of repeated abuses committed against myself by the same abuser, that would be enlightening. Graphs, percentages, however you prefer to indicate it.
I won’t argue with your figures, I am just interested to see what you think they are, for my own edification.
No one here needs me, the cesspool of a human being, to comment any further. I’ve made my point, my comments have been twisted, distorted, ridiculed, and yet somehow no one seems to have a real answer to my questions.
No. But the question is irrelevant.
Should a person who has witnessed a murder report that information to the authorities?
This is an example of why I’m not commenting anymore. I don’t know the specifics of your story except for what you’ve written here, but it sounds like quite a bit DID occur. I don’t know to what extent the lateness of the rape reporting complicated the trial, but I do know that because this person got away with it does not mean the criminal justice system is broken beyond repair. OJ Simpson got away with murder, two of them actually, but that doesn’t mean the system is broken.
Which brings me to another point which I took for granted but seems to have alluded almost everyone else here. The US criminal justice system is designed to minimize the number of innocent people put in jail for crimes they didn’t commit (please don’t list examples of where this has failed, it’s not a relevant digression). Standards of evidence are high, the accused do not have to testify, and there are all sorts of other protections. This means that people guilty of every type of crime are going to hear the jury read the words “not guilty” at the end of their trial. There are all sorts of people – victims of crimes or their surviving family members – who can make the argument that the criminal justice system “failed” them, not just rape survivors.
In other words, sometimes you are going to do everything “right” (arguable in your case) and the accused will not be convicted. If you’d prefer a system which convicts more people accused of crimes, you could advocate for some reforms which would accomplish that, some of which would likely require a constitutional amendment.
Another example of why I’m not commenting anymore. I’ve answered your question, I did so in the very first sentence you quoted. The answer is zero – no graphs required.
Finally –
Let’s bring the whole system down! We need a revolution! Fuck the system!
And when you’re done with that bong pass it over, I need a hit of whatever you’re having.
Penny L:
Depends. Which is the problem with deontological ethics.
(Do you seriously imagine circumstances can never contraindicate such reportage?)
—
PS
Asserting a counterfactual is not particularly credible, Penny.
Penny L,
shikko’s post #138 isn’t distorting your position. It’s using your position to ask a question (which you’ve dodged for some strange reason):
Penny L
Wrong.
We have demonstrated that rape victims almost certainly further harm from reporting, to the point of becoming suicidal, at the expense of their own chance of healing. Therefore it is unethical to demand that they put themselves into harm’S way for the small likelyhood of a benefit to others (Remember 98% of reported rapists never even spend one single night in jail).
Can the person do so safely?
Also, you don’t need to establish complicated multi-person scenarios to demonstrate that Penny L is blaming victims. Just take the all too common scenario of the raping husband/partner. Since the rape victim is responsible for all rapes her abusive partner commits after she didn’t report the first one*, she is responsible for her own repeated rape. Apparently with every rape she becomes less of a victim and more of a perpetrator.
Which os exactly the kind of rethoric that keeps victims from leaving/reporting after rape #5-500: They will be held responsible but the perpetrator won’t
*Did you know that the highest risk of being killed is right after you leave?
Penny L:
I’d love to simply write you off as an idiot, Penny. From all you have written here, it’s quite clear that you’re a bigot, in love with authority, and comfortable with reliance on stereotype rather than thinking. In this thread alone, you have written “I refuse to consider…” So, I’ll put you down as a willful idiot.
Is the system broken when it comes to rape and sexual assault? Yes, it most certainly is. It’s broken on a number of other fronts as well, such as racial bigotry and the overwhelming stupid of the so-called war on drugs, leading to massive overcrowding in prison, which also has a serious rape problem, on the part of inmates and guards. This thread is about rape and sexual assault, though, so I’ll stick to that for now. Why is the system so broken in this case? The system you cherish so fucking much is built on a long standing foundation of misogyny, brought to you by those never ending favourites, patriarchy and kyriarchy. Short form: because of rape culture, endemic in U.S. society to be sure, and many other societies around the world. Rape culture is everywhere, Penny, it infests everyone and everywhere. It’s on this level that change can be effected, and must be effected. That is what people have been trying like hell to pound into that closed off mind of yours.
You may consider yourself an ally here, but you are not one. You’re simply another person who is refusing to see what is right in front of you, refusing to consider the insidiousness of rape culture, and how that culture affects the every day thoughts and actions of people in every walk of life. People have told you their stories in an attempt to make you understand the harm and damage you have done by insisting that a victim bears responsibility for other people being raped or assaulted. People have tried like hell to get you to understand that the only thing all rapes have in common is a rapist, and it’s a rapist who bears all responsibility for a rape, full stop.
People have told you their stories (and that’s not easy) in an attempt to make you see that your repeated parroting of “report!” is too damn close to a guarantee of not only being traumatized again, but of seeing a complete lack of action, let alone justice. People have pointed out, repeatedly, that when victims do report, nothing is done, and there’s your rapist, free as could be. People have pointed out, repeatedly, all the women who did report, and went through all the trauma of being questioned, and the trauma of having rape kits done, only to have what happen? Hundreds of thousands, Penny. Think about that. Think about what all those victims went through, struggling to do it all by book. What happened, Penny?
All of this, and the only thing you can come up with are the two utterly idiotic sentences I quoted?
I know you won’t do this, but perhaps it will help someone else to understand. Recommended reading:
Misogyny, The World’s Oldest Prejudice, by Jack Holland
Manhood in America: a cultural history, by Michael Kimmel
Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, by Michael Kimmel
Asking For It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do About It, by Kate Harding
http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/mythcommunication-its-not-that-they-dont-understand-they-just-dont-like-the-answer/
Rape Culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_culture
Rape Culture 101
https://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/rape-culture-101/
Meet the Predators
http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-predators/
Predator Redux
https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/predator-redux/
Giliell @ 188:
Which happens whether they report or not, but the consequences are much heavier when there is reporting – look at all the cases where whole towns turned against a rape victim, to the point where a number of the victim’s families had to pull up stakes and move, to get away from the continual rain of threats and harassment. In such cases, the person who was raped is blamed for telling.
Steubenville. Where, IIRC, the girl didn’t even report but it was the video that got the guys in. But Penny L likes to pretend that those consequences aren’t real.
@184 Penny L said:
I think you are misinterpreting what’s going on. We HAVE answered your questions; I think it’s more that you either don’t like or don’t understand the answers.
I don’t think your comments have been twisted or distorted; what I (and others) have done is show you that you have a consistency problem in your statements. Pointing that out is not twisting your words, it’s pointing out that you are presenting a twisted position. You probably do feel that you’ve been ridiculed, but the only real response to that is: criticism is not ridicule, and anything that IS ridicule can be avoided in the future by not saying ridiculous things.
This position is ridiculous (comment #70):
We’ve shown you how that is self-refuting by way of contradiction, so yes, you are being ridiculed for holding it. Your options here are limited: 1) agree that your position doesn’t make sense and revise it; 2) show that we have made an error in analysis; 3) continue to hold a fatally flawed view; 4) slink off; 5) pretend it never happened. You are already doing 3) to 5), which is another cause for ridicule. Again, that’s avoidable.
I’m not saying you can’t hold the position that rape victims bear responsibility for future rapes if they don’t report their own attack; I’m saying that you can’t ALSO believe that a victim never bears any responsibility for their own rape. If intellectual integrity is important to you (and I’d like to believe that it is), you must drop one of those two beliefs. It doesn’t matter which one from a logical standpoint, but from an ethical one, I’d suggest dropping the one that tries to assign blame for an action to anyone but the actor.
Let me try putting it anther way…
“Victims aren’t responsible for their attacker’s behaviour. A victim does bear some level of responsibilty, however, if they do not share their attacker’s behaviour with authorities.” @70
X = ‘some level of responsibility”
Please solve the following (and show your working)
0 responsibility + X = ?
That rapist cop got convicted and may spend the rest of his life in jail! It’s like a fucking unicorn just tap danced across my room.
http://news.yahoo.com/oklahoma-ex-cop-guilty-rape-sex-abuse-case-023035702.html
But here’s a nice example of why some women don’t tell the cops, and can’t handle the trials of going to trial.
Doh, borkquote.
shikko, bonzaikitten, Penny’s claim about responsibility is literally contradictory as expressed, but that apparent contradiction is not present if the hidden and the overt conditionals are included (though the claim itself remains very arguable).
Specifically:
“Victims aren’t responsible for their attacker’s behaviour. A victim does bear some level of responsibilty, however, if they do not share their attacker’s behaviour with authorities.”
charitably should be read as:
“Victims aren’t responsible for their attacker’s [initial] behaviour . A victim does bear some level of responsibility [for further similar behaviour], however, if they do not share their attacker’s behaviour with authorities.”
Wow. Fabulous, Penny. I thought surely you simply can NOT sink any lower, but there it is. So you not only HAVE to report whatever happened to you, sometimes to the very people who allowed / caused it to happen, but you have to do everything “right” (according to Penny, who is after all the Ultimate Judge and Arbitrator and gifted with the Knowledge of All Things Hidden and Unhidden) to escape culpability, otherwise, wow, you are a bad human being, not only did you get yourself raped, you should have done more afterwards, when you were in shock at your whole fucking life being ripped apart, you should have followed every single complicated step perfectly even though your mind was tearing itself apart, because now the next person he rapes will be on your conscience.
And then, if you do report and get treated badly, get set on fire again while your first wounds haven’t even started to bleed yet, hey, at least you can sleep soundly knowing you did the right thing, right? Now if only you’d done it differently, and chose another day to go to the police, or another officer to report to, or or or, so still your fault.
And then, even if you DO do everything exactly perfectly just right, and magically happen to hit the jackpot and get police and other officials who take you seriously, actually investigate the crime and doesn’t take the chance to get in on the action of sexually exploiting you, then meh.
Maybe, probably the rapist gets off, and comes to hurt you again, like they promised they would do if you told anyone what happened. Whatchoo gonna do? People die and get hurt every day, right Penny? God forbid some one exception out of thousands who might be innocent be in danger of standing trial (note, not even be found guilty, just actually go to trial)! That would be a travesty! Meanwhile, rape victims automatically get a life sentence, every single one of them, with no possibility of parole or release, and with it being aggravated by the many people like Penny second guessing every single thing you do to make sure you personally took responsibility for the person who raped you.
Rape victims should *absolutely not* be held accountable in this way and have this kind of shit added to their already existing torture, all so that Penny and people like Penny can sleep soundly at night, thinking “this shit would never happen to me, because I will do everything “right” and that will protect me”.
So I just want to add another hearty “fuck you you rape apologist” to the list.
John Morales @ 196.
Then I continue to await a response to see what percentage of responsibility a victim bears, and what percentage the perpetrator bears.
@196 John Morales said:
That was quite clear, and as written and charitably interpreted it still leads to a situation in which a person can be partially responsible for their own subsequent rape by the same assailant. I explained my objection originally in #102. Assigning any responsibility for a crime to anyone but the perpetrator can lead to situations of victim-blaming, and that’s the problem.