Women's Issues

Zeal, can I ask a question? You say that don't drink at all isn't a practical solution yet acknowledge that people are more likely to be raped by those they trust. What exactly would you say is a practical solution in this case? We can tell people to not rape but there will always be people that don't care about that. How should we solve that problem?

edited 14th Mar '14 4:13:10 PM by kostya

It's not a practical solution because it doesn't answer anything. It's well and good to say "You shouldn't do XYZ", but if it's not illegal, then people are free to do it and the worst-case scenario can happen. Which, if it does, puts us right back into "how do you prove the rape" territory.

So, as Iaculus seemed to point out, awareness and education programs aimed at perpetrators, or people who unknowingly support them (like immature Fratbros), has potential as a more effective measure.

edited 14th Mar '14 4:37:11 PM by KingZeal

I'm not disagreeing that having sex with someone who's drunk is illegal where you live (the laws here aren't exactly the same). If you can prove that, that's fine. If you can't, your word is the only thing that claims it happened. That's where "innocent until proven guilty" comes into play, under those laws.

As for campaigns, as I said before, I think it's better to inform people what's actually legal or not, and what types of behaviour lead to those situations, without implying guilt or tendency to rape in the people it targets. It's never a bad idea to inform people of what they can do to reduce the risk of rape happening, whether they're involved or not.

I mean, it's pretty insulting to go up to someone and tell them not to rape people, let alone perpetuating stereotypes. On the other hand, saying, "If you see this happening, stop it," as that encourages them to work with society and be useful to others. It's also got a better range, since if such a situation happens somewhere, it would help if any one of the people around acted on it, rather than the message reaching the specific person doing the act.

edited 14th Mar '14 4:57:37 PM by AnotherDuck

Zeal, "Innocent until proven guilty" does not mean you can't be proven to have done it. That assumes you are guilty, but we just can't prove it, which a different thing.

It means you are assumed innocent until you are proven guilty. Your solution is to just takes someones word and assume guilt, without evidence to back it up.

Let me put it this way, we take your "Guilty until proven innocence"... What if the person is innocent, but can't prove it? Are we to just innocent people to jail? Furthermore, if your hypothetical victim was so drunk s/he can't remember the event or events leading to it, why is s/he assuming rape? While drunk, she might have consented.

Unless she made clear stance that s/he doesn't want to have sex, before getting to that point of drunkenness (which was irresponsible for him/her), how can one claim rape? If you went to drink, without "No sex today" attitude, got so drunk that you had sex with someone you didn't want (As in, didn't desire), are we to just give them this powerful regret weapon, a weapon to be used into blackmail? "Now do what I say or I call rape!"

What if the counter-accusation is made? "I wasn't the rapist, I was the one being raped!"

Mandemo if a person is too drunk to remember agreeing to sex the following day then that means they were blackout drunk which makes it impossible for them to consent.

Perhaps, but to everyone the point of blanking out is different. They might act like they are in complete control, but at the morning, can't remember anything.

People are individuals. Everyone have different tolerances. What if both were extremely drunken? Shall we convict both of rape?

Unless one was clearly forcing the other to do something they weren't okay with I'm pretty sure cases where both have no recollection of the night before would be waived since each of them raped the other and you can't really charge both of them.

This sort of grey area is precisely why I wouldn't even consiser have sex with a woman that's had anything to drink unless incrdibly specific conditions were met. Even then I might refuse.

edited 14th Mar '14 5:58:26 PM by kostya

Different people react very differently to alcohol. It's possible to not remember what happened the previous day while still maintaining enough mental facilities for that during the time of you don't remember. I've had such a friend who frequently forgot major parts of evenings, but was far more coherent and aware than people who did remember. But if you don't remember what happened, you can't really claim anything did happen (or, as in Zeal's example, that you said no but was forced upon) unless you have something that indicates it did.

Obviously determining who was the aggressor would require a third party being present and having enough recollection of the evening to relate the details to the police. If nobody remembers anything I don't see what you can do since you can't prove that either party was forcing the other into something they didn't want.

Ah, but there is the thing which we disagree with Zeal. Zeal claims that we should assume guilt, despite there not being evidence, rather than first seek evidence to support the claim before declaring guilt.

We say assume innocence and try to prove the guilt, before doing anything.

He says we should assume guilt and the accused should prove his/her innocence.

And yeah, Duck said what I mean with "Too drunk to remember" part.

edited 14th Mar '14 6:09:08 PM by Mandemo

Where has Zeal said this? I haven't read every single post in this discussion closely but from what I can tell their view seems to be that if it's known that one party was forcing the other into something or was sober then they're automatically guilty because a person that's drunk is mentally impaired and unable to consent to sex. That seems like common sense to me. You wouldn't have sex with a person that was under some kind of anesthetic so why would this be any different? Both prevent a person from being fully aware of their actions and what they're doing.

edited 14th Mar '14 6:13:38 PM by Kostya

Problem is the claim of rape, without proof. Furthermore, as noted, every person is different. There is no clear line of "This is where consent ends" with intoxication, because every person is different.

For example, would you agree that someone takes one shot of, let's say, vodka and becomes intoxicated. She still remember everything of the night, was able to fully think and was aware of her surroundings, but had sex with someone with consent. At the morning, she regrets it, for whatever reason.

So she calls rape. If we say "All sex under effect of alcohol is rape", well, the dude is boned. Just because the woman has decided she regrets it and wants to be free of responsibility to herself. She didn't make a mistake, she was raped!

This is not what we should allow. Fighting against rape I can agree, but starting witch hunts? No.

What do you mean without proof? If you(general you) forced someone into having sex while they were drunk and another person can verify this then you are guilty of rape.

In regards to your hypothetical. If she remembers and wasn't forced into doing it then I don't see how you could define what happened in that scenario as rape. It's also very likely that the man in the situation had also been drinking so he could claim the same thing.

As a side note I should say that this conversation has started to convince me that we should start teaching people that you shouldn't have sex at all with a person if anybody has had anything to drink. This isn't terribly practical but I can't really think of any other solution given the absurd number of variables in these situations.

edited 14th Mar '14 6:26:08 PM by Kostya

Zeal did mention that the other would just claim "rough sex", so yeah...

And for my hypothetical situation, yup, we wouldn't say it's rape. Yet, if we go with "Guilty until proven otherwise" attitude Zeal has been proposing, it will be her word against his, thus, she is assumed correct "just to be sure".

And I have been trying to ask Zeal about the counter-accusations. If both claim rape, who is lying? Or is mutual rape even possible?

That is not the attitude I get from Zeal's posts though. If there's no evidence that one forced the other and both were drunk then you would either have to charge both with rape or dismiss the case entirely. The latter seems far more likely.

I'm not Zeal but in my opinion mutual rape is possible if both are drunk enough that they can't remember consenting the following day. I don't think you can really charge either of them though.

Even consent while drunk is a gray area, and I am not sure it can be removed completely. It's one thing when someone was intoxicated to the point of losing consciousness - then it is definitely rape. But in oother cases, it is difficult to prove that someone consented only because of intoxication. Even an intoxicated person probably wouldn't consent to sex with just anybody, so to claim that without intoxication there would be no consent granted is difficult.

Now, I would say that it is a dick move to make advances towards a person more drunk than you. Don't do that. But illegality of it is a bit different matter.

How many cases do you get when only one party is drunk instead of both of them? As for most rapes happening from someone the victim knows, that's true, but the assumption seems to be that all preventative measures are aimed at the mythical "rape in a back ally" situation, not to mention that prevention measures aren't being suggested alongside a sustained campaign of stopping rape being carried out.

And it's exactly for that reason that it only addresses half the problem.

The issue with what you're suggesting is what's known as a "tautology" in social sciences. This is when people clearly see something wrong in the actions of other people, particularly "bad" people, but do not see the wrongness in their own actions, even when there's no difference. This is because, as you said, people feel "insulted" when you point this out. They're not a bad person, so of course they didn't do anything wrong.

Anti-rape campaigns cannot just focus on telling people to stop other people from doing these things. That assumes (1) that rapists always act with an audience and (2) perpetrators are able to recognize their actions for what they are. The point of a "don't rape" campaign is to teach people that things they think are okay are, in fact, not okay. In the college I work in, for example, you have no idea how many students recognize that something they think doesn't qualify as a sexual assault actually does. You have to tell them not to do these things before they do it. If they get insulted, that's too bad.

You Keep Using That Word. Again, if it is against the law to have sex with a drunk person, and you do it, you are guilty of the act. You broke the law. Period. If the law states that rape is having sex with a drunken person and you have sex with a drunk person, you are guilty by definition of the law.

What you want to do, I'm assuming, is challenge the definition of such a law and argue that this is not rape. Okay, fine. But that isn't "guilty until proven innocent". It's challenging the definition of a law that covers an ambiguous situation where it's impossible to accurately figure out guilt. The point of the law is that, having reasonable agency until the moment you made this decision, you could have avoided this ambiguous situation but didn't. There are tons of laws that serve a similar purpose, because it's more pragmatic to punish people for creating the situation which caused the problem, since the problem itself comes down to one person's word against another. The entire point to most traffic laws, for example, is to establish culpability by figuring out who had the greatest chance of stopping it, but didn't or who had the most power in the situation and did not yield certain privileges to the other person.

edited 15th Mar '14 8:27:01 AM by KingZeal

Moving the topic slightly, here's an article about people getting raped by people they trusted, and then being betrayed by the authorities. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2014/03/11/guest-post-god-is-done-with-you-pensacola-christian-college-and-sexual-violence/

One possible takeaway, of course, is "if you don't want to be raped, don't go to this college," but the college has done everything in its power to present itself as a place where this sort of thing could never happen.

Well, this place (among with many other Christian colleges) is infamous for enforcing strict gender roles and patriarchal culture, which makes rape much more likely. Because if a man feels tempted by a woman, clearly she was asking for it.

Religious Right political colleges do seem to have a problem with that, unsurprisingly enough. It's scary both because the kids in question generally don't get much of a choice in whether they're sent there (the whole point is that your parents should dictate your life for you) and because these colleges are designed to churn out America's ruling class, with a remarkable degree of success.

Zeal, of course it only addresses half the problem, because you're only addressing half of what I wrote.

And do you think it's acceptable if someone comes up to you and say "don't rape people", or "don't be a dick"? Or to have a campaign showing a black guy mugging people saying, "Don't be that dude"?

Or if a man is raped, he is clearly lying about it.

But this again shows that rape prevention can't all be put on the potential victim. "Clearly, you shouldn't have gone to sleep in the same room with your college-assigned roommates." We need to let people regardless of gender know that rape is not only wrong, but will be prosecuted fairly and with a reasonable chance of conviction.

edited 15th Mar '14 8:45:33 AM by SKJAM

I only quoted part of your post, but my answer addressed everything you said. The other parts not quoted didn't say anything about the other "half" of the problem, from what I could tell.

Tell black people to Stop Being Stereotypical?

You mean like the campaigns against "Stop Snitching", or the ones promoting "Stop The Violence", "I Want To Grow Up", "It Takes A Real Man To Be A Father", etc, etc? Oh yeah, I have no problem with that, considering that these are all problems that disproportionately affect black people in impoverished communities.

Sorry, if you were expecting me to be offended by that example, you'll be disappointed.

edited 15th Mar '14 8:56:24 AM by KingZeal

I specifically said, "I think it's better to inform people what's actually legal or not," which isn't just focused on the people around the perpetrator. You're also using a Perfect Solution Fallacy by claiming you cannot have a campaign that doesn't address the entire problem and everything that's wrong with it.

I'm not familiar with those campaigns, but I wasn't expecting you to be offended. I was trying to confirm what I disagree with you. If I wanted to offend you I'd have specifically directed it at you, without asking what you thought about it.

And now we're again getting to the point where it's useless to argue with you.