A RESPONSE TO I;SDKFO

Law and Order SVU wrestled with the issues for years.

l;sdkfo has left a new comment on your post "WHAT'S SO BAD ABOUT RAPE?”, posted on August 2, 2013

“Wait! How about the fact that this whole scenario is unlikely -- the man would most likely get all the sympathy and the woman would be judged and found guilty for wearing the wrong thing, being out late at night, etc. His story would make the news, but increasingly, hers would not. The police would seriously investigate the crime involving the male victim but probably would not do anything to investigate the rape. (I know that the police will not investigate, as I have reported a rape.)”

The timing of this comment is interesting in that the account of a terrible gang rape at the U of Virginia has just turned out to be invented, which raises a lot of questions.  In fact, the topic of rape is inexhaustible and very much subject to specific particulars.  The commenter is upset that society is likely to blame the victim for letting herself be raped, but she is not considering how extreme that can be: there are countries where a raped woman would simply be murdered by her male relatives for “wearing the wrong thing, being out late at night . . .”

The commenter doesn’t seem aware that all rapes are not alike.  The public bus gang rape in India that killed the victim was one thing.  A boy friend who has been intimate and encouraged but then gets angry in a quarrel and forces himself without much injury except to feelings is another sort of event.  The police officers who anally raped their victim with the handle of a toilet plunger, rupturing the viscera of the man, was yet another sort.  And no one quite knows what to do about underaged Romeo and Juliet who are technically raping each other in spite of willing true love.

An honor killing -- the ultimate blaming of victims.

The law has a terrible time trying to define rape because is is a phenomenon of the dark brain that society tries to get into logical categories of consent, damage, motivation, moral values that can be quantified.  Even then there is a difference between the two kinds of law: criminal law meant to address and curb violence, versus tort law, civil lawsuits, that do not have to point to a written out definition or recommended consequences, though reference might be made to precedents.  

An aspect of something as sensational as rape, no matter the level of violence (which would be relevant to criminal law, indicating misdemeanor, felony or capital offenses), attracts public interest that is often inflamed.  Another dimension is the question of the sanity of the individuals involved, or even something so simple as a man coming home drunk, crawling into bed with his wife, having sex with her, and not discovering until morning that it was a different female -- maybe even his mother.

So there is the level of physical damage, the social and possibly prescribed rules of how to react, the mitigating circumstances and motives and so on.  The commenter says that the police would not investigate her case and I believe her.  But why?  Is she a bad witness on her own behalf?  Is there no evidence?  Is she caught in one of those awful jurisdictional double-binds so common on reservations?  Is she a “professional” to use a euphemism?  Is the victim here a man or transexual?  Is the rapist a woman?

Or maybe this is one of the apparently numerous corrupt police forces?  Maybe the kind that saves money by never bothering to process rape kits or to do DNA analysis?  (A LOT of them have been identified.)

A woman who feels she has been raped does not have to stand alone, though she may have to reach out over a lot of miles find support and advice, maybe on the Internet.   It will take strength.  Somewhere there is someone who will help, if only by listening.  The least she can do for herself is to get immediately to a clinic or private doc -- without washing -- to collect evidence and check for infection, which can range from cooties to -- one hates to think about the possibilities -- in terms of incurability, burden on the body and relationships, and incredible expense in time and money, to say nothing of worry.

Too many people preserve the terms of grade school: who’s right and wrong, what authority figure will intervene, and how personal indignation and blame will bring parents to the rescue.  Too many women simply shift the role of their parents onto their male partners.

In the broadest philosophical terms, which are only available to those who have operable pre-frontal cortex neurons that can seek justice as an abstract, any intrusion of one person into the private space of another (including their thoughts and emotions) is a kind of rape.  Whether an act of unwelcome penetration is animal passion that will not be restrained or deliberately meant to be an act of invasion, destruction, control and revenge -- or even kissing that is too persistent -- the core issue is the same.  The wives of  Sioux warriors went to the corpse of Custer with their belt-awls, and stabbed him in the ears to make him listen to them in the afterlife.  That was a kind of rape, full of passion, but not sexual.

A person could be so resistant to anything outside of their own desires and expectations, that some kind of imposed penetration -- shouting? -- might be the only way “in.”  Is the opposite of rape simply narcissism?  This kind of thought becomes ridiculous.  But reading about the “Rolling Stone” story is suggestive.  

http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation.php

Different cultures, even those that are simply varying over time due to new circumstances, take different attitudes.  The ability to prevent conception and cure STD’s, the erosion of marriage, the ambiguity of parenthood (no more stigma for when a baby is conceived), the necessity of working females in public places, the wide variety of assumptions about officers of the law when people (any sex) have been attacked or seen others killed by officers, will mean that even when an efficient system for gathering evidence and building a case is in place and working, victims will choose to simply endure.  There is no way to guarantee good outcomes because the variables are so many.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

Derived from "Game of Thrones"  These are supposed to be Dothraki.

It is troubling that we have such an appetite for the particulars of sexual assault that an editor won’t check facts because the story will sell so well, let alone a writer spinning out a story meant to shock on the premise that this is the way to money.  It’s not that such things as described in Rolling Stone don’t happen -- in fact, have happened all along, though in the Seventies I suspect no one got very excited about the political correctness of it all.  It was just a party in those days.  Of course, that was before AIDS.  And does no one question why this victim of this clearly violent and criminal act didn’t go to the police -- instead seeking justice through a reporter?  She seems to be a normal, free-range co-ed with no previous trauma -- just a taste for drama.  Maybe the commenter is closer to that category that she might like to have noted.

Going back to the original comment to the blog post, to say it is a FACT that this “scenario is unlikely,” is to ignore that there was no scenario proposed.  Instead the original post is just a list of kinds of damage to people that rape can cause.  It was an attempt to break through the universal assumption that everyone else’s life is like our own but that somehow we are being treated badly, while everyone else is protected.  Such a conviction is hard to break through.  It comes from the dark brain, which is not affected by facts.  Or shouting.