Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
By that logic, the best way to prevent muggings is to just teach people to stop mugging other people.
We do a much better job of teaching people that theft is wrong than we do teaching them to respect sexual boundaries.
And yet, people still get mugged, robbed, their cars and houses broken into, etc.
Quote:
That said, the two crimes aren't especially similar in motivation or victims.
Well, that's where the distinction that I always talk about (and get bashed for) comes in. The same distinction exists between forcible rape and date rape. While we can speculate about the specific case in question, the distinction you're making here is between someone who knows what he's doing is wrong and does it anyway and someone who thinks what he's doing is ok (or otherwise justifies the action). The former case is just like the comparison I made. A sexual predator is going to go looking for prey, in the same way that a thief is going to go looking for something to steal. Trying to educate that person into not committing the crime isn't likely to be terribly effective, and relying on that as your means of preventing victimization is just plain moronic.
There is a value to education of men with regard to the later case though. Again though, I really wish it would go hand in hand with education of women with regard to their own behaviors and a more equal view of responsibility in these cases. As I've mentioned many times (and someone else actually paraphrased earlier in the thread), in a lot of cases, the exact same behavior by the man can result in a charge of date rape, or not, pretty much entirely based on the woman's reaction
after the fact. Even the victims letter, where the points out the absurdity of his claim that he got verbal permission from her at each stage highlights this point. No one does that. People get drunk at parties and clubs and hook up. All the time.
And guess what? People do dumb things when drunk. Like deciding to have sex in a public place. All the time. And people black out while drunk. And people pass out while drunk. People pass out while having sex while drunk (and sometimes even while blacked out). In a perfect world, no one would ever have sex except while completely sober and after having had a complete conversation with their prospective partner about every thing they plan to do, what is in our out of the limits, etc. But...
No one does that. Yet, that's more or less the standard being applied here. And I think it's a pretty darn unusable standard.
And that's the problem with education in the second case. What is the education here? No means no? Well, in this case, we have no idea if she said "no" at any point (and neither does she). No sex if the other person is drunk? That's not going to work, for reasons mentioned above. Where does that basically leave guys who are trying to comply with the education? So... Go to party where there's a ton of drunk girls. If one hits on you, tell her no because she's too drunk to give consent. Watch while she goes home with your friend. Rinse. Repeat. All the "education" in the world isn't going to make horny teens and 20 somethings do that Joph. You know it. I know it. We all know it. Why pretend that's not the case?
So where does that leave us? It leaves us with the occasional edge case where some idiot guy hooks up with a drunk girl, likely thinking this is no different than any other of a thousand drunk hookup scenarios that people engage in around him all the time and which don't result in sexual assault charges, but idiot guy gets too carried away, doesn't notice she's passed out, or is too drunk/horny/whatever to stop when she does. Deplorable behavior? Absolutely. Should have gotten a longer sentence as a warning to the next idiot guy? Absolutely. No matter how drunk he is, he's responsible for his behavior while drunk, and at the point she passed out (or frankly the point where she was even close to that), he should have stopped.
But she's responsible for her behavior while drunk too. And from what I've read of the case, to all witnesses, they were both drunk and both left together. At that point, neither is any more or less responsible or a victim for any sexual activity which occurs. What happened after that point clearly changed that fact (as I mentioned above). But let's imagine a slightly different scenario. What if they had hopped in a cab and gone back to her place (she asked him to take her home IIRC), and had sex in her bed? Upon waking up, finding this stranger next to her and no memory of what happened, would she not also have a claim to him having raped her? If she had charged him, regardless of the criminal outcome, might we not possibly have a similar argument on this forum about the case? And isn't it likely that the same people arguing for his guilt and the need to educate men to not do this sort of thing would also be making those arguments in that alternative scenario?
My point is that it's not just the obvious case of assault that get this treatment. And those other scenarios are far more common, and are often the focus of the very type of education we're trying to do here. But, as mentioned above, it's a kind of "rule" that's pretty impossible to follow, because the outcome is totally dependent on reaction after the fact. In that same scenario, maybe she wakes up the next morning, doesn't remember how this stranger got here, but instead assumes that she had a good time, and moves on? Again, the guy can't know what kind of sexual habits the woman he's hooking up with has, or what she wants and doesn't want. Obviously, being assaulted in an alley while unconscious isn't on that list, but "wild sex in the alley" might. And "sex in my bedroom with a random guy" might. He can't know that. He can't tell the difference between the party girl who likes to go out on a Friday night, get rip roaring drunk, hook up with some guy, toss him out in the morning, then do it all again on Saturday night, and a girl who doesn't go out much, drinks too much, and makes what appear to him to be the exact same actions, but in her case they're things she's not going to be ok with the next day.
The guy can't read the girl's mind. Hence, the suggestion that maybe if you don't want a guy to mistake you for the wild party girl, it might be a good idea to not act exactly like said party girl. Again, this in no way is me excusing what he did in this specific case (nor the minimal jail time he got as a result), but is me pointing out that the same caution that I think it would be a good idea for all women to practice would not just have prevented this assault, but a whole lot of other unwanted sexual activity which doesn't rise to such an obvious criminally guilty outcome.
I would hope we'd all agree that would be a good thing. Again. It's not about blame. It's about the best and most effective course of action to minimize the rates of such cases. At the end of the day, I don't see that it's much comfort to the woman that she can put the "blame" on the guy. I think she'd much rather that the situation didn't happen in the first place. And I think that's better accomplished by educating women on the dangers of over drinking than it will ever be on trying to educate men to not hook up with women who are drunk.
Edited, Sep 19th 2016 8:25pm by gbaji