Hey, Can A Woman "Ask To Get Raped"?

The need for threaded conversation is on a2k at large, not in groups (which likely won't develop the need for it either).

Quote:

I will use whatever feature I choose to use on this forum. It is my right just as it is your right. I vote you down to show my disdain for your disrespect and absolute lack of compassion.

I agree completely.

However, I'd also add that his claims that he is speaking "the truth" are absolutely absurd.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The allegations in the indictment were shocking: A young woman had been held captive for years as the sex slave of a Missouri couple. She had been locked in a cage and subjected to electrical shocks. Parts of her body had been nailed to wooden planks.

When announcing charges last month, U.S. Attorney Beth Phillips called the case one of "the most horrific ever prosecuted in this district."

Authorities said the woman was a mentally deficient runaway who was recruited by an older man at the age of 16 to live in his trailer. The situation came to light in early 2009, after the woman, then 23, landed in a hospital following what prosecutors said was a torture session.

But as more details have emerged, more questions have arisen about the accuser, including her involvement in violent sex practices, her posing for a pornographic magazine and her work as a strip-club dancer. Supporters of the defendant are speaking out, too, saying many of the acts described in the indictment are practiced every day between consenting adults.

Ed Bagley, 43, faces 11 federal charges, including conspiracy, sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion, and forced labor trafficking. Four other men also are charged with various crimes.

A graphic 21-page federal indictment describes medieval-like sexual devices being used on the woman at Bagley's mobile home about six miles outside Lebanon, in southwest Missouri. Accusations of waterboarding, suffocation and beatings are mentioned throughout.

Bagley's wife, Marilyn, said she and her husband knew the girl because she had dated their son. That relationship had ended, Bagley's wife said, but the girl wanted to come live with the couple when relations with her adoptive parents soured. She said the girl moved in when she was 17, not 16, and never had sex with her husband until after she turned 18.

"She was not a runaway," Marilyn Bagley said. "We picked her up from her adopted dad and stepmom. They were right there and everything."

Marilyn Bagley said prosecutors have told her she also will be charged if she doesn't agree to testify against her husband. But she said she will not take the stand against him because she believes the two did nothing wrong.

Prosecutors said Ed Bagley posted videos and other images on the Internet showing the young woman engaged in sexual activities. He allegedly described her as his sex slave and advertised that she would perform sex acts and submit to torture for other people during encounters online or in person.

Bagley is accused of taking payments of cash, cigarettes, computer hard drives, even meat, to let other men come to his home and torture her.

Bagley and other defendants are also charged with transporting the woman to California in 2006 and 2007 for prostitution. She appeared on the cover of the July 2007 issue of Taboo, a publication owned by Larry Flynt's Hustler Magazine Group, and was the subject of a story and multipage photo spread inside.

Prosecutors said Ed Bagley also forced the girl to work as an exotic dancer and threatened to punish her if she was not a top earner at the clubs where she stripped.

But another dancer at the same Missouri strip club said the woman seemed to enjoy the attention she got when she danced, often showing off the issue of Taboo magazine that featured her on the cover.

"This girl was spoiled," said Katie Smothers, who said she spent time at Bagley's trailer when she needed a place to stay but never participated in bondage activities.

"She would take customers to show them her magazine, and she had a bucket of photos at the bar. She bragged about it."

Susan Dill, Bagley's Kansas City-based attorney, told reporters recently that the indictment tells only one side of the story. She said the defense will present evidence that the woman practiced BDSM -- bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism -- by choice.

Dill declined to go into detail, and attorneys for the other defendants turned down requests for comment.

The U.S. attorney's office in Kansas City also declined repeated requests to comment, saying the indictment speaks for itself.

Marilyn Bagley, who for years shared a bed with her husband and the woman, told The Associated Press the woman often left the Bagleys' home to go into the community.

She believes the woman's family coerced her to go to police after she was taken to a hospital suffering from cardiac arrest, which Bagley claims she suffered while getting ready for work -- not during a torture session.

"She started seizing, and when she was done, she stopped breathing. Ed gave her CPR. I was on the phone to 911. We were freaking out. We didn't know what to do," she said.

Dr. Keely Kolmes, a San Francisco-based psychologist who sees patients who practice BDSM, said that many of the acts listed in the indictment can be part of consensual activities. But others might indicate Bagley was an abuser, such as allegations that he shot animals the woman cared about to prove he could kill her and that he refused to stop immediately when the woman used a "safe word."

"Consensual BDSM does not involve holding minors hostage against their will or causing physical or mental harm," Kolmes said in an e-mail to the AP. "That is a criminal behavior."

Susan Wright, spokeswoman for the Baltimore-based National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, said some of the things Bagley is accused of are clearly abuse, if true.

"Certainly in abusive relationships, sometimes it's hard to parse out what people do voluntarily and what things they are coerced to do," said Wright, who helped write a sadomasochism vs. abuse policy statement in the late 1990s that has been adopted by national BDSM groups.

At times, it all becomes "tangled up," she said. "And at that point, I don't think any consent you give is legitimate consent."

It might be more helpful in regard to this if you addressed specific statistical information BillRM posts.

Quote:

jurisprudence
How Often Do Women Falsely Cry Rape?
The question the Hofstra disaster left dangling.
By Emily Bazelon and Rachael Larimore
Posted Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009, at 12:54 PM ET
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How often do women falsely cry rape? Because of the 18-year-old Hofstra student who recanted after telling police that five men had tricked her into a bathroom and then gang raped her two weeks ago, that question has been flying around the Internet. As Cathy Young notes in Newsday, the answers often fall into one of two camps. "Many feminists argue that the problem of false accusations is so minuscule that to discuss it extensively is a harmful distraction from the far more serious problem of rape. On the other side are men's-rights activists, claiming that false accusations are as much of a scourge as rape itself."

But isn't the rate of false rape charges an empirical question, with a specific answer that isn't vulnerable to ideological twisting? Yes and no. There has been a burst of research on this subject. Some of it is careful, but much of it is questionable. While most of the good studies converge at a rate of about 8 percent to 10 percent for false rape charges, the literature isn't quite definitive enough to stamp out the far higher estimates. And even if we go by the lower numbers, there's the question of interpretation. If one in 10 charges of rape is made up, is that a dangerously high rate or an acceptably low one? To put this in perspective, if we use the Bureau of Justice Statistics that show about 200,000 rapes in 2008, we could be looking at as many as 20,000 false accusations.

Legal scholars used to be routinely suspicious of rape victims. "Surely the simplest, and perhaps the most important, reason not to permit conviction for rape on the uncorroborated word of the prosecutrix is that the word is very often false," a Yale Law Journal article opined in 1952, echoing a view voiced since at least the 17th century. These views remained mainstream into the 1970s, if not later. As Marcia Clark said yesterday recalling the 1977 rape charges against Roman Polanski, "Those were the days when folks still believed rape was 'easy to charge and hard to disprove.' " And that old adage couldn't have been further from the truth. Prosecutors well knew that unless the victim was Snow White, the case was toast."

You can see what Susan Brownmiller was up against when she wrote her path-breaking feminist tract, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, in 1975.

In her book, Brownmiller said that only 2 percent of rape allegations are false, citing findings by the female police in a New York City rape squad. The problem is that while this statistic has been widely repeated, with dutiful mentions of New York-based "research," no one has ever tracked down its source. This we learned from a comprehensive review of the literature on false rape charges published in the Cambridge Law Journal in 2006. The author, Philip Rumney, finds a couple of small studies that back up the 2 percent claim but isn't confident of their methodology.

Rumney's survey of the terrain is the best we found. He also takes aim at the findings on the other end of the spectrum—the research that purports to show that the rate of false allegations of rape is in the range of 40 percent, as well as the flawed (but often cited) work that makes a crazy high jump to as high as 90 percent. The 40 percent figure is usually attributed to a 1994 article by E.J. Kanin in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Kanin looked at 109 reports of rape to police in one small Midwestern metropolitan area over nine years. His pool was small. The police he studied always offered the victim a polygraph—perhaps signaling they doubted her veracity. And Kanin himself "warns against generalizing from his findings" and points to reasons for questioning them, as Rumney explains.

The hugely high 90 percent false rate is several degrees more suspect. The citation for it is usually a study in Scotland by police surgeon N.M. MacLean of only 34 rape complaints made from 1969-74. Complaints were labeled false if they were made after a delay. Or if the victim didn't look "disheveled" or upset or seriously injured. But those factors don't necessarily indicate that a rape charge is trumped up. When police use stereotypes about rape to sort real allegations from false ones, they can do victims a real disservice, as this model paper from the Oregon Attorney General's Sexual Assault Task Force explains. In a 1981 study of 16 reports that claimed the victim admitted to making it up in 14 of them, one case was disproved because the police decided the woman was too large for the alleged rapist to have taken off her "extremely tight undergarments" against her will. Need we say that this not the critical eye we want from the cops?

Rumney's smart debunkings leave us with a group of American, British, Canadian, and New Zealand studies that converge around a rate of 8 percent to 10 percent for false reports of rape. Not all of these studies are flawless, but together they're better than the rest of the lot. They include a massive 1997 report on sexual assault by the U.S. Department of Justice, which includes data from 16,000 local, county, and state law enforcement agencies. The DoJ found that "in 1995, 87% of recorded forcible rapes were completed crimes and the remainder were classified as attempts. Law enforcement agencies indicated that about 8% of forcible rapes reported to them were determined to be unfounded and were excluded from the count of crimes."

If 8 percent to 10 percent is about right for false reporting of rape, based on what we know so far, how should we think about that number? Rumney says he's not sure whether crying wolf is more or less likely over rape than over other crimes, because the comparative research is even less conclusive. So that's a question that appears to have no answer at the moment. (A 2001 Department of Justice report says that the rate of false reports is similar for other crimes, but it also gives the 2 percent figure without a source, so we're skeptical.)

What is clear, however, are two problems that are the flip side of the same coin. False charges of rape are an absolute nightmare for the men caught in their net. And the specter of made-up allegations is a real problem for law enforcement—which means they are also a problem for women who are telling the truth. Let's take the men first. We've heard from many of them in e-mails and comments since the Hofstra incident. Here is one story, equal parts heartbreaking and thoughtful:

My girlfriend was raped several years ago. I was falsely accused of rape less than a year ago. I contacted her (I had known her before her incident) because I was desperate for someone to talk to who would understand what I was going through. To my great relief, it turned out that we understood each other very well. From the initial stages of suicidal thoughts and not being able to function to the long-term fear, mistrust, and guilt that are facts of our lives, it turns out that her experience of being raped and mine of being falsely accused of rape were very similar. … One important difference, though, is that when she was violated, she received a great deal of help (medical, legal, psychological). Apart from family and friends, I was on my own. My legal and psychological problems had to be dealt with by me at a time when I couldn't eat, sleep, or think (except, of course, about killing myself).

On the law enforcement end, we heard from Steve Cullen, an Army attorney who's worked extensively as a prosecutor. He offered this cogent—and dire—explanation of the reverberations when women cry wolf about rape:

False reports have an incredibly corrosive impact on how sexual assault accusations are policed. Police treat sexual assault accusers badly—much worse than the lawyers do—much worse than the courtroom does. Forget what you see on "Law and Order SVU," the police end absolutely discourages victims from reporting. Why is this so? Because cops suspect just about every victim is another false accuser, because either he/she has personally dealt with such a problem, or has heard stories from his or her cop buddies to this effect (and yes, in my experience female cops can be even worse offenders). This police behavior is bad, and counterproductive—but it's real. Putting a real stigma on false reports might combat this a bit—and make it a little easier for actual victims at the police station.

False reports also have a disproportionate impact on juries. How I'd hate to be prosecuting a sexual assault right now. Often in sexual assault prosecutions there's no debate as to the sex, but everything falls on proving lack of consent—and can only be proven through a convincing and persuasive victim's testimony. Often, that victim's testimony has to overcome some less than ideal circumstances—she was drinking, people observed her flirting with the perpetrator etc. That's something she can own up to, and overcome on her own. What she can't do on her own is extinguish jury members' memory of reading of some spectacular false accusation case in the newspaper last month. Every false accusation that makes it into the news makes it that much harder for the real victims to receive justice.

If police and juries are influenced by false reports, especially high-profile instances of false charges, like the Duke lacrosse case or the Hofstra case, why wouldn't those reports influence victims, too? Up to 60 percent of rapes go unreported. The Hofstra story will only make more women wonder if the police will believe them.

This is sobering. As, of course, is the whole topic. We're left to draw the following conclusion: False allegations of rape aren't rampant. But they don't have to be to cause terrible trouble. This is a problem that a men's rights movement shouldn't trump up. And also one that feminists can't dismiss.
http://www.slate.com/id/2231012

Absolutely no one condones someone who would deliberately make a false allegation of rape. That is a horrible thing to do to the individual falsely accused, and it is damaging to all of those who have actually been raped and need their complaints to be considered legitimate. Those who admit to making false accusations should be charged with filing a false police report. Those they have falsely accused should sue them for damages in civil court.

But bringing up the issue of false rape accusations detracts from a discussion of actual crimes, of rape. It is a tactic used by rape apologists--i.e.how can you believe her, look how many times women lie about such things. The fact is, more crimes of rape go unreported than false accusations are made. It does nothing to address the crime of rape when it dissolves into a discussion of who has been victimized more, innocent men who are accused, or women who are raped and not taken seriously by law enforcement. Both groups are harmed, but discouraging women from reporting rapes, and following through on pressing charges, also allows rapists to escape punishment and allows their crimes to continue, thereby posing a threat to even more women. I daresay that there are probably far more serial rapists than there are serial false accusers. A rapist who gets away with his crime is far more likely to repeat it. A woman who makes a false allegation, and admits it, has been exposed (and, if she doesn't admit it, or if evidence doesn't disprove her claim, you can't assume the accusation was false), and is not likely to do it again, or to be taken seriously if she does.

For most women, the legal process that ensues when she reports a rape is often a humiliating and highly stressful experience. In the past, her character, her sexual past, her behavior, became the focus of defense tactics. That's why rape shield laws were passed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_shield_law

But, even with such laws in place, the woman often subjects herself to a frustrating and painful emotional ordeal when she reports a rape. That is why so many rapes go unreported, and why the issue of false allegations should be kept in perspective.

Why are some of you posting random stories about rape to the thread? Reminds me of Pamela Rosa's collections.

Um, because this is a thread about rape?