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

You're forgetting, both Hall and Clifford were found guilty. The police had every right, and duty, to go after people like that.

It's the courts that are doing this, not the government

Craigslist rapist gets 36 years
By Amanda MarrazzoTribune reporter
May 8, 2014

A Woodstock man accused of raping eight women he met through online sex ads was sentenced this afternoon to 36 years in prison.

Charles Oliver, 46, was convicted by a McHenry County jury in February of criminal sexual assault and unlawful restraint of a 22-year-old woman in his home in November 2012. In March, he pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a second woman he had met on Craigslist and paid for sex.

In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors dropped the remaining six cases against Oliver and agreed not to press any new charges should additional claims be made.

"Sir, this court finds you to truly be a predator," Judge Sharon Prather told Oliver. "You had no (regard) for these women. ... You treated them horribly. ... You humiliated and degraded them. ... I saw the fear and terror in the faces of many of those women."

Authorities said Oliver had a pattern of meeting women online and agreeing to exchange money for sex with them. But after taking them back to his home, he became threatening, verbally abusive and, in some cases, violent, and forced the women to perform acts to which they had not agreed. He often videotaped these acts.

During his trial, videos were shown of Oliver engaging in sex with the two victims he's convicted of raping. In one video, Oliver is seen forcing himself on the second victim and verbally berating her. The woman is seen and heard crying and saying, "no," "stop" and "you’re scaring me." Oliver could be heard saying, "I don’t have to listen to you. I paid you."

Both women testified at Oliver’s trial, describing similar encounters.

Police said Oliver also stole women’s IDs and threatened to expose them as prostitutes if they reported what he had done, authorities said.

During a search of Oliver’s Woodstock home, authorities discovered zip ties, police scanners, personal items belonging to several different women and a large volume of photographs and videos that he had made of himself having sex with various women.

Following the trial, rape victim advocates lauded the conviction, which they said dispels the dangerous fallacy that someone who accepts money for sex does not have the right to say no.

Before handing down her sentence, Prather told Oliver that he had made a choice to pick "vulnerable women" to abuse. He took advantage of the fact that they were troubled and that they would be reluctant to report him because they had offered sex for money, the judge said.

Prather noted that she had "the displeasure" of viewing the many sex videos he had made of the women.

Woodstock Police Detective George Kopulos took the stand today and said there were other women he had seen on Oliver’s sex videos who had not yet been identified. One woman "was tied up and screaming," the detective said.

"We still have concerns about her safety and where she is located," Kopulos said.

Kopulos said detectives have reached out to other states trying to reach other women seen in photographs and on videos retrieved from Oliver’s home.

Oliver also admitted to having herpes and still choosing not to wear condoms, the officer said.

Woodstock Police Detective Robbie Branum testified about another woman whose mother had reported she had been raped. The woman agreed to sex for money and gave an account similar to other victims.

She met Oliver through Backpage.com and he picked her up in Rockford. Oliver he gave her $40 to buy drugs, then they went back to his home where he became threatening and belligerent, Branum said.

In the basement, he told her, “She was gonna do whatever he said if she was gonna go home,” Branum said.

At one point he gave her a gun and told her to point it at him, when she could not comply with his demands he took it away from her and said, "You’ll never be in control."

Oliver also friended this woman’s mother on Facebook and began threatening that he would rape her daughter again, Branum said.

Prosecutors also played recorded jailhouse phone calls where Oliver is heard saying to an unidentified man: "I should have killed them it would have been easier."

In another phone call, he is heard saying, “What was I supposed to do? Pluck women on the street or go in a schoolyard?”

Defense attorney Jeff Altman said Oliver had no other criminal history and believed he could be rehabilitated.

"He lived a relatively normal life, but for the fact that he frequented the company of prostitutes," Altman said, adding that there is nothing that he has done that indicates he "should be locked up of the rest of his life."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/suburbs/mchenry_woodstock_huntley/chi-craigslist-rapist-gets-36-years-in-prison-20140508,0,7601172.story

Quote:

It's the courts that are doing this, not the government

You are pulling my leg now, I know that you are not this stupid.

Can anyone please sumarise the discussion so far ? :p

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2013/10/24/statistics-dont-back-up-claims-about-rape-culture

Statistics surrounding sexual assault are notoriously unreliable and inconsistent, primarily because of vague and expansive definitions of what qualifies as sexual assault. Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute explains that the study often cited as the origin of the "one in five" factoid is an online survey conducted under a grant from the Justice Department. Surveyors employed such a broad definition that "'forced kissing" and even "attempted forced kissing" qualified as sexual assault.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics' "Violent Victimization of College Students" report tells a different and more plausible story about campus culture. During the years surveyed, 1995-2002, the DOJ found that there were six rapes or sexual assaults per thousand per year. Across the nation's four million female college students, that comes to about one victim in forty students. Other DOJ statistics show that the overall rape rate is in sharp decline: since 1995, the estimated rate of female rape or sexual assault victimizations has decreased by about 60 percent.

Of course, there are still far too many college women who are victims of sexual assault. But there's little evidence to support the claim that campus rape is an "epidemic," as Yale student activist Alexandra Brodsky recently wrote in the Guardian.

Bolstered by inflated statistics and alarmist depictions of campus culture, advocates have been successful in initiating policy changes designed to better protect victims of sexual violence. Duke, Swarthmore, Amherst, Emerson and the University of North Carolina are among the many institutions that have recently reviewed and revised their policies. It is not clear that these policies have made campuses safer places for women, but they have certainly made them treacherous places for falsely accused men.

[Read the U.S. News Debate: Should Women Be Allowed to Fight in Combat?]

In January 2010, University of North Dakota student Caleb Warner was accused of sexually assaulting a fellow student. A UND tribunal determined that Warner was guilty of misconduct, and he was swiftly suspended from school and banned from setting foot on campus for three years. Yet the police – presented with the same evidence – were so unconvinced of Warner's guilt that they refused to bring criminal charges against him. Instead, they charged his accuser with filing a false report and issued a warrant for her arrest. Warner's accuser fled town and failed to appear to answer the charges.

Despite these developments, the university repeatedly rejected Warner's requests for a rehearing. Finally, a year and a half later, UND reexamined Warner's case and determined that their finding of guilt was "not substantiated" – but only after the civil liberties group FIRE intervened and launched a national campaign on Warner's behalf.

Unfortunately, Warner is not alone in his grievances. Across the country, students accused of sexual assault are regularly tried before inadequate and unjust campus judiciaries. At most schools, cases of sexual misconduct are decided by a committee of as few as three students, faculty members or administrators. At Swarthmore College, volunteers are now being solicited via email to serve on the Sexual Assault and Harassment Hearing Panel. Such a panel is far more likely to yield gender violence activists than impartial fact finders. In a court of law, we rely on procedural safeguards to ensure unbiased jury selection and due process. But on the college campus, these safeguards have vanished.

[Read the U.S. News Debate: Is There a Republican 'War on Women'?]

What's more, campus judiciaries operate under a dangerously low standard of proof for sexual assault cases, thanks to federal mandates. Since April 2011, the Department of Education has required institutions to consider cases of sexual misconduct under a "preponderance of evidence" standard (rather than a higher "clear and convincing" standard, which was commonly used prior to the new guidelines). This means that if a majority of committee members believe it is just slightly more likely than not that a sexual assault occurred, they must side with the accuser.

Sexual assault is a horrific offense, and institutions must do all they can to protect victims. It is admirable that activists like Chadwick are trying to fight it. However, a false accusation of rape can also have devastating, life-altering consequences. Universities have an obligation to protect the rights of all students – both victims of sexual assault and the accused. They must stop responding to questionable statistics and abstract claims about a rape culture and instead focus on ensuring basic fairness for all students.

Meanwhile, advocates for due process, rules of evidence, basic justice and true gender equality need to speak louder than the "f*ckrapeculture" alarmists.

Caroline Kitchens is a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute.

If we would stop trying to define sexual assaults as drunken consensual sex...

Of course, there are still far too many college women who are victims of sexual assault...

Sexual assault is a horrific offense, and institutions must do all they can to protect victims.

Are men too lacking in self control to abide by such laws?

Drunk sex can be fantastic , and I have no desire to deprive myself of it.

Can anyone please sumarise the discussion so far ? :p

africanman wrote:

Can anyone please sumarise the discussion so far ? :p

Let me take a stab at condensing this for you. BillRM and Hawkeye firmly believe that any female over the age of 8, is in desperate need of having a brute penetrate their genital areas. All these poor guys are languishing in prison for accommodating the unholy urges of this demographic, also known as women of any age. They believe that unless they are wearing chastity belts they are fair game. If their fathers or husbands were smart, they would make sure their daughters and wives we constantly protected with armed bodyguards, but only eunuchs. Exactly how they know this is unknowable. That's something stored away in their fevered imagination. Most of the population is horrified that such things happen. I think that sums it up. This conversation was started in 2010 and I don't know how it got legs.