@failures art,
Quote:
You are correct. Many states create a lesser crime for an equally heinous offense. The distinction is meaningless.
In the crime of murder, we don't have a different class of crime for if the murder is done with a knife versus a gun. The creation of which would be meaningless. Both offenses are EQUALLY heinous, and deserve equal treatment under the law.
A woman who has intercourse forced upon her is no less traumatized than a woman who is forced to have oral sex, be urinated/defecated on, or penetrated with a foreign object other than a penis. The same applies for a man. The laws should reflect that. It does not appear that they do (in some places).
Because you consider certain crimes "equally heinous" does not mean the law regards them the same way. For instance, we have many different legal charges to cover the killing of another person besides "murder". The punishment for each of these crimes may differ significantly, but, in each instance, a victim is dead. If you were to punish the offender simply for the fact that a victim is dead, why do we have, or need to have, all those other crimes, with all those varying sentences, when it comes to killing another person, why not just have murder? In some states the killing of a police officer is a capital offense, where the deaths of civilians might not carry an automatic death penalty. Is the life of a police officer really worth more than the life of someone else in the community, like a cardiac surgeon or a school teacher?
There are varying reasons why the law defines the killing of another human by different crimes. The same is true for why it regards and defines different types of sexual assaults as being different crimes,
I don't think you have any basis in fact for saying that a woman is as equally traumatized emotionally by a rape as she would be by having something else offensive done to her, like being urinated/defecated on. While both may be emotionally degrading experiences, one does involve a literal physical invasion of her body, an assault inside the body, which can also do considerably more actual physical damage than being urinated on.
I think you are also failing to fully appreciate the "assault" part of "sexual assaults". These aren't just regarded as sexual acts, sexual assaults are classified as crimes of violence. You can't just look at these crimes from the perspective of degree of emotional trauma to the victim, there are different degrees of violence to the human body, of physical trauma, involved with different sexual assaults, and people vary in their emotional reactions to trauma.
When women were regarded as the property of their husbands, her rape was considered to be a crime against her husband, and not against the woman herself, and the crime was considered a theft. Rapes of unmarried women were sometimes not even regarded as crimes. Not until women were regarded as independent, legally separate human beings, did rape even come to be recognized as a crime against the woman. And, until fairly recently, the rape laws, and the treatment of rape in the criminal justice system in the U.S. and Canada, were significantly biased against the female victim and in favor of the male defendant. One reason that "sexual assault" replaced "rape" in the Canadian system was to emphasize the violent and aggressive nature of the crime rather than its sexual aspects.
Male rape has a somewhat different history
Quote:Historically, the rape of males was more widely recognized in ancient times. Several of the legends in Greek mythology involved abductions and sexual assaults of males by other males or gods. The rape of a defeated male enemy was considered the special right of the victorious soldier in some societies and was a signal of the totality of the defeat. There was a widespread belief that a male who was sexually penetrated, even if it was by forced sexual assault, thus "lost his manhood," and could no longer be a warrior or ruler. Gang rape of a male was considered an ultimate form of punishment and, as such, was known to the Romans as punishment for adultery and the Persians and Iranians as punishment for violation of the sanctity of the harem (Donaldson, 1990).
Nicholas Groth, a clinical psychologist and author of Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender, says all sexual assault is an act of aggression, regardless of the gender or age of the victim or the assailant. Neither sexual desire nor sexual deprivation is the primary motivating force behind sexual assault. It is not about sexual gratification, but rather a sexual aggressor using somebody else as a means of expressing their own power and control.
In some states, the word "rape" is used only to define a forced act of vaginal sexual intercourse, and an act of forced anal intercourse is termed "sodomy." In some states, the crime of sodomy also includes any oral sexual act. There are some states that now use gender-neutral terms to define acts of forced anal, vaginal or oral intercourse. Also, some states no longer use the terms "rape" and "sodomy," rather all sex crimes are described as sexual assaults or criminal sexual conduct of various degrees depending on the use and amount of force or coercion on the part of the assailant .
http://www.ncvc.org/ncvc/main.aspx?dbName=DocumentViewer&DocumentID=32361
Most of the time, when people talk about male rape they are talking about forcible rapes committed by males, where the victim is also male, and anal penetration is involved. Those rapes are now equivalent legally with rapes of females by males.
English law chooses to reserve the term "rape" exclusively for a crime that involves male penetration of a woman's vagina without consent. That does not mean that they do not similarly punish women who commit a crime that involves penetration of a man's anus without consent.
Quote:Under English law, it is possible for a woman to 'rape' a man, but the woman would be prosecuted for the offence of assault by penetration and not for the offence of rape... Section 2 of the 2003 Act introduces a new sexual offence, "assault by penetration", with the same punishment as rape. It is committed when someone sexually penetrates the anus or vagina with a part of his or her body, or with an object, without that person's consent.
So, what difference does it really make if the crime is called "rape" when the victim is female, but "assault by penetration" if the victim is male, as long as the punishments are equivalent? The English system equates the unlawful penetration of the woman's vagina by a male with the unlawful pentration of the man's anus by the female. That seems reasonable.
I'm not sure that when a female has sexual intercourse with a man, without consent, that we are talking about "rape" as "rape" has been understood historically in the law, or even in the general culture. And I am not at all sure it is completely equivalent to male on female rape or male on male rape in its seriousness as an aggressive or violent offense.
It is also extremely difficult to get statistics regarding female on male forced intercourse. These figures, for instance, include intercourse which was forced on males by both males and females.
Quote:Forced intercourse
•Percent of women 18-44 years of age ever forced by a male to have sexual intercourse at some time in their lives, 2002: 22.6%
(Based on the question: "Have you ever been forced by a male to have vaginal intercourse against your will?"
•Percent of men 18-44 years of age ever forced by a male or female to have sexual intercourse at some time in their lives, 2002: 7.6%
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/abc_list_f.htm#forced
This is a news story about a man who reported to the police that he was "raped by a woman".
Quote:
San Diego News
Local Man Claims Woman Raped Him
UPDATED: 10:43 am PDT September 21, 2007
COLINA DEL SOL, Calif. -- A local man claims he was raped by a woman. Police disagree.
As 10News digital correspondent Ron Tuatagaloa reports, the man says police are treating him differently because of his gender.
George Kelly does a lot of reading and Web surfing these days in an effort to forget the night last week when a distraught neighbor came to his door, ostensibly to talk about her son's deployment to Iraq.
"She goes into the thing about her husband dying and then she jumped from that to not having sex," Kelley claims.
It was a topic George wasn't comfortable with, but despite his protests the talk turned physical.
"She pinned me down on the bed," he said.
Kelly claims he was raped. However, according to the investigation, there's no proof; no evidence; no smoking gun. The only remnant is an apologetic phone message left by George's alleged attacker.
"I'm really sorry, OK, [about] what happened. And, um, you were right, you know. It shouldn't have happened. OK. Think like it never happened," the woman said in a recorded phone message.
It is proof of an uncomfortable interaction, perhaps, but not a rape. Which is what detectives of the sex crimes unit determined when they investigated Kelly's accusation.
Still, Kelly thinks he was brushed off because of his gender.
"I'm trying to be strong. I'm angry. I just want to... I don't know. I don't want to just feel like nothing happened. It did happen. It did happen. It happened to me," he insisted.
A police representative said Kelly's claims were investigated thoroughly, and according to department policy all rape claims are treated equally regardless of the victim's gender.
http://www.10news.com/news/14173622/detail.html
I'm not sure that this man was brushed off because of his gender. There is absolutely no evidence to prove that the sex occurred, let alone that it was forced. And that would be the problem with the police following up on stories like this, where an adult man alleges that a woman forced him to have intercourse, but there are no witnesses or any evidence to substantiate the attack. One could argue that the police showed sexist bias because the complainant was male, but there really isn't evidence of that either.
Also, in this story, as in many stories (mostly outside the U.S.) where men claim such things, the motive given was that the woman was "sex starved" which is inconsistent with generally accepted motives for sexual crimes as acts of aggression or violence. The alleged victim in this case was possibly perpetuating that same myth about why a woman would do that to him. Why do people assume a woman would not force sex for the same reasons men do--domination, power, humiliation of the victim, etc.
I think male victims of sexual assaults by females have to be urged to come forward to report such crimes. There are not enough meaningful statistics to evaluate the extent of the problem. And we don't know how law enforcement and the criminal justice system treats the problem of forced intercourse of adult men by women. If we can't find the cases, and look at the punishments given out, I'm not sure we can jump to conclusion that existing laws are unfair to men. These cases have to wind up in courtrooms before we can find out how the criminal justice system is handling them. I want male victims treated fairly too.
