@firefly,
firefly wrote:
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?
The difference in comparing murder with manslaughter and rape with sexual assault is that murder and are related in specific degrees of intent (and additionally negligence in many manslaughter cases). With rape and sexual assault, there is no way to declare that the vaginal rape of a woman is more heinous of a crime than the sexual humiliation and/or violence of any other sexual offense.
As for the killing of a officer being a capital crime, no, I don't agree. Lives are lives.
firefly wrote:
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.
I think you're failing to fully appriciate the "assault" part. In all seriousness. You linked below to the English sexual assault laws. This underlines my point completely. Please compare the violence and trauma of a person who has been forcibly entered with a penis versus a person forcibly entered with a police baton. Please compare the psychological nature of the aggressors in both cases.
Beyond this simple point, a person who is sexually assaulted in a way other than being penetrated should not be assumed to have less physical or psychological trauma.
firefly wrote:
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.
I'm not sure what your point is here. I think Canada has it correct, and protects the rights of all citizens better with their legal language. Rape is violent crime of power. If you read the links I sent to you about female sex offenders, you see that the trend in female sex offenders is that they deny anything sexual about their crime. They would often describe their act as "punishment." One of the frequent trends would be to force a child to masturbate, or eat it's own body fluids (feces, urine, semen, or vomit). Canada Criminal laws recognize that the violent nature of the sexual assaults is more worth emphasis than simple penetration. I'm inclined to agree.
firefly wrote:
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.
Yes, I post to this point many pages back. Rapists typically are not acting on their base physiological desires, but rather their insecurity and desire to have power over another individual.
firefly wrote:
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.
This is good, however it stops shy of where I personally believe it needs to be.
firefly wrote:
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.
The difference is not only about male or female victim. This as written still affects women negatively. What's the difference between forcing a penis in a victim versus a police baton?
When the woman or man who is forcibly entered with a non-penis confesses they were raped, are you going to correct them? Are you going to tell me that you're going to place your hand on their shoulder and tell them "I'm sorry, I think you mean that you were
sexually assaulted. You weren't
raped." No. I don't believe you would.
As I already mentioned above I think this is problematic. While it's good that a man has legal recourse, saying that it is equal is false. First, the crime still only pertains to forced penetration. Second, once we've created a parallel crime, we create a door for bias in the prosecution of these crimes. It's a separate but equal case, and it is the wrong approach in my opinion.
firefly wrote:
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.
Returning to murder for a moment, it doesn't matter if you poison someone in their sleep and they die peacefully or if you butcher them with a chainsaw. It's Murder 1, if it was premeditated.
I'm not particularly interested in how culture has viewed rape, and neither are you. We both recognize our culture's past failure on this topic. Our ancestors were wrong about women as property, and I think how we "historically" have viewed rape female-male is incorrect as well.
firefly wrote:
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.
Replace the pronouns and we'd both agree that the case deserves to be investigated. The woman he is accusing deserves to be treated as innocent, but the case should not be taken any less seriously.
firefly wrote:
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.
This issue is talked about in the second feminist blog post I put up. The language used when a woman is the sex offender is awful. The media often refers to it as a "sex scandal," etc. I'd not put too much merit into "sex starved" either. I don't assume that a woman does these things for different reasons. However, I also don't think that the victim ever really understands why they were chosen. It's honestly an awful question to ask a person who has been assaulted. I'd never ask a women why she thought a man raped her.
firefly wrote:
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.
If the law is written in such a way that these cases aren't making it to trial, then what's the point in looking for the cases? When looking for rape convictions in a time when women were considered property, you'd not find any either; you'd find (as you noted)
theft convictions. You shouldn't base your understanding of male victims on the legal case load of the past. It will fail you.
We can't find these cases, but we can find the offenses. This is a problem.
I can't see how a gender inclusive legal definition (such as Canada's) is wrong. Would you support that definition in the USA? If no, why not?
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