ElneClare wrote:
nope, I am not smart enough that I can't help but to respond to this caveman's idea, that it's got to be the female's fault.
I didn't say it was her fault. I said that we can't assume that she was raped. You get that there's a whole range of "bad things" that can happen to you in your life that don't include being raped, right?
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Only thing I can guess is that no women in Gbaji's family, have ever admitted to having been victim of abuse or raped.
You have no clue how wrong you are. Look. I don't take the position I take on this issue because I'm some unfeeling guy who thinks that women should just suffer at the hands of brutal men and keep their mouths shut. I take the position I do out of a mature recognition of the fact that as we expand the different types of situations which we classify as "rape" (whether in legal code or social definition), we automatically lump a whole lot of less violent guys in with the truly horrible ones. And as we do that, we make it harder to make real legal distinctions between the guy who got his girl friend drunk at a party and took advantage of the situation, and the guy who stalked a woman, followed her home, broke in, terrorized her, beat her, raped her, and left her for dead.
A recent event here in San Diego has highlighted this. Everyone is wondering why "the system" failed to properly keep track of John Gardner. Why wasn't he sentenced more strongly? Why were numerous parole violations allowed to slide? Why weren't we able to protect our children from someone who every single professional who examined him said would repeat offend (violently) if he was released? Why? Because the system set up to track guys like that is overwhelmed with tracking guys convicted in cases like the one in the OP. Guys with a low chance of re-offending, a low chance of violently attacking a random woman on the street, and a very very low chance of killing a victim in the future.
When I read posts like the ones in this thread, all smug and self confident about the inherent
rightness of going after guys who are far at the other end of the spectrum in terms of real danger, I honestly feel like I need to scream at the computer. I wonder how you can just plain not see that in your desire to get guys like those in the OP, you are making it harder to get the guys who are real threats. Nothing the girl in the OP went through is even in the same category as what girls like Chelsea King and Amber Dubuois suffered. It's not even vaguely close.
I hold the positions I do because I want to protect women from the latter sort of attacks. I want to make sure that the guys who commit those sorts of crimes are punished to the full extent of the law. And I see the kind of "punish guys for being guys" movement going on right now as being one of the major reasons why we're unable to do that. Right now, there is a push for a "one strike" penalty for guys like Gardner. But that can only happen if there is a real legal distinction which can be made between the crime he originally was convicted of, and those of a more questionable nature. We can't have stiff sentencing if the criteria for a given charge is too broad. But that's exactly what we've been doing over the last couple decades, and it's giving the true predators in our society ways to sneak through the cracks.
Do not even pretend to assume what my motivations are for this, or what experiences I'm operating on. You would almost certainly be wrong.