Rape sucksFollow

Your mother is lazy.

I didn't know you were a rapist, BT.

It's public record if you check up.

Yes, but will you take down the posters?

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?




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.

Gbaji, the system isn't overwhelmed because we're over-prosecuting rape, but rather because we pursue drug offenders too vigorously. Sex offenders don't have their own specialized PO's.

The rest of your post is equally deluded. There are in fact already varying degrees of sexual assault, little buddy. Anyone convicted of any degree of sex assault will undergo a sex offender evaluation and treatment will be decided from there. You surely understand that the reason your friendly neighborhood date-rapist is as dangerous the violent rapist is because they can be the same guy, just at different points in their progression.

Really? They track where drug offenders live? They put them on a website so that the community can know if one of their neighbors was convicted of a drug crime? They require drug offenders to report any change of address and to notify said tracking system? No... They don't.

The reason they didn't catch this guy sooner was because he played games with the system. He had an address in one county, his mother lived in another county, and his grandmother in yet another. All were relatively close though. What he was doing was changing his address for the purposes of the sex offender database to one of those counties, while committing a crime in another. In one case they had a very accurate sketch of him, but he wasn't picked up for questioning because they only checked for sex offenders in the county where the crime occurred. He worked the system.

It's not hard to figure out that the reason they only check the local county registry is because if you assume it's someone from outside your county, your search becomes very very large. If they had smaller registries, limited only to the most violent offenders and most likely to re-offend, they could search an entire state, or every offender within a 500 mile radius, or any other relatively "large" area, with the same amount of overhead and he likely would have been caught.



Not really. The motivations for the two types of crime are completely different. The vast majority of date-rape offenders will never "progress" to stalking, kidnapping, and raping women. Their motivation is sex, not violence or control. They just don't follow socially acceptable boundaries when pursuing it (by getting a girl drunk and taking advantage of her for example). The kind of guys who commit the sort of crimes Gardner committed don't start out by pressuring their girlfriend to have sex with them. They start out by abusing small animals and then go on to people. Women are often the target because they are often acting out some sort of rage about some sexual abuse they themselves received as a child.


I'm frankly shocked that you could even pretend that the two are similar crimes. They are similar *only* by the label that is applied, and the fact that sex is involved.

Oh where's Anna when you need her.

After 2 /facepalms and 20 minutes of reading gbaji's waterboarding of the English language. . . .

Having sex with a woman who has not consciously agreed to have sex and communicated that to you is rape, assault, sexual assault. . . add more twisted definitions here.

Whether the lever is a knife to the throat, rohypnol, emotional blackmail or simply preying on insecurities, it still constitutes a justification for justice with two carefully yet swiftly applied bricks.

No.

Uh, if we're going to trim the sex offender database, we may as well trim the ones that aren't actually harming people... like drunk guys taking a ****, et al. Not someone who deems it their right to forcibly coerce a woman into having sex.

I imagine if you're the woman being raped, it doesn't really matter which situation you're in. Either way, it's horrible, and the guy needs to be behind bars, and on a sex offender registry. They both deserve the same punishment. Which, in my opinion, should be life in prison, not some time served and a registry list you can get around.

Did you seriously just write that? BS. Bull Fucking shit. Women who have been raped in a situation similar to the one I wrote about (assuming of course that they weren't actually killed and dumped in some bushes) are pretty darn likely to look at the situation in the OP and think that she's a whiny ***** who doesn't really know what being raped is like. And they'd be right.



Yes. It's horrible. But one is 100,000 times more horrible than the other. And no, the guy in the OP does *not* need to be behind bars. Not unless the story of threats of violence can be proven. You get that, right? And even if it is proven, the charge should be far far less serious than in the other situation.



You have got to be kidding me! Both deserve the same punishment? A guy who uses verbal threats to talk a girl in his class to have sex with him? He never laid a finger on her. She kept going back to him the whole time. Are you kidding me? If you want to say he's an A-hole for taking advantage of her, I'd agree. But she also let him do it. She had the power to walk away at any time. She choose not to for months. That's not rape, that's a relationship. A screwed up one, perhaps. But a relationship nonetheless.

That's the difference here. There is no psychological game going on in the scenario I outlined. The victim didn't have a choice. She didn't choose to hang out with the guy. She didn't choose to continue having sex with him and then later call it rape. She knew the instant he attacked that he was there to hurt her. She never for one second didn't know that she was being raped. She did not wander around for months in denial wondering to what degree she was responsible for what happened, much less having to realize after the fact that she was raped.


To even vaguely relate those crimes is just astounding to me. I can't understand how anyone could do that.

Edited, Mar 15th 2010 8:19pm by gbaji

This has to top a list of the most idiotic statements you've ever made in the history of these forums. My god, are you completely unaware of the concept of empathy? Do you really think that women who were beaten by their rapists will look at a date-rape victim and go "quit whining and go without justice, you prissy *****"? What the **** is wrong with you?