Sexual Assaults in the militaryFollow

One of the two people I mentioned earlier who were known rape victims was raped at a party of all known friends, by a friend, in a house owned by a friend. We'd all known each other for years, grown up together, etc.

She had drank a lot, so we made her slow down, eat, drink water, and put her to bed. Another friend stayed in the room with her, sleeping on the floor in case she needed anything.

After the friend was asleep, one of the guys at the party (who I had known for at least 5 or 6 years at that point), came in and raped her. It was never reported, and he doesn't consider it rape because she "consented." The friend on the floor didn't wake up.

He was completely sober, and had only stopped by the party after work. He was intending to drive home, so he had MAYBE two beers the entire time he was there.

This is someone I would have imagined incapable of doing this sort of thing.

The horrible reality is that a disgusting number of rapes (as if there's such a thing as a non-disgusting number of rapes) are committed by people who know the victim. Avoiding environments with strangers might reduce your chances of being raped (I don't know - maybe most non-forcible rapes are committed by known assailants), but it's not going to eliminate them.

And I really don't feel like engaging in victim blaming in either case. It's not a woman's fault she was raped just because she went to a party. It's the rapist's fault. She has the right to go wherever the **** she wants, do whatever the **** she wants, and not be blamed for being in an environment where it would be easier for some monster to harm her.

Yeah, there is something we can do.

You're the one ****-shaming. I said nothing about it being shameful to drink with strangers. It's not any more shameful than not locking your doors or living in Oklahoma.

You're putting rape into some special category of crime that makes it unavoidable. Nothing is unavoidable.

You should be sorry.





Edited, Jun 5th 2013 3:23pm by Elinda

Yes, rape is avoidable. If you avoid rapists.

If you figure out a way to identify those ahead of time, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know. Most of my friends are female.

Not all rapists have a *****.

The successful ones do!

I know. I was just being a dick.

But any situation not specifically mentioned here, is fine. Right?

Why would you ever blame a woman for being raped?

By stating that there are precautions a person can take to avoid being a victim of crime is NOT blaming the victim for the crime.


I agree. I never once alluded to such a thing.



Edited, Jun 5th 2013 5:26pm by Elinda

Conversely, if a guy went out, got drunk, and then had some girl haul him into court claiming that vaguely remembered sex he thought was consensual really wasn't. Well, I wouldn't have any sympathy for him.

*Writes Note* Fat chicks who know how to use their mouths stop potential rapists. Got it.

The buddy system is absolutely wiser than going along. But the problem is that it's really not much harder to spike two drinks than one.

And I think one of the significant aspects of disagreement here is that there are two major points of consideration for discussion, and they're being talked about simultaneously.

One is the day to day experience of women in our society, and their interactions with rape as a tangible risk.

The other is the issue of rape as a tangible risk in our society.

Language regarding things like "don't dress provacatively, don't get wasted, etc." is really damaging in the context of the society-wide issue, because it shifts the discussion away from rape prevention entirely. Because the problem with an approach that focuses on diminishing the chances of a specific woman being the victim is that it does nothing with reducing the number of victims overall. If you are at a party, and you and your 5 friends aren't letting a single one of you out of their sights, the ******* with the roofies is just going to find some other woman there. A rape still occurs, he just raped someone else. So the overall systemic issue isn't addressed at all. There will ALWAYS be a weakest member of a pack, and constant vigilance isn't possible. What we need to do is figure out ways, as a society, to stem the impulses that lead to rape in the first place.

I'm a big fan of blanket education regarding rape. If you let the conversation shift from "Women, here's how you protect yourself" to "People, this is how you protect each other," it just becomes far more effective (statistically proven), and I would hope (though have no confidence to say it does) it has an effect on diminishing the number of attempted rapes through education. So that ******** who don't understand what consent actually means systematically get taught it as part of typical social experience.

Right now, so much energy goes into teaching girls how not to get raped that very little goes into teaching both men and women how to look out for women around them and (by extension) teach widespread understandings of consent.

You and I consume very different media.

This is a summary of the CNN coverage. From my perspective, it's casting these young men as the victims - not as perpetrators of a heinous crime. All the sympathy goes to them, not the young women who was raped. No opprobrium. This is "mainstream" coverage. Obviously a lot of the coverage from blogs etc was hard on the rapists - but in the mainstream the message was essentially "awww those poor young men had their lives ruined"

Edited, Jun 5th 2013 11:45am by Olorinus