SEEMINGLY inappropriate? OK, I’ll bite: please explain one or two examples of how a judge could have “good reasons” for putting a rapist back with his kids in only 2 months.
If you can’t come up with two different possibilities, then let’s just have one. Tell us what set of circumstances there would have to be for this sentence to be appropriate.
Asking you why you feel that our anger over years of child-rape and a non-sentence in order to send him back to the daughter he raped for all her life is “vindictive” is the height of male-privilege?
Never mind to my initial curiosity, I don’t think any further explanation will allow us to understand your initial comments in a more productive sense.
We are even sympathetic to the idea of recidivism and overzealous prosecution, but these statements are so utterly disjointed that I have no interest.
But you’re going to trolley us anyway.
Fuck the women in her family
Yes, and by yes, I mean yes on crack. It ain’t murder crime. It’s murder. It ain’t burgarly crime. It’s burgarly. This is all part and parcel of our inability to call a spade a fucking spade. When one forces oneself on another without consent, one has committed rape and that one is a rapist. Sure, that may not be all that they are. I’m a mother, a daughter, a wife, and a librarian. But if I commit rape, I’m also a rapist. End of story.
I’m very conflicted about this viewpoint. I’m certainly not of the opinion that if you have a vagina, that gives you a free pass. (Although, if there are free passes for having one, I’d like to know, particularly if there are discounts at Trader Joe’s.) We don’t know their situations. It’s just too easy to say the supporting women are as blameworthy as the fucker who raped a 12-year-old. Maybe all those extreme Latter Day Saints women are to blame for not protecting their children. Would we agree with that? I don’t have the answer here. I’m just suggesting that there are more complex and sick reasons for their defense of his actions than are dreamt of in your philosophies, Horatio.
Stockholm syndrome is a real thing. Especially with abusers. Abusers love taking advantage of unreliable reward, and that leads to things pike sunk cost fallacy thinking.
“maybe he’ll be nice this time. He didn’t hit me two weeks ago.”
Agreed. But this goes way, way beyond Stockholm Syndrome and into ugly, ugly gender/power dynamics that have existed for thousands of years that we are only beginning to investigate. Sure, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” in 1792, but that’s a good two-thousand years after we started keeping track of time before someone was able to put to paper as she did: “Hey! Things aren’t equal.” We may have come a long way, baby, but we ain’t there yet and to deny the massive influence of gender norms is to stick our heads in the dirt like a cheap plastic flamingo in Alabama. (I may, or may not, have more than one of these in my yard.)
Absolutely. But I’m on a phone right now, so I had to simplify so I won’t go crazy typing ten paragraphs.
Sex crimes is a category that includes rape, because rape is sex-related. Violent crimes is a category that includes murder. Property crimes is a category that includes burglary. These categories are in everyday use; I doubt anyone thinks using the phrase “sex crimes” sounds softer or better than saying “rape.” It’s hardly a polite euphemism.
He probably did. She almost certainly wasn’t the only victim. There are probably many others in that family who are afraid to come forward
Rape is a violent crime against a person perpetrated under the guise of sex. If that’s how we’re defining ‘sex crime’ then we’re on the same page.
I think the reason some people (myself included) tend to balk at using the phrase ‘sex crime’ is that it condenses the nature of the crime to the point of being simplistic. It doesn’t really acknowledge the violence—physical and psychological—that compounds the trauma of such an act. I’m not sure any phrase could sufficiently describe the horror of being raped, which is why some of us insist on calling rape, well, rape.
Sexual assault falls under Violent Crimes, as does murder. Despite what Law & Order tells us, municipalities don’t have separate divisions to deal with only rape cases.
I wasn’t talking about which office of the police department handles things, but categories used for statistics. Sexual assault is both a sex crime and a violent crime.
I’ve been binge reading it over the past several days and oh man is it ever brilliant. I haven’t even started with the constitutional law section yet.
Aka: Christ, What an Asshole.
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