This. Whereas rapists almost never just stop at one. The murderer who kills for greed, may consider doing it again, partly because they are willing to place a literal dollar value on human life. The more steeped you are in comitting violence, the more likely you are to resort to it.
But rape is a crime of entitlement. Not just entitlement to sex, but feeling entitled to do whatever you want to another person. Murderers with that mindset are highly dangerous, too… but that’s actually not your garden variety murder.
Basically, the motives for murder vary greatly. The motives for rape, down at the core really don’t.
But how much is that an aversion to murder, and how much is that an aversion to external consequences? As someone with an aversion to both transgressions, I don’t know. I can’t imagine that someone suddenly becomes willing to deliberately take away someone else’s very existence and then loses that willingness afterward, but I can absolutely see them losing the willingness to risk the punishments for murder.
Sorry about all the edits. I really feel like I’m doing a terrible job of framing this question. Allow me to simplify. If murder was as acceptable, tolerated and even encouraged in our culture to the same extent that rape and sexual assault are, would murder be: A) as common as rape?, or B) still less common than rape? If B, then what is the source of that greater entitlement to commit the latter crime than the former in the absence of a culture tolerating it? And in particular, and this is the question that terrifies me, is murder on average less intrinsically acceptable to the human psyche regardless of its environment? I’m not a psychologist or a sociologist so I don’t know, but I really don’t want the human psyche have any higher predilection to rape than murder, and maybe that’s wishful thinking, because it seems like it would make it less of a solvable problem.
No. Because even with severe punishments, there are cases where a “murder culture” exists. Hell, places with the most severe penalties for murder often have higher murder rates.
We need to stop thinking in simple terms like “punishment” and more about prevention (changing the culture) and protection (some people will hurt others regardless of whether society “accepts” it or not).
You’re right, I was conflating punishment and the wider culture of which punishment is just one facet. I frankly was not doing a good job of thinking through my thought process.
I think severity of punishment basically has nothing to do whether people kill each other or not. For all but an extremely rare subset of people killing is something only done in an emotional state so heightened they are not thinking of consequences. It’s even hard to get soldiers on a battlefield to actually shoot at each other.
That can’t be compared to sexual assault, which is done out of entitlement, or robbery, which might be someone’s vocation.
That’s basically it. A “murder culture” (in ways similar to rape culture) is basically a subset where extreme violence is normalized and expected. Think more organized crime or authoritarian bully forces than general military, even. And it takes programming to think of the victims as “not human” or having “earned” capital punishment. Unfortunately for us, rape culture still isn’t entirely a subset: just look at all the “decent people” who deny it exists while making prison rape jokes in topics like this one.
