Rape Threats and Free Speech

I don't completely dispute this but there is much cruelty to be found in the animal kingdom. Chimpanzees come to mind where the dominant male maintains that position by inflicting a lot of pain on other chimps, males, females, and juveniles. And I can't believe it is painless for a female when males kill her offspring which occurs in bears and big cats.

I get it you are defining the difference as being biology and intent, but you'd need to show that something very abruptly changed genetically in humans allowing some drastically different level of cruelty for it not to just be a step further in evolutionary behavior. In other words we are incrementally different, and when it comes to technology and language one can say it's a pretty big increment. But it's still an increment, and not likely a brand new behavior.

 

I'm not gonna rehash the thread about whether animals have emotions or morals but I don't think animals feel malice and I think that animals simply act according to their genetic programming. They don't really have a cognitive thought process for their actions.

I think it's better just not making the comparison at all because, as Ginger pointed out there is such a large divide between animals and humans. Cognition allows humans to make decisions contrary to our genetics. We have free will to act against our own instincts, whether for good or evil.

 

Non human primates and dogs demonstrate behavior you think they don't or can't, JJ, such as sabotaging their own food rewards in order to prevent another member of their species from getting something the animal judges to be unfair. But this is getting much too far off topic.

 

...but it's merely placing assumptions on animal behavior. Behavior alone does not prove emotion or morals, it could just as easily be a more complicated reaction to genetic predispositions. We do not have the technology to detect emotions or moral cognition. But I digress...

I think the percentage of actual rapists in a collection of rape-threateners is minuscule if not zero. It takes a uniquely deranged individually to commit such a violent sexual assault.

The possibility that an average US male is a rapist is around 0.0001%.

So I think the issue is anonymity and immaturity, combined with a skewed disrespect for women and sexuality.

 

But does it really? Not all rape cases are physically violent but are still rape, intercourse without consent. How about this; you've been partying, come home with your male friend, might even make out a bit with him, but then end up going to sleep in your room, too drunk and groggy, he falls asleep on the couch, wake up a little later, your friend's clambering into your bed, start feeling you up, you're still tired, drunk, kinda nauseous, too weak to really do anything... he has his way with you and passes out next to you.

These situations are difficult for the woman because you can't tell for sure if you caused this to happen to yourself, or if it really was even rape, maybe you did consent to it somehow by not pushing him off or something? The guy might feel like shit in the morning too, and might not even be generally considered 'deranged.'

 

Excuse me, but on what planet?

 

It's off topic to discuss the evolution of moral behavior, JJ. Tests have been designed that most certainly do prove a moral basis of behavior in animals from a sense of fairness to empathy. But you can ignore the evidence and believe what you want.

I suspect your statistics are completely made up. The widespread use of rape as a weapon of war such as has been occurring currently in Darfur, for example, suggests your made up number is not at all close to factual. But closer to home and under more normalized conditions, surveys I saw recently amazed me as they suggested a lot of men would rape if they knew that wouldn't be caught. Personally, I found the results of the survey difficult to believe, but there they were.

Rape Proclivity Among Males

Other studies find that 'no means no' is a more difficult concept for some men to comprehend than it should be.

The scope of rape: Incidence and prevalence of sexual aggression and victimization in a national sample of higher education students.

Unfortunately this study is not free to access but in general what has been found in scientific studies is a lot more date rape occurs than one would think. And this is violent, physical assault. The attitude by a lot of people is somehow date rape is not the same as 'real' rape.

 

America, based on the statistics anyways. I should have added that the number was an annual figure and only takes into account rape of strangers, which is what the original post was about. Still, the probability is very, very small.

 

[MENTION=53143]GingerCoffee[/MENTION] - You don't need a study to tell you the probability that an average US male is a rapist.

We know the average number a rapes reported in a year - 89,000

We know how many males are in the US - abouy 148,000,000

So the probability of a male in the US committing a rape is approximately 0.0006 percent.

This data may not show the picture you want to show, but it's factual.

 

that's a way to twist figures there JJ. Did you get that number of males by splitting the population in half? If so, now take out male babies, infants, children, disabled, those in prison, hospitals, comatose etc and that 148 million might come down a bit.

Looking at reported rape cases - some interesting figures here -
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/quick-click/which-country-has-the-highest-reported-incidents-rape-data the links on the site are to PDFs but here is the gist - The US Justice Department estimates 300,000 American women are raped every year, and the Centers for Disease Control puts the number much higher at 1.3 million.

 

Of course you don't need a study, JJ. Not when you can just make up whatever facts you want to do.

 

Okay, we'll let's use those numbers then. In fact, lets say that 2 million women are raped every year. Then lets take that 158 million and bring it down to just 90 million, which is way under the actual number.

This only brings up the probability to 0.025% of men.

Still a very small number.

All I was saying is that there is a very small percentage of these people making threats of rape anonymously on the Internet that would actually rape the person.

I mean, we all agree that even one rape is too much and that we need to help prevent rape among women so there's no need for the vitriol.

 

90 million males - 2 million rapes, shouldn't that be 2,22% probability?

No vitriol - just questioning figures

 

[MENTION=44992]JJ_Maxx[/MENTION]: So using your flawed numbers (noting I still don't think your methodology would hold up in any scientific circle), you still left out the denominator: 0.025% of men per year.

And using Erebh's corrected math, that would be 2.22% of men in the US per year, nothing remotely close to your original made up number.

 

Duh, got my decimal places confused. Yeah around 2.2% for an inflated number. I would put it closer to 1%, maybe less.

 

So you do the math and still make up your own number? Check.

 

So I should be more like you and state that 3-4 out of every 10 men is a rapist? Check.

 

If you want to be like me, you need to be more precise in how you paraphrase a person's position, and more importantly support your conclusions with valid scientific evidence.

The study I cited which you misinterpret did not find 35% of men had committed rape, only that on a survey asking a select group of college attending males they replied that if they could get away with it they would have sex against a woman's will. That can mean any number of things depending on how the respondents interpreted the survey questions and how honestly they answered the questions and how that limited sample represents the broader population.

The one conclusion the evidence overwhelmingly does support is that your fantasy of how rare rapists are and your perception of the world and the rape culture is seriously flawed.

 

I just read a "statistic" that one in four female college students have survived rape or attempted rape

 

I used to be tempted to discount that number. But personally, I've had 3 close calls, no rapes thankfully. Once I let a guy I met walking home buy me a beer. I was a naive young teen. He decided the beer meant he was owed something and he grabbed me and started tearing my clothes. I screamed and people came out of their houses, he ran off. I got away with torn clothes, torn bra, nothing more.

Once I went home with a guy I didn't know very well. He sat on me. After a lot of protesting he stopped.

And once I met some guys when I was traveling I made the mistake of going with. They talked about rape, but never acted on the discussion.

Was I stupid? Yes. When you are young and inexperienced it happens.

It does make that "attempted rape" statistic a lot more credible.

 

Oh, I do agree that nature can be very cruel, I never meant to say it wasn't. My point was that since we, as humans, have a notably better developed understanding of concepts like good and evil and are far more aware of "self" than animals, the level of evil, so to speak, among humans is, in my opinion, far more pronounced in comparison to what our base instincts are driving us to do. Some animals may exhibit similar tendencies, i.e. conscious malice that serves little purpose other than to inflict suffering on others as opposed to securing their survival, but from what I've observed, animals are still a far cry from humans in regards to true evil (i.e. consciously choosing evil instead of good for other urposes besides survival, esp. since e.g. establishing a dominant standing within a pack is likely mostly about survival too).

I don't think it does, even. Or, of course, it depends on the definition of "uniquely deranged." To me, that phrase brings up images of people who have trouble telling fantasy from reality, people who have notable difficulties blending in socially etc. whereas many rapists are, for all intents and purposes, "normal" men who either make some bad choices (got too drunk, chose to ignore the fact that the girl was passed out etc), or happen to find sexual violence arousing and, combined with an opportunistic nature, commit rape when the perfect opportunity to do so without fear of getting caught presents itself.

I can't remember which documentary was in question, but I watched one with KaTrian a while back. It was about WWII, I think, and one of the people interviewed in it was a grandmother who, after the war, was wary of all men for the rest of her life simply because she had witnessed so many "ordinary" men committing rape in war zones, even men whom she had grown up with, men she knew very well. She said that the setting was such that it made those men look at the world in a different way during the war: there were no consequences to rape, women were 2nd class citizens because most of them didn't fight (and fighters were those who deserved more than everyone else), everyone else was doing it too etc. etc.

Now, I can't imagine any situation where I would rape anyone, but the same applies to, say, punching a woman, something I'd never do either, yet plenty of "normal" men have hit women, so I'd imagine that if the situation was just right (opportunity, peer pressure, society's silent consent, no repercussions etc), more men than we'd like to think would commit, or at least attempt or consider rape. Many wouldn't, but if you look at the numbers discussed on this page, well, I'd argue that even 0,001% is a frighteningly large number when we're talking about millions of men.

Finland is a relatively small country, not really known for being the Mecca of rape, and I'm not a particularly social guy, but even I can name 7 girls (whom I know) off the top of my head who have been raped (the number could be larger since I could be forgetting someone or, as is very likely, not all girls I've known have told me if they've been raped or even if someone's attempted to rape them).
So compare the number of women who've been raped / who have been targets of attempted rape (also take into consideration that not nearly all rapes / rape attempts are reported), and compare it to the number of "uniquely deranged" men, and I'd be willing to bet that the numbers don't add up. That, in turn, would imply that quite a few rapists are normal and blend in in every other respect except that they are capable of deriving pleasure from the act of rape.


Ginger, glad you got off with a scare. I think many cases of rape / attempted rape could be avoided if parents discussed the issue with their daughters. Preaching never helps, but instead they should explain things calmly and rationally without trying to scare her, explaining to her how the world works in this regard etc, so perhaps they could avoid the mistakes others have made before them. It's a delicate subject and undoubtedly one of the less pleasant topics to discuss with your own child, but it beats the hell out of the alternative.

 

Not everyone has parents who meet this ideal. I didn't have the worst parents in the world, but I also did not have parents who were skilled in talking to their children.

 

The reason I put statistic in quotes is because I found these results in the same research:

At least 1 in 4 college women will be the victim of a sexual assault during her academic career. Hirsch, Kathleen (1990)”Fraternities of Fear: Gang Rape, Male Bonding, and the Silencing of Women.” Ms., 1(2) 52-56.​

There are 35.3 incidents of sexual assault per 1,000 female students on a campus as recorded over a 6.91 month period (the academic year of ‘96 – ’97) as reported in the 2000 DOJ Bureau of Justice Statistics report “The Sexual Victimization of College Women.”​

 

I don't see any contradiction here. I assume that the first is the percentage of women who reported in an anonymous poll that they had been assaulted, while the second is the percentage of women who took the much more dangerous and frightening action of formally reporting a crime to a law enforcement agency.

 

[MENTION=53984]Garball[/MENTION]: ChickenFreak is right, it's a discrepancy because less than 10% rapes are ever reported, and then, less than 15% of that ever results in conviction (or thereabouts, obviously, the figures vary a bit from research to research, but not significantly).

See, JJ, this is a side-effect of rape survivor's silence, where the only info we have on the issue comes from dry police and rape centres statistics, Hollywood impressionists and assumptions of people who have absolutely no knowledge of the issue.

In fact (which is easily verifiable in literature and in talkng to survivors) over 75% of rapes are commited by a non-stanger, most often an acquaintance, but relatives, spouses and friends also. Most rapes don't leave obvious trace of violence, because that allows the rapist to continue to rape unpunished. Society still thinks that unless you were beaten or stabbed during your rape, you 'weren't really harmed'. The typical stranger who rapes and beats in the park, that's less than 15% of the reported cases, but we mustn't forget that less than 10% of all rapes ever get reported, partly bcause survivors don't go to the police and partly because the police refuses to file reports.

Also, many rapists are quite handsome, but they rape despite the fact they could get women easily. Rapists often have issues with their genitals (too small, to thin, got laughed at by girls before) or sexual problems which render them impotent. The aggressison is a substitute and compensation for the inadequacy.

Rapists thrive in professions that give them power and access, highly respected professions that inspire trust and authority. This is why prostitution is so popular, and pornography, because for one reason or another, men are turned on by violence (to a smaller or larger degree, of course) and perusing more socially accpetable forms of rape, helps them not directly harm anyone while still indulging their fantasies. This last point is, however, my personal opinion so people may disagree. Everything else in this comment is an easily verifiable fact.

As a doctor, I am always most sickened when my colleagues rape (doctors, nurses, therapists, dentists), and there are quite a few. They abuse the power dynamic and often utilise drugs, like palliative care medicines or general anaesthetics instead of vaccines or other medication they are supposed to be giving, to trick and incapacitate the patient. They are highly intelligent predators, who know how to destroy evidence (douching, drugs will be in the system such as opiates, so they can accuse their victims of being 'junky fantasist whores' and ultimately, to allow the evidence to deteriorate by the time victim is compos mentis enough to seek help.

You obviously lack information, but I strongly advise you to read up on rape, a lot of your strange misconceptions will be dispelled.