If the pharmacist didn’t have intercourse with the women, but just posed as an ob/gyn and conducted a fake medical procedure, a number of states have criminalized using a medical position/the appearance of a medical position for nefarious purposes, with much more narrow language than the statute listed above.

Fraud in factum is where the fraud involves concealing the nature of the contact so the victim doesn’t know sex is happening (like the pharmacist posing as an ob/gyn.)

Fraud in the inducement is where someone knows sex is happening but the sexual act has been induced by fraud. (there was a case where someone purported to have a bloodtest showing the victim had a disease, he had a donor who had been injected with a serum, and by sexing the donor she would be cured.)

Fraud in factum is typically rape in a lot of places already, and would cover the situation with the pharmacist, and there is a typical statutory line which says that sex induced by pretending to be a husband is also rape. The Mass Legislature could fix the loophole that allowed these two cases by extending the husband fraud to include boyfriends and by saying that fraud in factum is rape. The Legislature could do all this without messing up our lying games. I doubt this article was written by a lawyer.

It seems like most other places in the western world do include fraud in the “by force” language. Mass is just wacked.

I don’t see why you need special laws. It just seems to me that perhaps she has a harder case to prove, maybe, but given that she really can prove that she was tricked into having sex with a man she did not want to have sex with, then she is still being forced to have sex with someone against her will. Instead of normal physical force, it is by means of deception, but that never makes a difference in any other case like stealing my car or something.

Perhaps I was a bit too gullible.

In your post you said the author of the bill had his heart in the right place. Would it change your mind if it turned out that the reason these guys couldn’t be prosecuted is that the victims were not blameless, not credible as witnesses, or unwilling to testify publicly? When people say they seek “justice,” sometimes what they really want is “vengeance.”

I’m no taking sides here. I am saying that perhaps you should not, either.

You’ve surely abbreviated the facts of the two cases. How is it that the claims of the perpetrators were believed by the victims to be credible?

The problem with the law as stated, is that (as people have pointed out) it leads to absurd results. If any such deception, etc. counts as rape, then far too much would count as rape. If we use societal norms, then (as was pointed out) the cases in question would probably not fall under the law. The first case would probably fall under any laws governing that sort of “medical fraud.”

So, if the existing laws are not adequate, then a better law than this would be needed.

http://aphilosopher.wordpress.com/