A fair counterpoint on the Steubenville Case

Rogier Van Bakel, as usual, makes you think (whether you agree with him or not), in this post: All Rape is Created Equal, Or is It?

Just like he made anyone with a brain re-examine their thoughts about sex offenders in this one.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2013 at 1:05 pm and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to A fair counterpoint on the Steubenville Case

  1. dan says:
    January 6, 2013 at 2:07 pm

    Most jurisdictions differentiate very easily between the examples he gives. Here in canada everything from inappropriate touching (grabbing someone’s butt) to the brutal violence in India is called sexual assault. but sentencing takes care of it. So I don’t see much to re-examine. It’s already covered.

  2. picklefactory says:
    January 6, 2013 at 2:36 pm

    Where’s my goddamn sandwich?

  3. John David Galt says:
    January 6, 2013 at 7:12 pm

    @dan: The problem with “sentencing taking care of it” is that it replaces the rule of law with the discretion (= arbitrary judgment) of a prosecutor, thus making the system unfair and unpredictable. Nobody but a jury, or once in a while a judge, ought to have any choice about how the law is applied, or it isn’t really law.

    • dan says:
      January 6, 2013 at 8:00 pm

      Most places have sentencing guidelines. Mostly they are pretty close to mandatory. A judge will always have some discretion and that has been part of the common law since its origins in druid/brehon law thousands of years ago. If you get too detailed you fall into the civil law trap of having to take into account every possible situation and get bogged down in the details. I think the law already is quite nuanced. Prosecutors have always been accused of favoritism in some cases or taking too hard a line in others. why only worry about this instance?

  4. Cephas Q. Atheos says:
    January 7, 2013 at 12:40 am

    It *was* a thought-provoking article. My only concern is that it comes to a global issue with a local consensus – and that’s far from the case in the other 95% of the world that’s not the USA.

    In many parts of the world, it’s difficult, if not impossible, for a victim who was raped, against her will, by one or more men, to even come forward, let alone obtain justice.

    Because women are weak-willed, evil satanic temptresses, in most Islamic countries a woman needs a minimum of two, and usually four, independent male witnesses to attest that she really was raped, and didn’t just seduce the mob, as the Indian girl did.

    Then, if she’s really lucky, her relatives will kill her, before her disgraceful behaviour stains their honour.

    I’m sure many posters here are already painfully aware of this terrible religious-based attitude, and I’m not entirely sure I completely understand why I mentioned this here, but it just seems that there is a lot of very fine detail being discussed here in what is everywhere else a crime very, very far from shades of grey. Whether or not that’s relevant, I don’t know, but it feels important to mention that not every rape is a “rape” (i.e. in the sense mentioned by Rogier in his first two examples), but is a cowardly, preconsidered sexual and physical attack on someone who may be unable to defend themselves before or afterwards.

    [For any reader suffering from terminal sarcasmosis, two of the above paragraphs were written in a completely derogatory and sarcastic manner. If you can't tell which is which, phone a friend].

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