Do we live in a rape culture?

[Ryika]

http://www.binghamton.edu/counseling/documents/RAPE_FACT_SHEET1.pdf

The ones with rape-only statistics are:

Mosher & Anderson, 19867 -> First paragraph: "To relate the macho personality constellation to men’s reports of sexual aggression, 175 nineteen-year old, middle-class, college sophomores anonymously completed the Hypermasculinity Inventory and a newly constructed Aggressive Sexual Behavior Inventory."

Kosson, Kelly & White, 1997 -> Study's called: "Psychopathy-related traits predict self-reported sexual aggression among college men."

Rubenzahl & Corcoran, 199811 -> Copy-paste doesn't work in that study, but it's also from college, plus the sample size (104) is highly questionable.

Collings, 1999 -> From the abstract: "The prevalence of sexual aggression was examined in a non-forensic sample of 393 university males. "

Weiss & Zverina, 1999 -> Irrelevant. "Experiences with sexual aggression within the general population in the Czech Republic."

Spitzberg, 1999 -> This one's actually about the general population. That's great. Not for your numbers though, because it has a lower rate of 4.8%.

So in conclusion: The one study that's not been conducted on colleges shows a lower number than the one you're using to refer to the whole population. You should stop using it and use the 4.8 instead.

Which is still a terrifying number btw.

/edit: Looked at a few of the mixed studies, too. College students, college students... university students. Well, that's new.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Sure, but most people don't even know what that word means. But they do use the words I was describing before. 'Psychopath' 'psychotic' 'crazy' 'delusional' words like that get thrown around to describe rapists (and other violent criminals) on a regular basis, and yes it does offend me.

You are not a psychopath. You say that you have a schizophrenia-like illness. That is quite a difference and the terms should not be confused with each other. A psychopath is someone widely attributed to be without social or moral conscience, among other traits. I think that you might be a little oversensitive about this. Words that don't describe you shouldn't bother you, no matter who throws them around.

 

[Bootstoots]

Sexual remarks can get you fired or at the very least shunned. Sexual touching without consent can get you arrested/beat up.

I think it really depends on the circumstances, there will always be times & places where people get away with horrificness. There are 'rape cultures', painting society at large, every household, office & city block as rape culture is too broad.

In most modern workplaces, sexual remarks and actions are treated that way. In frat houses, parties, and other 'date rape' cases, people usually can get away with outright sexual assault. So you're right - the norms for sexual behavior vary extremely widely. The claim that there is a 'rape culture' among groups of young men, especially fraternities and the like, is true, but that doesn't mean that it extends to all corners of society.

That said, women still usually are paid less than men for the same work, and are more likely to be fired or otherwise punished if they negotiate for a raise, in standard workplaces - despite the coexistence of norms against sexual harassment. This sort of issue is a complex morass where most people who think they're arguing against each other are actually arguing past each other, and apparently competing claims are often both correct.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

So let's be clear here, we're talking about the case of Robin Camp, right?

Yes, I was referring to Robin Camp. He is no longer a judge, thank goodness. He is not, however, the only judge to have such a despicable attitude toward rape victims.

How you can think that this case is an example of how slut shaming is a "common thing" is beyond me. From the evidence available, it's clear that the people in favor of what he said, are a tiny minority. He's made a fool out of himself, and pretty much nobody agrees with him.

Try reading the comment boards, where there were a lot of people judging the victim ("she chose to drink, she chose to put herself at risk, so she shouldn't be surprised if some guy took advantage of that, and should quit complaining about it.").

You're ignoring all of that, looking at the small group of people agreeing with him, pointing at them and yelling: "See! See! That's Canada!!" ...no, it's not, it's just the tiny minority of people that you focus on.

I never said that. Stop putting words on my keyboard that I never typed.

Here's a fun fact: Not every rape kit needs to be investigated.

Why? What makes some rape cases more worthy than others to be investigated?

That's a question facing some of the RCMP officers in British Columbia, btw. They have an abysmal record of investigating cases of rape and/or disappearances of aboriginal women - particularly those who were known to be addicts, prostitutes, living on the street... Evidence sat around for years with nothing being done about it. Even when they did catch and jail one perpetrator (Robert William Pickton, who would pick up women, take them to his pig farm, and kill, dismember, and feed them to his pigs), they only charged him with 8 of the 49 women's deaths that he admitted to.

Even our now ex-Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, said the MMIW ("Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women") investigation "isn't high on my radar, actually". The current government promised to do better, and it's bogged down. Some of the RCMP who didn't bother doing their jobs before... are still not doing their jobs when it comes to properly investigating what happened to these women. If you're an aboriginal woman in Canada and you get raped, taken up into the sex trade and trafficked, or murdered (or some combination of all three), the chances of your case being properly investigated are very low. The prevailing attitude among far too many male RCMP is that "they're only native women, so who cares?".

 

[Narz]

That said, women still usually are paid less than men for the same work

Off topic but I hear this bandied around alot but have never seen it before. At every job I've ever worked at men & women were paid the same. If women were willing to work for less a company would be smart to hire all women. I've read that once you account for all variables (women taking more leave/men working more crazy hours) the pay gap goes away.

 

[Bootstoots]

Off topic but I hear this bandied around alot but have never seen it before. At every job I've ever worked at men & women were paid the same. If women were willing to work for less a company would be smart to hire all women. I've read that once you account for all variables (women taking more leave/men working more crazy hours) the pay gap goes away.

My impression is this is much more common in corporate salaried positions where people don't know each other's salaries, and where people may have different 'job titles' that amount to the same thing. In such a position, women earn something like 15% less on average (IIRC) after controlling for variables like maternity leave and seniority. The gap rises to something like 25-30% if you don't control for that, which is the number often thrown around. The point is that a residual of about half of the total value of the wage gap still exists even when you account for differences in behavior (including pregnancy, maternity leave, and childcare).

It's less of an issue where payment is more transparent, so it occurs more in the middle-class, office drone types of jobs than in wage labor where people know (and freely share) each others' wages. I suspect this is partly why so much is made of it - if it were a thing that happened disproportionately to the working poor, middle-class feminists might care less.

 

[Commodore]

But that's culture. If this was a crime that they really cared about, there would be standards. It wouldn't get to the point where places have backlogs that go back years.

Law enforcement is mostly bureaucratic. Inefficiencies exist where they don't care enough to fix them. It's pretty clear that sexual assault is not a crime that many jurisdictions care much about. Be really careful being an apologist for that; it only further evidences the existence of rape culture.

Okay. That's a fair enough argument. But I think there is a real effort being made to rectify this "I don't care" attitude. It's starting small with zero tolerance for sexual harassment policies in both the private and public sector. Police academies are giving sexual assault more time in the training curriculum each officer goes through and politicians at the state level do seem to be making larger pushes for creating standardized procedures for dealing with sexual assault cases. The only areas of the country that don't seem to be making any significant strides towards improving how sexual assaults are handled are the rural jurisdictions. But they've always been the "sweep anything unpleasant under the rug and hope it goes away" types anyway, so we may never see any significant progress there.

 

[Spoonwood]

This question isn't localized to a particular nation or state.

The term 'rape culture' really isn't a good one though. Culture in general is positive. Rape is not. Thus, the term "rape culture" itself should be jarring. I don't believe that people speak of a "murder culture" or "homicide culture", because both murder and homicide are generally recognized as well... evil.

I think RAINN, the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network in The United States put things best when they basically said that rape isn't really caused by cultural factors, but rather the decisions of some deviant individuals. Even though in this thread there have existed some people pointing out how prison rape might get overlooked, that still isn't the same as rape getting caused by cultural factors.

Can rape get caused by cultural factors? I think only if you absolve individuals of conscience.

 

[Ryika]

Why? What makes some rape cases more worthy than others to be investigated?

You changed "Not every rape kit needs to be investigated." into "What makes some rape cases more worthy than others to be investigated?".
I never said that, and that you changed one into the other does, I think, show part of the problem with the rape kit debate.

Here's on obvious example:

- A girlfriend and a boyfriend spend the night together.
- The next morning, she calls the police, saying that her (now ex-)boyfriend got violent that night and forced her to do things she didn't want to do.
- A rape kit is used to make sure the evidence is there in case it becomes important.
- The boyfriend is taken into custody. He however admits that the two of them had sex, but claims it was consensual.
(- Because she doesn't have any marks on her body that couldn't reasonably be explained by rough sex, the accused gets set free)

There you go, a rape kit that didn't need to be investigated, because it wouldn't have told us anything we didn't already know.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

You changed "Not every rape kit needs to be investigated." into "What makes some rape cases more worthy than others to be investigated?".
I never said that, and that you changed one into the other does, I think, show part of the problem with the rape kit debate.

If it doesn't "need" to be investigated, that's the same as saying it's not worth the time and bother to investigate.

Here's on obvious example:

- A girlfriend and a boyfriend spend the night together.
- The next morning, she calls the police, saying that her (now ex-)boyfriend got violent that night and forced her to do things she didn't want to do.
- A rape kit is used to make sure the evidence is there in case it becomes important.
- The boyfriend is taken into custody. He however admits that the two of them had sex, but claims it was consensual.
(- Because she doesn't have any marks on her body that couldn't reasonably be explained by rough sex, the accused gets set free)

There you go, a rape kit that didn't need to be investigated, because it wouldn't have told us anything we didn't already know.

And of course his claim that it was consensual is to be automatically accepted as the truth because...?

To be absolutely sure, the investigation needs to happen.

 

[Ryika]

If it doesn't "need" to be investigated, that's the same as saying it's not worth the time and bother to investigate.

I think we might be talking past each other here, so just to be clear:
When I say it doesn't need to be investigated, then what I say is that the rape kit does not need to be checked for DNA evidence in the laboratory, that's what the "rape kit backlog" that people keep bringing up refers to.

And of course his claim that it was consensual is to be automatically accepted as the truth because...?

To be absolutely sure, the investigation needs to happen.

There's nothing we can do to be "absolutely sure", in many cases we simply cannot know.

Independent from that, it is absolutely useless to send the rape kit to the laboratory in a case where we the potential perpetrator admits to having had sex with the victim. We simply do not need to have that confirmed, we already know it to be true, because the potential perpetrator admitted it.

 

[metalhead]

Bogus. Totally bogus. Even if someone knows their attacker, the kit needs to be tested to see if connections can be made, if a perpetrator of acquaintance or even intimate partner rape otherwise not in the DNA database might match unknown DNA of perpetrators in other cases. It can also be useful to establish an evidentiary trail for an individual who may commit multiple rapes, but didn't have charges pressed in every case. You can only determine that by testing all of the kits.

Honestly, just stop. You're being ridiculous.

 

[Ryika]

Bogus. Totally bogus. Even if someone knows their attacker, the kit needs to be tested to see if connections can be made, if a perpetrator of acquaintance or even intimate partner rape otherwise not in the DNA database might match unknown DNA of perpetrators in other cases. It can also be useful to establish an evidentiary trail for an individual who may commit multiple rapes, but didn't have charges pressed in every case. You can only determine that by testing all of the kits.

Honestly, just stop. You're being ridiculous.

If your sole goal is to catch as many perpetrators as possible, then what you should be arguing for is universally gathering the dna of all citizens.

Merely being accused of a crime should not invalidate the assumption of innocence that you give to everybody else, having an accused person's dna checked against a database of crime cases (or at worse, being put into such a database as a potential criminal), is no different from just checking random (or all) people in that sense. The only real difference is the likelihood of finding a match, but that certainly does not validate the breach of privacy that you're proposing.

The only people who should have their DNA checked against a list that is solely designed to find more crimes that might or might not have been committed, or have their DNA put onto such a list as a potential perpetrator, are people who have been found guilty of the crime they were accused of.

 

[metalhead]

That's an extremely long goalpost move from "there is no reason to test a rape kit from someone who knew their attacker." Just admit you made a dumb argument and move on.

The existence of DNA evidence has nothing to do with the presumption of innocence, by the way. You're essentially arguing that we not do forensic DNA investigations in rape cases which is just, freaking insane.

 

[Ryika]

That's an extremely long goalpost move from "there is no reason to test a rape kit from someone who knew their attacker." Just admit you made a dumb argument and move on.

Not exactly sure what you even mean by that. Did I not consider that evidence from the rape kit could be used that way? Yeah, sure, that's pretty obvious. It didn't cross my mind that one could want to do that.

However, while I acknowledge that that's a possibility, I still strongly disagree that this should be done, as again, it basically means that the moment you're accused of a crime you're no longer treated as every other person in the country is treated in terms of being assumed innocent. So again, I think there are two ethical ways of doing this: Either you collect DNA from every single person in the country, that means you heavily value catching as many criminals as possible over the privacy + assumption of innocence of every single citizen, or you don't compare the DNA of people not found guilty at all (unless maybe they willfully agree to such a test).

What you're saying basically means that the ACCUSATION itself is validation to compare DNA, do you not see the problems with that?

The existence of DNA evidence has nothing to do with the presumption of innocence, by the way. You're essentially arguing that we not do forensic DNA investigations in rape cases which is just, freaking insane.

Nope, I'm saying an accusation should not make your DNA fair game to be used for a database search. You should obviously use DNA evidence for the case at hand if required - which will likely be any case where the accused does not admit to having had sexual intercourse with the accuser - but comparing the DNA of an accused to a database "because well, you could find something, right?" gives ridiculous power to the accusation.

 

[metalhead]

You're essentially arguing against the use of any forensic evidence in criminal investigations. DNA, fingerprints, hair samples, etc. If you can't compare the evidence in open cases to what is on file, then that would mean you would almost never have appropriate cause to compare DNA to a database, to compare fingerprints to a database, etc.

Do you really believe this type of evidence should not be used in criminal investigations? Because I don't think there is a legal jurisdiction anywhere in the world that would agree with you.

 

[Ryika]

You're essentially arguing against the use of any forensic evidence in criminal investigations. DNA, fingerprints, hair samples, etc.

This nonsense doesn't become true just because you repeat it a thousand times. Again:

An accusation is made -> dna evidence has been gathered -> testing whether the dna of the accused matches the dna that has been found -> perfectly fine with me and a reasonable thing to do*.
An accusation is made -> dna evidence has been gathered -> seeing whether the dna of the accused matches the dna in a database of dna that has been gathered in other cases for the off-chance that something sticks -> Not okay at all. At least not without the explicit consent of the person being accused.

(*But still not required in cases where the accused does not deny having had sex with the accusor)

And again, that's even the lesser problem. The larger problem is having your dna be placed in a database of "rape cases", even though you have not been found guilty of committing that crime.

 

[Akka]

The term 'rape culture' really isn't a good one though. Culture in general is positive. Rape is not.

"culture" is not "generally positive". Culture is factual, it has no positive or negative connotation.

 

[warpus]

Nope, we don't. 99.999% people in this country agree that rape is a horrible thing and speak out against it when it happens.

 

[metalhead]

This nonsense doesn't become true just because you repeat it a thousand times. Again:

An accusation is made -> dna evidence has been gathered -> testing whether the dna of the accused matches the dna that has been found -> perfectly fine with me and a reasonable thing to do*.
An accusation is made -> dna evidence has been gathered -> seeing whether the dna of the accused matches the dna in a database of dna that has been gathered in other cases for the off-chance that something sticks -> Not okay at all. At least not without the explicit consent of the person being accused.

Nobody is saying to start doing unconstitutional searches. But if the person is arrested for or convicted of the crime, then it is certainly legitimate to try to match them to other crimes, no? You'd at the very least have probable cause to suspect criminal behavior, if not outright conviction for it. So your argument for not testing rape kits in the backlog remains ridiculous, and this line of inquiry quite at odds with commonly accepted investigative behavior.

Also, you would run the DNA against CODIS (or equivalent database) for the purposes of checking if the accused has previously been convicted of other crimes, regardless of whether you use it to try to link a person to an unrelated, unsolved case, just like you'd run forensic evidence at any other crime scene. AND, this is also important - you test rape kits to make sure that the DNA gathered actually belongs to the accused, to help protect against false accusations.

So yeah, saying you don't test the rape kits is ridiculous, plain and simple. Tons of reasons to do it, none particularly controversial.