The argument was that imposing the death penalty for rape placed too much value on women's "chastity" and presupposed that women who experienced rape were somehow worthless afterward
This is why I found _jeremiad's "Rape irrevocably ends childhood!" thing so disturbing.
It's another version of the same thing -- "You were once innocent and happy, now your innocence is gone and you are a broken, stained, ugly thing who is incapable of wholeness". It's a horrible message to send kids who have actually been victims of abuse -- it essentializes the abuse as part of them rather than something that happened to them.
And using it to analogously support the death penalty by comparing it to "murder" -- the "murder of innocence", the "murder of childhood", etc. -- does it to an even more extreme degree. ("The person I was is dead; the happy child no longer exists and has been permanently replaced by a rape victim".)
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This is why I found
It's another version of the same thing -- "You were once innocent and happy, now your innocence is gone and you are a broken, stained, ugly thing who is incapable of wholeness". It's a horrible message to send kids who have actually been victims of abuse -- it essentializes the abuse as part of them rather than something that happened to them.
And using it to analogously support the death penalty by comparing it to "murder" -- the "murder of innocence", the "murder of childhood", etc. -- does it to an even more extreme degree. ("The person I was is dead; the happy child no longer exists and has been permanently replaced by a rape victim".)