xenologer | Rape and Capital Punishment

I was linked this article today.

The gist of this recent Supreme Court decision is that the death penalty in America shouldn't be resorted to unless the crime involves espionage or treason, or the crime results in the death of the victim. The context is whether or not people who sexually abuse children should be faced with capital punishment as an option.

Now, on the one hand... if someone raped anybody that I know, I don't know that I'll be responsible for my actions in the matter. That counts both for a child and a grown adult. In that sense, I can understand why many people have a problem with this ruling. After all, it's natural to want to hurt and even eliminate someone who hurts us badly enough, and the rape of a child is not just an offense to the whole community, but downright damaging to the whole community.

But the rape of an adult woman is, too. The UN Security Council just equated it to a war crime. It happens in war because, as the article states, "rape is a deliberate war tactic meant to intimidate and destroy communities." This is coloring my reception of this ruling. As the article I first linked states, "The Supreme Court banned executions for rape in 1977 in a case in which the victim was an adult woman."

If we executed people who rape children but not people who rape adult women... I feel that would create a harmful double standard. To say that raping kids is morally more reprehensible than raping adult women kind of smacks of the old view that raping virgins was a grievous evil, but raping adult women (who might have had sex before) was merely rude.

Now, granted, I think raping children is weirder than raping an adult woman, but that doesn't make it worse. Just weirder. To say that an adult woman is morally more rapeable than a child really is a throwback to days that I don't think anyone wants to see us repeat. Sexual violence should be treated the same way across the board, no matter what stage of life the victim is in.

Personally I have my reservations about capital punishment in practice, but that's a topic for another day. Right now I'm concentrating on the fact that rape of adults and children is being treated the same way by our legal system, and I think that's a good thing.

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Alternatively, do you think grouping child rape and adult rape (which, functionally speaking, means rape against women) would bring back that whole women are children idea?

That seems less likely to me. Unless courts somehow started talking about lost innocence (a dubious claim in any time, much less ours) with adult rape victims, at that point you'd still be talking about violence and violation. Just now you'd primarily be talking about violence and violation when you talk about children as well.

*stops before she starts rambling*

Why are we continuing to assume that adult men can't be raped, or that if they are raped it isn't as serious?

I don't think we are. I think it's more an issue of frequency. Something like one male rape for every thousand female rapes (or more, I don't have the stats in front of me); it makes sense that when people discuss rape, they mean women being raped.

Doesn't mean rape of males shouldn't be discussed, of course. But it's good that people in this discussion have reliably specified gender.

UCR, NCVS, and NVAW data finds that women are between 7 and 10 times more likely to be raped than men, even when accounting for underreporting. Women are also more likely to experience serious injury after a rape and multiple rapes over the life course. Other studies show that women, unlike men, structure their lives around the fear of being raped.

That's not to minimize the rape of men at all, but for something that affects so many women (something like 1 in 6 women), piping up with "Men are raped too!" doesn't seem to effectively address any problem. Rather it seems like yet another distraction from issues that affect women primarily.

My point is that claiming that treating the rape of children and adults the same lumps women in with children is silly -- unless we are specifically having another set of penalties for men.

I was suggesting it as another possible interpretation, not making a statement of my beliefs.

You sound like the only person making assumptions here.

I'm not saying that men can't be raped (though, in many states, legally speaking, they cannot). Nor am I saying that men's sexual assault is less serious than women's sexual assault.

I am saying, however, that men are much less likely to be victims of rape, or any other kind of sexual assault over their life course, than women. Therefore, when talking about rape, the de facto meaning is of a man raping a woman.

Rape and Capital Punishment

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