Rape and Capital Punishment

[xenologer]

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.

Comments

[sammka.livejournal.com]

While it may seem that women were getting a "back seat" in terms of punishment for rape, actually the main people who lobbied for ending the death penalty for rape were feminists. 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 or that women are so sexually vulnerable that it's worse to rape a woman than it is to do pretty much anything to a man - including, say, cutting all his limbs off, which didn't merit the death penalty.

Also, the death penalty for rape made it harder to achieve convictions, especially of respectable, professional white males who couldn't possibly have done something so awful it merits the death penalty.

And, because it was almost exclusively reserved for black men, was used as a form of racist terrorism more than it was used to actually protect women from violence. This movement was, I think, a bit before "take back the night" marches and feminist movements against date rape.

Punishing child rape, and not rape of adults, with death was therefore never actually a matter of devaluing violence against women so much as a matter of overreacting to violence against children. People are more comfortable seeing children as people whose chastity needs to be protected and who are sexually vulnerable.

All the same, on a practical level, I'm seriously opposed to death penalty for child rapists, not just because I'm against the death penalty, but because most child rapists are the children's family members. One of the most sure-fire ways to get a kid not to report what's happening to them is telling them that if they do, they'll be killing daddy. Or Uncle Fred. Or whoever. Even if daddy or Uncle Fred puts their lives in danger, they will almost certainly not report. And even non-perpetrators in the family, who already often try to keep rape out of view of authorities because they don't want their sons and spouses to go to jail, will become even worse about it. Heck, I know that if my spouse raped my child and they faced the death penalty, I would take my kid as far away from my spouse as possible, but also do everything in my power to keep that kid quiet. I think I'd be more willing to see justice done if it was a matter of jail time.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_jeremiad/]

One of the most sure-fire ways to get a kid not to report what's happening to them is telling them that if they do, they'll be killing daddy.

Completely forgot about that bit.

Makes perfect sense.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

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".)

[sammka.livejournal.com]

This is really true. There is a place for acknowledging the severe harm that rape does to kids. But you know, I have a lot of friends who were raped as kids and they're, you know, not as good as dead?

I think the attitude that you may as well be as good as dead once something bad enough happens to you actually contributes to a lot of the harm that people suffer later in life, like low self-esteem, self-harm, suicide attempts and drug abuse. It also contributes to really fucking crazy reactions against that attitude: at least one friend I have who was abused thinks that child abuse is actually not that bad at all and it gave him an interesting life, and he would be sad if child abuse actually stopped because then there wouldn't be any people like him anymore. That's pretty fucked up, but I can sort of see where he got that from. Sort of like how some people with, say, cerebral palsy complain that they wouldn't want a world without cerebral palsy and that attempts to prevent it are genocidal - it's a pretty natural reaction to a world that really does think that they'd rather die than be you.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

(clarification - right now I'm speaking to a general societal attitude and don't want to attribute more to _jeremiah than she actually meant. People do say that being raped and especially being raped as a child is a fate worse than death, which disturbs me)