Rape law and culture, then and now
The Duke rape case has finally been reduced to a blatantly false accusation, with the charges all dropped. Some are saying that now that the accuser has been exposed as a liar and the rape a fabrication, the protection of the rape shield law should end and her name be published.
That would certainly discourage trumped-up charges. But it would also have to be limited only to the most egregious of cases, ones in which the accusations of rape were utterly false and malicious from the start and could be proven to be so.
Rape law is inherently problematic. There are certain areas (usually the deeper ones of the human heart/mind/body) where the law is an especially imperfect tool, and always will be no matter how much effort is made at fine tuning. Divorce and child custody is one such area, and rape is most definitely another.
The history of rape laws makes for very sobering reading indeed, a long sordid past not only of sexual violence against women, but widespread times and places in which they were treated like chattel, punished for the “crime” of having been raped, assumed to have led men on, and discouraged from reporting a rape because of the close examination (in a very harsh light) of every aspect of their sex lives that was sure to follow.
It was centuries ago that English common law, on which our law is based, advanced to the point where the raped woman was not given a sentence (or even killed) afterwards. But more recent changes in rape laws, like so many other changes in our society, were the result of the social revolution of the 60s. The miscarriages of justice they were designed to redress were serious ones. But, as with so many changes, there was an overcorrection—or, if not an overcorrection, then a new danger entered the picture, traded for the old.
Earlier laws were designed to shield the man and protect him from what was considered the exceedingly high risk of false accusation. Under those earlier laws a woman had to think long and hard before even a bona fide accusation of rape: her previous sex life would become fair game, there needed to be corroboratory evidence of the crime, and her identity was made public with all the attendant shame this caused in a society much more inclined to consider a raped woman sullied goods or a tramp who asked for it.
The net result was that many raped women declined to prosecute, and rapists went free to rape again. The law had a particular interest in protecting the man, and it was considered in great measure the woman’s duty to protect herself.
The older rape laws were embedded in a societal structure that regulated women’s freedom in a way hard to fathom today. And yet many of these mores were still in place in my own youth, and I’m not that old. No, an unmarried woman wasn’t required to have a chaperone for any encounter with a man who wasn’t a close relative, as in an earlier century. But boys were only allowed on the ground floor of a girls’ dormitory and were confined to the public areas (at least three of the four feet owned by a couple needed to be on the floor, please, as they necked—archaic word, that—on the couches).
We girls knew the rules, and they weren’t just empty meaningless exercises. I recall being on the terrace of a fraternity house in my college days, at a party, and hearing some raised voices upstairs, one of a woman, quite drunk. A female head with long blond hair (a fellow student from my dorm whom I knew, although not very well) poked out from one of the windows on the upper floor (where we were not allowed!). She yelled some slurred words to raucous laughter. Just as quickly, her head was withdrawn, but she didn’t come down, and all of us girls knew what was going on.
Or rather, we knew and didn’t know, all at the same time. The details could be imagined, and they weren’t good. Whether the sex she was having was group or individual, technically consensual or non, we downstairs knew that she’d put herself in a highly vulnerable position.
Did we think she was to blame? At least partly—not for whatever rape might be occurring (even then I would have put that responibility squarely at the proverbial feet of the guys involved) but for sheer stupidity and reckless behavior. Everyone knew the code, even though we found the whole situation distasteful and sad, and wished it were otherwise.
And then, later on, it became otherwise. If a woman such as the one in that upstairs fraternity room had been gang-raped while drunk, she could prosecute without fear of being judged guilty herself. This was a good thing. But it led to some bad things, as many good things do, and the Duke rape case was one of them. It has gotten to the point where false accusations are too easy to make, and the consequences too light.
I’m all for female freedom. But the checks and balances of the society in which I was raised, restrictive and limiting though they undoubtedly were, kept the behavior of most of us more reasonable. In other words, we learned the art of self-protection and even something known as good judgment, all in all not bad things to learn in this imperfect world.
Because the law isn’t able to prevent all bad things from happening. It can only try to punish the perpetrator after the fact, and that doesn’t mend a broken life or repair a deep trauma.
And sometimes, it doesn’t even punish the guilty. Sometimes the law affords an opportunity to ruin the reputations of the innocent.
In this case, justice triumphed and has exonerated the lacrosse players, although not early enough to have spared them and their families terrible suffering. And perhaps it will even discourage future false accusations if this woman’s name is made public.
There’s no easy solution to these problems. We can’t go back to the days of the three feet on the floor of the public rooms of the unisex dorms, much less the duenna. All of this would be on a continuum where, somewhere down the line, we might end up with the chador and purdah. In the end, the only thing to do is to try to teach young people good judgment, and try to balance the law so that both accuser and accused are protected from the twin evils of blaming the victim and false prosecution.
Interestingly enough, her name is now released: Crystal Gail Mangum.
I wonder if there will be a media frenzy over her.
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Nifong should be strung up in public. It should both send a message and punish the guilty, Neo.
Interesting post. You think that Ms. Magnum will be drug over the coals like the Duke students?
For those who tried to demonize the Duke Lacrosse players and paint them as privileged rich white males in whose favor the ‘system’ was rigged, I suggest that they look back to 1991 when a certain William Kennedy Smith, nephew to Teddy Kennedy, was accused of rape.
The vicitm’s name, a Ms. Patricia Bowman, was given to the media early on. Indeed, she had been tried by media long before young Master Smith was tried before a court of law. The media were relentless and the prosecution inept in comparison to the Kennedy furnished attorney Roy Black. Rules were broken and standard procedure not followed. That was a casebook study of how the privileged get special treatment.
Though he keeps a low Mr. Smith has been accused of sexual assault several times since, not a peep in the media. Indeed his uncle, Senator Kennedy has a long trail of allegations of sexual assault and misconduct, which if he had been a conservative republican, would have been more than sufficient to have driven him from the senate long ago and possibly to prison.
I won’t even venture onto Clinton’s history, or Senator Dodd’s or Gary Studd’s.
We all know who the real privileged elite are and that the media treats them with kid gloves.
While the players are not angels and in all probability loutish frat-boys, they didn’t deserve to be looking at up to 30 years in prison. They were to be made a sacrifice on the altar of political correctness and race/class warfare. Not to mention partisan politics. First, by an up for election prosecutor, then by the leftist progressives who wished to make these young men by inference, an implicit indictment of conservatives in general and republicans in specific. Much like Imus is now a ‘conservative.’
Most of the mainstream media was only too glad to lend a hand in their lynching.
Indeed, what will be interesting is how many in the media, or the Duke faculty group of 88 will ever even admit that they possibly might have been mistaken, let alone apologize.
It is said that in war, truth is the first casualty. In this skirmish in the ongoing culture war, I would venture to say that right after truth, simple human decency took the next hit.
We can’t go back to the days of the three feet on the floor of the public rooms of the unisex dorms
Why not? At Brigham Young University, they still have unisex dorms and rules against being in the bedroom of the opposite sex. The rules aren’t always kept, but because they’re there, you can still tell someone “no” and have the force of “law” behind it.
It’s been that way for decades, and no one is proposing chadors, purdahs, or duennas. The slope isn’t slipping at all in that direction.
I’m all for female freedom too — but to say that “In this case, justice triumphed” is just flat out wrong, unless and until the people who perpetrated this particular travesty are brought to justice, and that includes the false accuser and the prosecutor. If rape is a horrendous crime — and it is — then it’s also a horrendous crime to falsely accuse someone of it. And if, before the facts of the matter are ascertained in a trial, even the alleged victim must be shielded from publicity, than why not the alleged perpetrators as well?
Oh, and why is prison rape still a matter for comedy sketches and idle political threats?
The accuser in this case seems to have been a pawn manipulated by the prosecutor who used the case to grandstand while seeking re-election. That he held press conferences, withheld exculpatory evidence and studiosly avoided talking to the alleged victim(!) makes his nauseating abuse of power so transparent as to be farcical. That it worked (he was re-elected) reflects very poorly on the people who voted for him. Obviously, he should be disbarred. If he violated any law, any prosecutor who gives a damn about public confidence in the justice system should throw the book at him.
As I found out when my boys went to college in 2000, girls had rooms across the hall. I was surprised, but not as much as the father of a girl to whom I mentioned my surprise; he didn’t know either. I didn’t even mind the rules when I went to college in the mid 60s; I’m male. That was the way I was raised, so nothing was different. I never liked the rape statutes as I became aware of them in stories/movies of the time and thought that it was wise to level the playing field, so to speak. But what does bother me are the situations where guys were falsely accused. Two I have heard of where guys were sent to prison and one where an accused a teacher in my hometown committed suicide because of the false accusations by a student. The women recanted and NOTHING happened to them. They should receive the same sentence that the man received, but that will never happen. But if it was the law, no women would recant either. The he said, she said about rape may be the one area where polygraphs should be allowed as evidence.
You know Neo, exactly in the same way that technology alleviated the injustice of slavery, so can technology (a 99.99% accurate lie detector) alleviate injustice as well. That is why human progress in the form of America and the American Imperium is so important in the fight against the forces of decadence (Hollywood), chaos (Middle East), disorder (Islamic Jihad), entropy (suicide bombers, death (Palestinian brainwashing of children), and evil.
Those fighting against human progress using revolutionary, anarchic, religious, or political means are trying to hold humans back. That is not a good thing, Neo. The duke case is only one minor consequence of holding humanity back from our potential. That’s why evil is evil. It seeks to weaken us, to hold us back, to stunt our potential, and glorify self-destruction.
Neo-
Your 4th paragraph, “The history of rape laws…” summarizes Islamic Sharia law re rape as practiced today, unmodified over >1000 years.
And your “We can’t go back” conclusion symbolizes our largest societal problem: accepting error and erroneous outcomes as fait accompli. Recall the classic Edmund Burke statement on the triumph of Evil. When we are manifestly and obviously wrong we must “Go back”. The Left NEVER does that; it always forces the foot to fit the wrong shoe it produced!
The Left NEVER does that; it always forces the foot to fit the wrong shoe it produced!
That’s because the Left wants maximum entropy. Please go google Second Law of Thermodynamics if you don’t get what that means.
Entropy only goes in one direction, which is the direction time’s arrow flies. It don’t go back.
We can’t go back because it just plain doesn’t work that way. Ever. As Ymar says, time’s arrow is unidirectional. So is society’s. All movements that try to take us back to a better, earlier, more golden time are doomed to failure. That’s not a moral judgment; just an observation about humanity and history.
This case has little to do with discouraging false accusations of rape. The level of false accusations is determined, like roaches, by our habits, and not by the roaches, who only reveal us as we live. If something is to be affected by change, it would be the understanding that nostrums of feminism and multiculturalism do not support reason and law.
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I disagree, Neo: Society’s “arrow” isn’t uni-directional. In fact it flies all over the place and it’s only in hindsight that we can make out a trajectory at all. We _could_ go back to the days of three-feet-on-the-floor. It would require major shifts in attitudes, but it took equally major shifts to get us here in the first place.
In fact, we _did_ see a mini-shift away from promiscuity for a while during the height of the AIDS epidemic. The current wave of “outrageous” behavior at colleges and among young singles still falls well short of the excesses of the 1970s.
Discouraging dangerous behavior would require parents to take a strong stand, institutions to do likewise (and _not_ impose their views instead of the parents’), and law to back them up. These are achievable, but people have to _want_ to achieve them, rather than just wishing for someone to wave a magic wand.
I can’t agree with unidirectional course of society development. History testifies against this assertion, especially in case of sex norms and morals: they clearly demonstrate tendency to oscillate. From promiscuity of cavaliers to strict, even harsh norms of puritans; than to romanticism with cult of feelings, rather permissive; then to outrageous moral depravity of “merry old England” of Dickens and Thackeray – and again to Victorian age… I can prolong this list, but it is already long enough to expect a new Victorian age, which can reverse the current decadence just as abruptly and powerfully as previous moral revival put an end to slums of Whitechappel.
“All movements that try to take us back to a better, earlier, more golden time are doomed to failure.”
And yet human history is not constant movement from moral to amoral. We have had movements in both directions–towards more strict morality and away from it–over time. I don’t think it’s impossible that some future American age might have institutions more adherent to a moral code.
Cultural power seems to be in the hands of the very young right now, who are inclined to explore and think rules established by 10,000 years of human history are only there to get in the way of their having fun.
If cultural power in the US were in the hands of an older crowd, we might see a more systemically conservative attitude to things like male and female dorms–more similar to the way they were in your youth.
A few good lawsuits could have a similar effect. Universities tend to bend whichever way the litigous wind blows
neo: As Ymar says, time’s arrow is unidirectional. So is society’s.
The direction of time’s arrow really doesn’t have much to do with recognizing when you’ve entered a blind alley — the only route out of such a situation is back. That doesn’t mean trying to reproduce some mythical “golden age” of the past — it simply means recognizing that some supposedly “progressive” ideas in fact aren’t.
What you do with that recognition varies. In some cases, the remedy might be simply to reverse the changes; in others — and I think this situation is one of these — it might be enough to undo some of the worst aspects of the change and improve upon other aspects. Extending the “rape shield” to include both accuser and accused until the legal system can pronounce its verdict would be one such improvement.
Hedonistic ideology comes to end. It never was able to hold its promisses of personal happiness and invariably was leading to spiritual emptiness and despair. In ancient Rome it resulted in landslide conversion to Christianity. This can happen nowadays again, both in Europe and US. Some signs already visible in vigorous growth of Evangelican and Pentecostal chirches and decline of Anglicans and other “old Protestants”.
Guys, you don’t have to wait for the law to change. Quit ducking jury duty, and remember that rape shield laws, VAWA laws, etc. are a 100% guarantee that exculpatory evidence has been suppressed, and a 100% reason for doubt in the absence of verified physical coercion. Then vote accordingly. Oh, and just as all blacks can’t be excluded from the jury, you can’t either.
Neo’s point is, assuming my observations are correct, is that if you want to change society, then you will have to do so by advancing it to a new path, a path going to a new destination. Not trying to reverse time and “go back”. What are you going back to? You can’t go back to when you were a child. You can’t go back to when Reagan was President. You can’t go back to when the Soviet Union was still in power threatening the world with nukes (regardless of how much the Left wishes that to be). So what can you do? You can move forward. You can learn from the mistakes of the past, to do what is right and better, more right and better than the past.
the only route out of such a situation is back.
Spacial orientation is not the same as time orientation. That’s space-time are two distnct quantities, or qualities.
When people coming from spatial perspectives interface with those coming from time perspectives, it becomes a semantic problem.
I remember when Neo wrote some posts about nostalgia. I got the sense that Neo wanted to bring the best that was in the past, and bring it forth to the future without dragging all the negatives along with it. She described nostalgia as one trick the human mind plays on itself in attempting to acquire such a state. But the actual ability to learn from history and improve upon the human condition, doesn’t use nostalgia, because going back to Neo is not a solution. And it is not a solution because nobody wants to go back, nobody should want to go back to being a child. Instead, people should grow up, if the had or have problems, they need to mature and grow as they deal with these problems. In the now and the future, rather than the past and the forgotten.
Here is a post people might be interested in, if they like me are fascinated with the Fall of the Roman Empire and how that relates to the American Imperium.
Do we want to go back to Ancient Roman Times? No. Can we go back even if we wanted to? No to that as well.
Fall of Empires
Just so there’s no misunderstanding. I mean that because the Left serves entropy, they cannot go back, they must always go forward, falling headfirst to the ground. The Left is, and therefore they cannot resist gravity, evil, entropy, etc.
A lot of people want to go back to Golden Times and there are arguments about how to best do that. But in the Physics-Philosophical-Metaphysical sense, all I’m saying is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics weighs in pretty heavily concerning whether you can go back in time or not. Real heavy.
One of the reasons we know which direct time is going is because of entropy. If entropy is increasing, then we know time is going forwards. If entropy is DECREASING in a closed system, then we know time is going backwards. Otherwise, we get into trouble.
You know, I’ve read the claim dozens, if not hundreds of times, that there are people (usually called “conservatives”) who believe in a past golden age and want to take us back there. But I’ve never heard anyone, conservative or otherwise, who actually thought there was a past golden age or wanted to turn the clock back in general.
I conclude that this is either a caricature of the conservative position or the position of a miniscule minority.
Doc, you’ve sort of made a straw man there, however. Lots of conservatives such as myself like lots of eras of the past a lot more than we like the present, notwithstanding that there are certain aspects of the present that are unquestionably superior to any time of the past. But one can, as I have recently, express a longing for a time and place that, notwithstanding certain ghastly aspects of it for some people — maybe most — may have been superior to our own and that, perhaps, if we had the choice, we might actually prefer in one-for-one switch.
OK, I can’t say that I’ve never read anyone who said that any more. Nuts.
But I suspect that you are idealizing, Ron, and that a little careful investigation of any of these past times that you think are better than today would make you change your mind. Note, I’m not saying that past times were uniformly worse than today, just that they weren’t, overall, better.
I’m disappointed with Ymar’s and Neo’s misapplication of the Second Law of thermodynamics to our subject today. Entropy occurs over time in energy-isolated systems.
Fortunately, other posters have risen to the occasion!
By Mussab Al-Khairalla and Paul Tait
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The political movement of fiery Iraqi Shi’ite cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr said on Sunday it would withdraw from the government on Monday to press its demand for a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal.
Something worth noting: there’s no law against naming the accuser in any crime, including rape. (The rape shield laws are something different; they govern the admissibility of evidence about the accuser’s prior sexual encounters/behavior in court.) The convention of not naming the accuser in the press is just that, a media convention based on the old idea that it is shameful to be raped and that a rape victim should be protected from having her shame broadcast to all and sundry.
However, if there’s a stigma attached to being the victim of rape, there’s a thousand times more attached to being a rapist. Even in cases where the accused aren’t tried in the media the way these have been, the mere accusation can get you ostracized for life, cause you problems finding a job, getting the trust of a girlfriend’s or fiancee’s family, and so on. (Particularly now. Google never forgets such an accusation.)
There will always be people who say “Well, he was acquitted but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.” People are saying such things now about the Duke 3, despite the fact that the NC Attorney General has declared their complete and proven innocence, in so many words. Even in this comment thread we have people calling them “loutish frat boys” with the implication that they did something wrong, or violent, or something. They’ll never be out from under this accusation, or the concurrent insinuations such as the one mentioned earlier, and the taint will do much more harm in their lives than is done to any woman by public knowledge of her rape.
So why don’t the media also protect accused, in cases such as rape or child abuse, until such time as they’re convicted? My cynical answer is that they’d sell less broadcast time and fewer papers. Certainly the lurid Newsweek cover story of last year – “Sex, Lies, and Duke” – made quite a bit of money. Likewise the TV pundits have benefited greatly – I speak of financial benefit.
But is there any principled reason to hold the name of an accuser confidential because of the damage revealing it might do, while feeling no inhibitions over doing far greater damage by trumpeting the name of the accused in conjunction with the word “rapist”?
Entropy occurs over time in energy-isolated systems.
The Universe is a closed system, Tom. Technically, there could be a Higher Power called God by mortals, that could be feeding stars energy so they won’t go supernova or reversing time and decay, but I don’t think that’s something mortals should count on in their dealings with time and entropy.
Entropy occurs everywhere, not just in isolated and closed systems. To make things short, the Second Law of Thermodynamics state that for any closed system that is isolated from other systems with energy, entropy is either increasing or staying constant. It’s a trick proposition if you think about what occurs to a system in which entropy is decreasing, in which the energy that is causing this decrease in entropy is being provided by another system. What happens to the entropy in that system if it is contributing energy to the first the system? You could end up with a situation in which you talk about two systems both with access to each other, with one system decreasing in entropy, and the other system decreasing in entropy as well by shunting off its heat from one region to System 1. This might be called a perpetual motion machine, which shouldn’t exist. Actually, it doesn’t exist, but should exist since it would be a nice thing to have.
In the end, the only way Tom could be why that I’m incorrect about my application the Second Law of Thermodynamics is if he says that God is able to turn back the clock, resurrect people from the dead, and so forth.
Obviously if you believe there’s some open source energy avaiable to do work, any application of the Second Law to state that we are operating under a closed system, would be disbelieved. But this becomes a religious debate. Not a discussion on the Laws of Thermodyanmics. That is an important point to make.
If people want to talk about God, they’re free to do so, Tom.
So why don’t the media also protect accused, in cases such as rape or child abuse, until such time as they’re convicted?
I think this has to do with that law people discussed about laws concerning whether a man should pay child support for a child he didn’t want, as opposed to a woman who could abort a child she didn’t want and therefore not pay any support. The law was definitely applied unfairly, and Neo made the point that it was to protect the child. But then again, there are other laws that specifically don’t protect the child, but protects the right for mothers to kill their future children. So it was an interesting argument.
“A lot of people want to go back to Golden Times and there are arguments about how to best do that. But in the Physics-Philosophical-Metaphysical sense, all I’m saying is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics weighs in pretty heavily concerning whether you can go back in time or not. Real heavy.”
The Law of Gravity weighs in pretty heavily concerning whether I can float around at will. Real heavy. And?
It seems, Ymarsakar, you have mistaken two very different concepts. You seem to have mixed up the idea of traveling back in time with the concept of implementing and enforcing social or legal rules that were in force in the past but are no longer in force.
This is a little like mixing up the ideas of the law of conservation of mass with the concept of there being no free lunch. That is, the two could be mistaken if and only if your grasp on the English language were very tenuous, or you were very stupid, or if you only barely understood the conversation and the topics, as a child might confuse the conversation of parents, and you wanted desperately to sound like you knew what you were talking about. I’m going to guess that last one, but it’s just a guess. Maybe English is your third language?
“If entropy is DECREASING in a closed system, then we know time is going backwards. Otherwise, we get into trouble.”
What a delightful concept! How else might we know? Has someone checked today’s entropy levels against yesterday’s, to make sure that we’re still moving forward in time and not hurtling backwards through time?
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I feel that the rape shield law need change, there are way to many false accusations being made and it is noe fair to the men or young boys out there. My son In-law just went through this and let me tell you there was no way with the rape shield law that he could protect him self. She clamed to be a virgin when just hour before she said he raped her he caught in the my basement having oral sex with a 15 year old boy. 3 time she told the officer that nothing happend in my basement, except that they were only kissing, she all said my son -inlaw pulled her pants down and spanked her the boy told the officer that this did not happen,at no time did my son in-law touch her. We also stated to follow her my space she was talking to her boy friend of 18 years old that she was going to have (his her boyfriends baby) but that she would not get him in trouble and turn him in. This took place on Dec. 25,2007, in July of 2008 she wrote in her my space that she would of been holding her baby now if it would not of died. Do the count that meant she would of been pragnant in Nov, Dec. of 2007. This is a very troubled young girl and needs help, But in my eyes the Rape Shild law helped put someone in jail that did nothing and could do nothing to prove his case. Where is the justice???????????
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