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I'm not letting anyone off the hook. My experience was with a violent rape assault. A true predator. He was hunting a target of opportunity with a violent attack in mind. Sadistic and vicious. He WANTED to hurt. He had a record of having done so before. My girl fit the profile of previous attacks. Very petite, health care field, parking lot assault. My question has been constant, WHY was he free?
Anyway, before I get wound up, moving on....What is it that men/male children should be taught about rape that is not glaringly obvious? That if we witness a rape in progress we should stop it by any and all means? If we hear someone bragging about a rape, we should beat them within an inch of their life and drag them to the police? If a woman confides being raped to us that we should do all in our power to help her and see justice done? That rape is a violation of a woman that can NEVER be toleratedand that it goes against everything it means to be a man?
I thought this was common teaching already. Am I mistaken? Or am I an anachronism?
I think you are right on target and your experience probably gives you more authority in this matter than any of us. The person you have described isn't going to be rehabilitated or taught differently. That ship sailed a LONG time ago. If society fails in removing him from the public, which they had, the only other option is to empower potential targets to avoid being victims.
I think Miss Nevada provides a good short term solution. As for "educating" men about sexual assault I do not see how that will help. People murder and steal, there will be awful deviants in our society.
There are campaigns about domestic violence, sadly, it still happens. I am not certain educating people will prevent crime.
I think the real danger here is in telling women that self defense or prevention are somehow wrong.
I think the real danger here is in telling women that self defense or prevention are somehow wrong.
The question is: does prevention education work? We have DARE, has that program been effective? We have had campaigns against domestic violence, I don't think domestic violence has been reduced or men or women, for that matter, learn not to dominate and control a partner.
If there were an effective prevention program, I would be 100% for it.
In the mean time, it would not harm females to learn self defense.
Another thing that people forget, men can be sexually assaulted as well-there is a lot of stigma with men reporting sexual assault OR domestic violence.
Meanwhile, back in reality…
Men who are vile and evil enough to rape are not going to be taught to stop, nor were they taught to rape in the first place. There is something seriously broken in their wiring that isn't going to be fixed with a teaching moment.
In an ideal world, women should not have to worry about defending themselves from predators.
In an ideal world, people shouldn't have to lock their doors at night either.
We don't live an in ideal world.
It's much more realistic to empower people to not become victims of crime than it is to think we can "teach" all of the bad people in society to behave.
Learning self defense won't end the rape culture we have in this country. It would be better for our country to teach men that it isn't okay to rape someone.
I will say the article sounded to be hard Ms Nevada because she is also right that in our rape culture, it is important for women to learn how to defend themselves from their attackers because we are incapable of teaching our men that it isn't okay to rape a woman.
While we're at it, why don't we teach people not to rob, steal, murder, fight, drive faster than the speed limit, beat their wives, abuse their kids, drink and drive, etc.
Give me a break!!!
Some people don't abide by the law, not because they haven't been "taught" to do so, but because they are criminals and do not care. We can all agree that in a perfect world, woman wouldn't have to learn how to defend themselves against attakers, but we do not live in a perfect world.
The objection isn't to women learning self-defense. The objection is to society always making rape prevention 100% women's responsibility, rather than men's. Teaching women self-defense is all well and good. But how about teaching men not to rape? We rarely hear much about that side of things...
While I can understand the frustration many feel about violent crime, it's not something that can be taught-away. There is no "rape culture". Rape doesn't happen because of politically incorrect fairy tales, print ads featuring impossibly skinny female models, or a disproportionately low percentage of women working as computer programmers. It doesn't happen because of pornography, tasteless sexual jokes, or unrealistic expectations some men may have about relationships. Rape is not a matter of cultural influences, it is a matter of personal behavior.
Rape happens because one individual makes a conscious decision to engage in an act of violence against another. While there may be growing controversy as to what constitutes an act of rape, I know of no one who takes an assault lightly when it meets the legal definition of rape. Perpetuating a radical feminist ideology which defines all males as enemy-combatants in a gender-based cultural war, isn't going to make rape go away.
Violence is an unfortunate reality of our species. We have been trying to understand why for most of our history--we haven't even come close to succeeding. Trying to correlate rape to whatever political, social, or cultural ideas one finds to be offensive; won't change the fact that it exists. Until and unless we can find the answer to human violence, teaching people to be vigilant and to fight back makes the most sense.
Unfortunately, this is a link to one of the many sites operated by a victimization feminist. While I don't doubt her sincerity (or yours), the statistics are dubious at best. The site is also riddled with the gender politics of feminism's more radical elements.
The site's author (Olivia Grey), argues that a wide assortment of cultural behaviors/statements--from telling a woman to "calm down, you're too emotional" to supporting industries she defines as being misogynistic--form a culture which causes or enables rapists to act. In terms of structural rationality, this is no different than the religious right suggesting that Judas Priest songs cause suicide. The fact that we can't explain why people engage in destructive behavior, doesn't give us the right to attribute that behavior to whatever we happen to find personally offensive in the world.
Grey's site also uses an abstract, ideological definition of rape, as opposed to the relatively straightforward legal definition. Nor does she leave room for the potential innocence of the accused--stating on the site "we believe the victim. period."
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