Tags
Barring mass surveillance, we are not ever ever ever ever going to be able to prove that most rapes happened beyond a reasonable doubt.
Normal rapes are “I said ‘no’, but I was too drunk to fight zir off”; it’s “I said ‘no’, but then I froze up and didn’t resist”; it’s “my partner was abusing me and I knew that if I kept refusing he would hurt me”; it’s “I couldn’t hit a girl”; it’s “he pinned me and I couldn’t move”; it’s “I fought back but it didn’t leave any marks”. Rapes that are provable are rare, they are the exception, and smart rapists can easily avoid them.
If we don’t allow colleges to expel people for committing rape, or we use a relatively high standard of evidence, then the victim will have to see his rapist across the quad, in the cafeteria, in science class, at parties. And the rapist has access to a new crop of vulnerable people, and she can rape again and again.
If we do use a relatively low standard of evidence, then abusers can easily get their partners expelled from school as a punishment for leaving them or as a tool for isolating them from their social group. Abusers already make their partners think the partners are the real abusive ones; do you think they’ll have very many problems stepping it up to “…and if you leave I’ll report you to the Dean”?
So it goes.
Thing of Things 
Pervasive video phones? It’s mass survaillance when necessary. Also, for the cases where resistance was too inefectual to be detected, I know what advice the libertarians would give.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is depressing and true. I wish I had something insightful to add. I’m going to go play games or look at pictures of cute animals or something.
LikeLike
Encrypted mass surveillance, Raikoth style?
(Perhaps, given that we don’t have absolutely trustworthy law enforcenent, a layered encryption mechanism where the outer layer provides VERY low-quality footage that could establish basic facts while keeping just a little privacy for victim and accused both – so as to make the option to examine it less costly for both victim and accuser; then look deeper if needed.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
One reason to be a tiny bit less pessemistic; it is, as you say, pretty much impossible by any acceptable means to catch a sufficiently careful rapist. But many criminals are wildly incompetent, and even the very skillful screw up sometimes. Cases with witnesses, or blatantly obvious physical evidence, are perhaps rare, but cases where there really isn’t any evidence at all beyond the victim testimony are also rare, and more could surely be done to collect and make use of what additional clues could be found. And while part of the effect of any such improvement will be to make rapists yet more careful, there are limits to how quickly or how thoroughly people can learn. So we shouldn’t let the impossibility of stopping the perfect rapist stand in the way of improving efforts to stop the far more common imperfect rapists.
LikeLiked by 6 people
I’ve thought for a while that the criminal justice system is fundamentally ill suited to doing much about rape culture, that continually seeking to water down established legal norms to fix it is a cure as bad or worse than the disease, and so, that most energies should be invested into alternatives strategies instead.
I feel like less of an asshole for thinking it now that you’ve written this.
LikeLiked by 6 people
We don’t need mass surveillance, we need mass sousveillance. Once contact lens cameras take off (although if you can make a basically flat camera (presumably with diffraction grates and Fresnel lenses), it’s much easier to glue it elsewhere, instead of making it transparent on top of that), having video-evidence of everything won’t be a problem, and won’t require giving a crazy amount of leverage to the government. It’s like dashcams, but better. Although the governments (e.g. that of California and Massachusetts) aren’t above hypocritically banning sousveillance claiming to care about people’s privacy.
LikeLiked by 3 people
And it makes revenge porn trivial to make, as well as blackmail. Lapel mics have already broadcast to the world off the cuff statments that are damning out of context, think of what leverage will be given to those with video evidence.
LikeLike
Honestly, we are already seeing the fruits of that society on the internet. We are forced to tolerate non-harmful weirdness, even if we find it distasteful. I pretty much like it.
As elites & hypocrites become unable to hide their strangeness strangeness that hurts no-one will become acceptable and those which hurt others will be caught.
I do see the problems with revenge porn and blackmail, though my guess is that long run they will simply become less effective as we as a society become inured to the fact that everyone has naked bodies, and everyone has done things they are ashamed of.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Unless it gets you fired (which is admittedly possible, but non-central), revenge porn only really matters if you care.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Tori Ticviking:
You underestimate how much variation there is between people. You are also underestimating that all human societies develop essentially arbitrary taboos on actions, wildly disproportionate form the harms that follow from such actions.
Perhaps the taboos will become more tightly coupled with things most people don’t do. But for the eccentric, the deviant, the subversive this will be a new hell. They will not survive long, they will be institutionalized or exiled. Perhaps killed. Political murder is a fact of life in Europe today. Hopefully they will be allowed to make their own communities in the digital wilderness.
From my perspective this will be a double tragedy:
1. The private vice will vanish. And with it the problem Neal Stephenson identified in The Diamond Age arises more strongly than ever before. It will become very hard to aim and preserve values humans can’t quite live up to. To use the Near vs. Far Distinction some Far values will be abandoned.
2. The Far values that remain, the ones we loudly claim to like, but in our heart of hearts are never quite motivated to enjoy or pursue, will tyrannize our actual Near preferences.
Both of these constitute suboptimal value change, struck not under benevolent Near-Far synthesis by a Friendly AI, but mechanistically changed by a process we don’t understand. We might as well subject ourselves to another million years of evolution and see if Azathoth turns us into dog cancer.
On psychological and social strain:
Human psychology is well used to being observed. What human psychology will strain under is constant observation with the added complication of objective memory!
Accurate recollection of past social conflicts can make reconciliation almost impossible. Face saving fictions remove so much needless suffering from the world.
LikeLike
There are many ways sousveillance is less than ideal, but it’s still the most plausible, feasible solution to protecting our freedoms. The genie is not going back in the bottle with regards to the technologies that make increased surveillance possible.
What we can do, however, is make sure that there are no watchers who themselves are not being watched. If everyone is guilty, then no one is.
LikeLike
The result of this would be complete compliance with popular established social norms. Whatever the popular established social norms happen to be.
They would perhaps mutate somewhat towards practicality. But they would also radically reduce the possibility of experimenting with novel things most people disagree with. Experimenting in new social norms suddenly becomes very costly coordination wise, because it would allow any defector to blackmail the group.
In the good scenario, we enter rigid legalism, with people suing each other through the government. In the bad scenario something like a social network is the enforcement and revenge mechanism of choicse.
Do you recall how an out of context tweet can balloon and become viral, costing people jobs, marriages and even incurring death threats in the space of one plane flight?
Yeah. Imagine living like that. Every moment of your day when you aren’t alone. I’d choose to be alone much more. I’d chose to try and get some freedom from social scrutiny by commenting on anon boards behind TOR if that wasn’t outlawed to.
LikeLike
Sounds like side effects of the sexual revolution. There might be helpful ideas here.
http://ethikapolitika.org/2014/12/16/natural-law-liberal-arts-interview-robert-p-george/
LikeLike
I’d suspect that the average case of marital rape is harder to prove than the average case of nonmarital rape.
LikeLiked by 3 people
My guess is marital rape is far less common than non marital rape.
LikeLiked by 1 person
On college campuses in the U.S. anyway
LikeLiked by 1 person
The assertion that marital rape is rarer is entirely insufficient to show the point. You would have to show that nonmarital rape increased as a result of the sexual revolution. And even then, if marital rape decreased a similar amount, the overall provability of accusations could be up.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh, well, if you restrict your sample to an almost entirely unmarried population, I guess I’d have to agree!
Time to roll back the sexual revolution, everyone!
LikeLike
@Joe: In terms of number of perpetrators, I suspect you’re right. In terms of number of rapes, I suspect you’re very, very wrong.
LikeLike
My thoughts exactly. It’s hard for me to think of a crime which is less intrinsically amenable to an unbiased method of detection than rape. I wish I had good ideas of a solution, or even vague brainstorming, to contribute.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Which is why, despite the unfairness, it’s important to teach people how to avoid being put in vulnerable situations, and doing so is not victim blaming.
LikeLiked by 6 people
I’d really like to see this discussed in more detail, as I’m not sure where to draw the line. Sure, we can all agree that “your fault for drinking” is horrible victim blaming and should not be done ever.
But on the other side, ignoring obvious dangers because you should have a right to not being raped is not optimal either. And I feel discussion of these dangers is all too often shut down with cries of “victim-blaming” even when not applicable.
LikeLiked by 3 people
The line is between moral responsibility and pragmatic responsibility. Unfortunately, these two completely separate concepts are easily confused in English. Also, there’s a complicating factor, in that many risky behaviors have traditionally been considered immoral (e.g. drinking heavily, being sexually promiscuous).
LikeLiked by 5 people
It happens that there’s an overlap between at least some behaviors that would decrease the likelihood of rape, and behaviors that are just plain good ideas for other reasons. If you’re going to a party, it makes sense to have a buddy to keep an eye on you, and who you keep an eye on in return. If they see you staggering from too much alcohol, they can tell you to slow down or walk you home. I used to attend a party where this was mandatory, and where the number of drinks partiers were given was marked on the backs of our hands.
Sensible, and it has no more to do with blaming rape victims than it does for blaming hungover people.
LikeLiked by 3 people
“But on the other side, ignoring obvious dangers because you should have a right to not being raped is not optimal either.”
Nobody even suggests that approach with other crimes. Civil society is about reducing these risks, and there are lots of them – swindling lenders and borrowers and people who renege on contracts, physical attacks, property crimes – but with most of those there is also an expectation that while society will do its best to reduce the risks, the individual also has a duty of care to protect himself.
So if you leave your house unlocked and go away and someone burglarizes the house, that burglary, but it’s not breaking and entering. With physical violence like rape or assault, it’s a lot less clear-cut.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ginkgo:
Actually, it is breaking and entering.
The exact laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (some states don’t actually make “breaking and entering” a crime of its own). But in some states – Washington state, for example – you can break and enter even by walking through a wide-open door. The key elements are 1) unauthorized entry, and 2) intent to commit a crime.
It’s true that there are people who will blame me if my house gets robbed and it turns out I failed to lock my windows, or my front door. (I think those people are assholes.) But you seem to be saying that in this case, it’s legally less of a crime to burgle a house if the homeowner didn’t take sufficient precautions (whatever those are). That’s not true, either for stealing from a house, or for rape.
(Not really relevant to the argument, but sort of funny: I’ve encountered burglars in my house twice, and in neither case did they enter through the front door. In one case, our front door was locked, but the burglar opened the locked front door and let me in as I was standing there fishing in my pockets for housekeys.)
LikeLike
I can’t take credit for it, but one helpful slogan is: “The difference between advice and blame is timing.”
LikeLike
Assuming (as any reasonable person would) that there is a minority portion of the population willing to rape, and that there is also a minority portion of the population willing to lie about rape, as a society we’re tasked with protecting the rest of the population from each of those groups.
Quite the balancing act.
LikeLiked by 2 people
This is not a problem unique to rape. Many crimes come down to one person’s word against another’s. The reasonable-doubt standard is the product of a long, sad history proving it the lesser evil, but apparently such lessons need to be refreshed occasionally.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Uh, name three? Preferably ones that involve a violation of bodily autonomy or something of comparable impact.
LikeLike
1) Self-defense vs assault/murder/etc.
2) Possession of stolen property/kidnapping vs entrustment of car, pet, child, etc.
3) Almost anything that depends on a cop’s word.
4) Scooter Libby’s obstruction trial came down to whether he or Tim Russert remembered a conversation better.
LikeLiked by 3 people
It may not be strictly unique, but there are precious few other crimes where you sometimes can’t even prove the damage done – and of most of these, the accusation alone is unlikely to destroy a reputation as thoroughly. Which makes it the ideal crime to falsely accuse someone of, especially after a relationship turns hostile.
And for more inclusive definitions of rape (which, in a few countries, actually made it into law), you sometimes couldn’t even tell whether it was rape if you caught the whole thing on video from five different angles – you’d also need to look into both people’s heads.
In conclusion: That’s a damn hard problem, and any decision you make *will* have horrible consequences. You can only try to find the least bad one.
LikeLike
I’m very disappointed that the restorative justice movement ( http://www.restorativejustice.org/ ) – despite the endorsement of Mary Koss ( http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/sexual-assault-college-campuses-20150501 ) – hasn’t gained any traction so far.
Although of course restorative justice isn’t a perfect answer to all problems (what is?), perfection is obviously the wrong basis for comparison. Restorative justice would often be a more useful and functional way of addressing rape than the “punish the offender” model.
LikeLike
In what proportion of cases does it help, rather than making things worse?
LikeLike
I’m not sure I can answer that exact question, but here’s a relevant quote, from a review of the academic literature on restorative justice (which in this review was referred to as “RJ conferences” or as “conferences”):
“When victims were asked whether they were satisfied with the way their case was dealt with by the justice system, there was a statistically significant difference between the court-assigned and the RJ-assigned victims (46% vs 60%). Significantly more of those who actually experienced an RJ conference were satisfied, compared with those whose cases were dealt with in court (70% vs 42%). There was no difference here between property and violence victims.
“As a further indicator of overall treatment satisfaction, all RISE victims were asked whether they were pleased with the way their case had been dealt with (whether by court or by conference), or whether they would have preferred the alternative treatment. Significantly more conference victims than court victims agreed they were pleased to have been treated the way they were (69% vs 48%). Property victims were slightly more pleased than violence victims. […]
“It seems likely that these findings are related to another striking difference between the conference-assigned and court–assigned victims: desire for revenge. Overall, 20% of court victims said they would harm their offenders if they had the chance, compared with 7% of conference victims. This difference was especially stark for victims of violent crime whose cases went to court, nearly half of whom (45%) wanted to harm their offenders, compared with 9% of those who went to a conference (Strang, 2002). Table 4 shows that when we extended this analysis to London, computing separate point estimates for men and women victims in each of four separate experiments, the pattern across the eight tests of the revenge-reduction
hypothesis was supported as statistically significant and substantial. On average, there was two-thirds less desire for revenge across the eight groups receiving RJ than their comparison victims receiving CJ (Sherman et al, 2005).”
That’s just a small section (although I think it’s representative); you’ll find out much more by reading the article, Or, if you don’t want to read the whole thing (which would be understandable, it’s ninety pages long), there’s an “executive summary” on page 4 as the pages are numbered, aka page 5 as the pdf viewer counts pages.
Restorative justice also performed better than courtroom justice when it came to lower rates of reoffending.
Of course, direct comparisons like this are limited by (among other factors) the fact that restorative justice is a process that both the victim and the offender must agree to. (I say “offender” rather than “alleged offender” because, as I understand it, admitting wrongdoing is part of the RJ process). Therefore, the people who use RJ are essentially self-selected for their belief that RJ would be helpful to them.
LikeLike
Regarding Koss: https://soundcloud.com/889-wers/male-rape
In this interview (starting at about 7 minutes in) she can’t even conceptualize how a man can be made to penetrate someone else – asking how is that possible. And when she’s asked what she would call it if a man is drugged and wake up with a woman on top of him with his penis inserted into her vagina she answers that she would call it “unwanted contact”.
I don’t see much hope for restoration for male victims in any programs she leads.
LikeLike
This seems like a pure ad hom to me.
I agree that Koss’ ideas about male victims of rape are regressive and ignorant. That’s bad, but it doesn’t erase all the good she’s done in her life, nor does it automatically make any idea she endorses a bad idea.
If you think that Restorative Justice is a bad idea, then I’d be interested in hearing why. But “this person I hate endorses the idea” is not really an argument.
LikeLike
Ampersand:
It’s not. I can’t see how her attitude towards male survivors are not relevant for how she would implement a restorative justice process in regards to male survivors.
Just to make it even more clear. I don’t think restorative justice is a bad idea in itself, but I have very little confidence in how well a restorative justice process like RESTORE would handle male victims of female perpetrators when the main designer of RESTORE cannot conceptualize how a man can be made to penetrate someone against his consent and thinks that a woman fucking a drugged, unconscious man without his consent is just a matter of “unwanted contact”.
She advocates that researchers make sure that male survivors experiences are not categorized as rape unless they were penetrated and the survey instruments she developed (the revised SES) indeed does not have any question which would capture male victims who been made to penetrate a female perpetrator vaginally or anally.
All this make me believe that RESTORE would not be very helpful for male victims and the gendered way RESTORE was talked about in the National Journal article you linked to does nothing to assure me that male victims would incorporated in a real, serious, meaningful and equal manner.
Since you thought my comment was an ad hom – can you tell me why you think Koss’ ideas about male rape victims are irrelevant for any restorative justice program she designs?
LikeLike
Didn’t RESTORE (the program Koss was personally running) end years ago?
My comment, to which you responded, was about Restorative Justice, not RESTORE. I misunderstood you to be talking about Restorative Justice in general; my bad. If you’re talking about RESTORE, I don’t disagree with you.
LikeLike
Yes, the funding for RESTORE ended in 2007, but that didn’t stop Koss from promoting the program in several papers and pointing out it’s potential for colleges. From the article:
Here is the abstract on two of the papers:
http://www.restorativejustice.org/articlesdb/articles/11070 http://www.restorativejustice.org/articlesdb/articles/11144
This push apparently failed to gain any traction and the article lists a number of possible reasons.
Your comment lamented that restorative justice largely has failed – and you included a link to an article which talked about Koss’ work with restorative justice and the RESTORE program she created based on funding from the CDC. I took that to mean that you implicitly endorsed Koss program (RESTORE) and that you lamented that even that failed despite having such a renowned name as Koss behind it. Hence I posted a criticism directed at that program – and indeed any program on restorative justice for sexual violence headed/designed by her.
LikeLike
Man, it sure is handy that the Dark Gods or Formless Things or whatever we’re calling them are clearly going to push a total surveillance society on everyone regardless of our political idiocy, isn’t it?
LikeLike
Poe’s Law check, please.
LikeLike
Where MugaSofer is coming from, they don’t need Poes.
LikeLike
To be clear, by “our political idiocy”, I meant “one tribe has decided false accusations don’ matter, and the other has decided villains getting away doesn’t matter, and the whole discussion of how to manage the tradeoff consists of these two groups yelling at each other over which of these two ludicrous positions is the truth.” Rereading it, that may not have been as clear from context as I apparently assumed it was. Political idiocy = the idiocy discussed in this post.
With that said, yeah, I’m reasonably serious.
It is genuinely my honest assessment of the facts that we’re moving firmly toward the kind of “total surveillance” Ozy dismisses as a solution in the post, despite an overwhelming majority of *people* being vocally against it. Now, is that Moloch, governmental corruption, historical imperative, or just plain weird?
So IDK, it strikes me as slightly amusing that the unstoppable forces of the Formless Things are probably going to solve this insoluble problem Ozy lays out for us. Isn’t that nice of them?
LikeLike
Totally sounds like a thing Moloch would do. But seriously, you might be more right than you realize. My suspicion why so many people are actually pretty ok with surveillance is that they do it themselves, to their children, as much as technology currently permits. Mostly to protect them from that evil sexual predator bogeyman in their mind. Doing that while criticizing state surveillance in the abstract requires amounts of cognitive dissonance even Scientologists would find challenging. So System 1 wins and tells System 2 to invent some rationalizations for surveillance.
I’m so happy I was born half a generation before surveillance became cheap.
LikeLike
Your observation on the rationalization of complete child observation as a precursor to adult observation Autolykos is frightening. It raises in my mind the question of whether once the latter comes we are all going to become each others helicopter parent.
The current levels of child surveillance are obviously harmful and dehumanizing.
While I don’t mind children being dehumanized as a rule, as long as they are clearly recognized as privately owned slaves like in ancient times, today they are publicly owned slaves. Parents as overseers of publicly owned slaves have terrible incentives. Remember for example that they are under risk of child abuse accusations if they sleep in the same bed as their children. Hominid cubs of course don’t need touch from their parents at all am I right. *sigh*
I do think since it is no longer allowed to treat them as privately owned slaves, treating them as freemen is obviously better than state ownership, so humanization should be encouraged.
Regardless of the viability and best approach to people ownership, the harm in the curtailing the space of experience and autonomy of young learning minds today is appalling.
LikeLike
This is difficult to answer. At least in terms of college campuses, the best solution I can think of is to keep the core of what is happening now (separate the accused from the complainant after a report has been filed, in the lead-up to the hearing), but if you want such a thing to have lifelong consequences, then you need a full trial with full Constitutional protections.
The problem of non-constitutional trials carrying de facto criminal consequences isn’t unique to either rape or college campuses. I don’t like it when job applications ask if you’ve ever been arrested. If you’ve been arrested but not convicted, that shouldn’t count for anything; to do so violates innocent until proven guilty; and I think such questions should be banned. I also don’t like it when similarly, various civil court injunctions start negatively impacting your ability to get a job or fit into society’s institutions.
LikeLike