We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. – Norman Mailer
Some of my readers say they need to keep a dictionary handy while they read my essays. That works fine for regular words, but sometimes I use metaphors that may be a bit obscure nowadays. Do most of y’all remember paint-by-number kits? Do they still sell those? For those who have never seen one, a kit consists of a board on which is a line drawing, and each area contains a number corresponding to one of the containers of oil paint that come with the set. One simply paints each area with the proper color, and if properly done it looks (almost) exactly like the picture on the box; if clumsily done, it at least resembles the picture. “Sex trafficking” stories are a lot like that; most of them start out with the same basic outline, and then the copyist reporter simply fills in the details by the numbers. If done properly, it almost looks like something a third-rate journalist might turn out, but if done clumsily …well, it’s easier to show you.
Many Morris County activists are counting the days to…Super Bowl XLVIII…but not for love of football. They’re already working to reduce the human trafficking that inevitably happens when tens of thousands of tourists assemble…
Our would-be artist, Lorraine Ash, must think that little reversal is very clever; unfortunately, the brainpower she devoted to it would have better been spent on a few minutes of research. Had she done so, she would have discovered things like this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and even this…which prove that the word “inevitable” is about as far from the truth as it’s possible to get. Oh, dear; I do believe Lorraine mistook the “6” for a “9” and used the wrong color here. But no matter; let’s see how she does on the next one:
…“There are four times as many people enslaved today than there were in the 1800s,” said Linda Michalski…campus minister at Benedictine Academy…“The value of a slave has actually decreased …Frederick Douglass was sold for $792. Today, somebody is sold for $70 in our country in the 21st century. How can this be?”
Well, at least here she’s only quoting, so someone else looks like a moron instead of poor Lorraine. The pretense that “trafficking” (which is highly illegal) can be compared in any valid way with chattel slavery (which can only exist where there are laws and social structures to support it) is a common, if especially idiotic, claim of the “trafficking” fetishists, as is the use of novel definitions for the word “sold” which do not actually involve transfer of property. But in this case, the apples-and-oranges comparison of the sale price of a chattel slave with some apparently-random sum of money (a streetwalker’s fee, perhaps?) is so deeply stupid it even confuses a high-school religion teacher. But let’s move on to the next number in the pattern:
…Michalski and…other activists…want people to understand that human trafficking…is real and happens in New Jersey.
A flawless execution of the Profession of Faith! And then she puts her own artistic touch on the classic “100,000 to 300,000 trafficked children” myth by attributing it to the Department of Homeland Security instead of the usual FBI or Department of Justice. Estes & Weiner sure do work for a lot of government departments, don’t they? And what “trafficking” masterpiece could be complete without a “King of the Hill” section?
…New Jersey is a big destination state for traffickers because of its ports and because…trains and buses leave from here and go all over the country. There are three airports in the area. Also, because of I-95, it’s very easy to move people through New Jersey and all the way down to Florida…
Trains and buses and airplanes! And an interstate highway, even! Why, no other place has those! What were the madmen who laid out New Jersey thinking to allow so many dangerous things all in one locale? Well, we know what they weren’t thinking of: THE CHILDREN!!!!!
But wait, it gets worse:
There is a prevailing notion that human trafficking does not happen in Morris County because of its wealth, according to Maria Vinci-Savettiere…“The demographics don’t matter…Trafficking is happening here.”
One Profession of Faith per story is enough, Lorraine; your attempts to look more-credulous-than-thou are rather transparent.
“Our focus is on radically changing the way we view the issue,” said Beth Hyre, spokeswoman for the League [of Woman Voters]. “According to law enforcement, our children, our grandchildren, the children we teach, and the children we supervise and mentor are prime targets for traffickers. Our complacency that the issue doesn’t directly affect us enables predators.”
Yes, Lorraine, we’ve got it. People think that trafficking doesn’t happen in New Jersey, but it does, and every single child in the entire state should be kept away from cars, trains, buses, airplanes and football games. You can stop repeating the same color now.
The public also is invited to stand for a maximum of nine hours Oct. 27 with Stand Against Human Trafficking, a gathering on the Morristown Green. Each hour signifies 3 million people enslaved worldwide, according to organizer Yvette Long of the Morris County Human Relations Commission…
Are they going to sway back and forth singing “Kumbaya” as well? Because I don’t think it’s possible to have a really effective lawn-standing session without singing “Kumbaya”.
The New Jersey Coalition Against Human Trafficking…is planning a Super Bowl Hotel Outreach in September…“We’re asking hotel management to accept materials…set protocols, and train their staff to spot human trafficking,” said [Melanie] Gorelick, the group’s facilitator…“A lot of times it would be the janitors or the cleaning people who would see a victim…What if a person comes in through a back door? The front desk wouldn’t even see that person”…
But wait, what about the bars of soap emblazoned with subtly huge red labels? WHAT IF THE TRAFFICKERS ARE HIDING IN THE LAVATORY, MELANIE? Without handy hotline numbers, how can they be stopped then? Didn’t think of that, didja Miss Smarty-Pants?
Well, I think you get the picture; too bad most of those who read this story without my helpful annotations won’t. Like most people who attempt painting by numbers without a modicum of skill, some rudimentary sense of proportion and at least a minimal level of judgment, the results are, to the educated viewer, not exactly what their creator intended.
“Trains and buses and airplanes! And an interstate highway, even! Why, no other place has those! What were the madmen who laid out New Jersey thinking to allow so many dangerous things all in one locale? Well, we know what they weren’t thinking of: THE CHILDREN!!!!!”
HAHAHAHAHAHAH! Brilliant!
Wrong colour. These people have an issue. It’s gotta be “We shall overcome”.
Yeah, paint by numbers is fun, but I prefer journo bingo.
Science journalists are really good at it.
Nah, its Kumbaya everywhere color is spelt without a ‘u’ 🙂
Weird, not a single thing about organized crime in the referenced article. I wonder why? Every major criminal organization has a foothold up there and if any major, profitable organized crime was going on, someone would be controlling it.
Oh, I know that the trafficking stuff is bogus, but you’d think in order to increase verisimilitude that they at least give an idea of who was profiting.
My guess is that in inventing the story, it just never occurred to them.
Who do you think owns the newspaper?
Maybe that color dried up or spilled; it probably corresponds to one of the numbers for which she substituted the “Profession of Faith” two extra times.
You know how it is, “Out of blue, well this sea green is pretty close…”
Not naming who is profiting increases the fear, which in turn increases the number of people who will devote time and resources to the cause. I haven’t seen the profiters named outside of the “shadowy network of traffickers” or the “pimp lobby”, aka the sex workers’ rights movement.
Ah, I get it.
Because really we all know who is behind it and we must never, ever speak His name.
I have seen them named by some of the kookier fringe types as an international Satanic conspiracy.
Every few years I do see news stories of some cult built around temple prostitution in the name of Ishtar. Which is somewhat historically accurate, but obvious enough today that I’m surprised anyone would think they’d actually get away with it in a prohibitionist country.
People still believe in international Satanic conspiracies? Sheesh…. I thought those lost popularity at the same time as Aqua Net.
I found this picture when I searched for Aqua Net: http://www.aqua-net.be/images/AquaNet_CEV_web.jpg
Thanks, Aspasia, much appreciation, though I think that wasn’t what you meant 🙂
as long as we have Americans, “speaking in tongues” in Charismatic churches, I think international satanic conspiracies will always be in style.
(As an AD&D player, I’m a level 3 Satanic conspiracist, myself! It’s not as exciting as people think, though, mostly involves arguments about Umber Hulks.)
Sure. Why not?
Only last month I started up a Satanic conspiracy and got an immediate positive international response.
I think the problem is that these “journalists” have no skill, insights or originality and hence desperately jump on any popular meme that is going around in order to be able to write _anything_. This problem is not limited to the US, the memes are just different. In one online newspaper extension I read, I noticed a massive increase in stupidity on the weekend, when the “emergency” crew takes over. 2-day panics are frequent, and suddenly end on Monday morning to be never heard from again. This is supposedly a “quality” paper and in comparison that is true. But in absolute terms, good journalism has gotten very rare.
It really is an exiting topic. With very little work by the writer that story is probably one of the most viewed on the site. Even on torrent sites sex slavery documentaries have above-average hits.
I think it is partially a failure of imagination. The word “slavery” is used far too lightly.
Some people are simply unable to comprehend what it would be like to live as a slave in a society where everyone, from the head of state to the urchins in the street see you as property and less than human, with no possible escape except death.
These days, even a serial killer on death row has someone who will listen sympathetically and try to help or at least care about the prisoner’s “rights”. Heck, they even have groupies.
“Some people are simply unable to comprehend what it would be like to live as a slave in a society where everyone, from the head of state to the urchins in the street see you as property and less than human, with no possible escape except death.”
I agree with you that few people can imagine this, but it goes further. Societies have existed where it was considered normal for some people to be property and others not, and for people to switch states. Rome, for example. Or the ante-bellum South, where there were numerous ‘free men of color’, some of whom were slave owners.
And this failure to understand how complicated the institution of Slavery has been in various cultures makes it easy for the White Slavery hysterics to spin their narratives, which are simplistic in the extreme.
Possibly the single stupidest element of the “modern slavery” narrative is the idea that slaves can be worked much harder or for much longer hours than free people, when in fact all the information we have from historical slave societies says the opposite. In fact, one of the chief arguments against slavery from US abolitionists was that slavery made people “lazy”, and that the slaves would work much harder (which was seen as a good in and of itself) if their survival was tied directly to industry as that of “free” people is. In A Renegade History of the United States, Thaddeus Russell quotes several interviews with former slaves which were recorded in the 1930s, wherein former slaves lamented how much harder they had to work as free people. And then, of course, within our own lifetimes the astonishing inefficiency and sloth of communist economies and Western bureaucracies demonstrate what happens when people’s income is not directly tied to their productivity. As weird as the notion may seem to some people, financial gain is a far greater motivator than threats.
I think one of the most succinct indictments of Communism I have ever read was P.J. O’Rourke’s observation that it had managed to make a nation of Germans lazy.
“financial gain is a far greater motivator than threats.”
Except that Frederick Hertzberg’s theories say that financial reward is a ‘hygiene factor’, not a motivator; that is, you expect to be paid for your work, and being paid moreper se won’t necessarily motivate you more. You are motivated more by responsibility, recognition etc; money does not give ‘positive satisfaction’.
Which isn’t what you’d expect, though there is evidence to confirm his theories, though, not unexpectedly, they have been challenged. And certainly, when you read of a CEO demanding to be paid millions just to ‘incentivise’ himself, you wonder if it’s motivation or greed.
The other things you mention ARE motivators – but not to the exclusion of money as motivator. There are plenty of people out there doing jobs they don’t like and yet are motivated as hell because of the income.
There’s a lot more to Hertzberg; still, I find this concept very difficult. Everyday experience suggests that money is a motivator, or is seen to be so. Yet his researches suggest it isn’t. Perhaps the explanation is along the lines of paying twice what your workers now get won’t double their output, or making them any happier or more ‘satisfied’. That doesn’t explain why corporate CEOs and bankers ‘need’ mega-salaries, or bonuses for doing exactly what they are contracted to do.
I’ve been looking for a UNSW study from about 15-20 years ago but can’t find it.
They had a group of students who were paid bonuses proportional to productivity on some boring individual task or another and another group who were paid bonuses based on productivity relative to other members in the group.
They found the second group were more productive even though their potential bonuses were no greater than the first and, as individuals, they were less likely to receive them.
I believe Shelby Foote made this point in his “Civil War” series. Slavery was inefficient – and required more manpower than was necessary to account for the fact that the slaves weren’t motivated.
And by the way – this image of a guy on a white horse with a bullwhip forcing slaves to harvest cotton is a bit off track. ANYONE who has ever “managed” a group of people KNOWS that you get more out of them when they are positively motivated. I will brag here and say I am one of the best “bosses” in the world – because I always took care of my people and they took care of me.
Everyone knows this – even the old Southern Slaveowners. Now, it’s hard to put a “nice” face on forced labor – but they had all kinds of schemes to motivate the slaves … things like giving them their own plots of land to raise crops on …
Jefferson Davis even allowed his own slaves to govern themselves … even with their own court system – which he didn’t interfere with unless he felt a punishment rendered by those courts was too harsh.
Shelby Foote pointed out a “dichotomy” between Davis’ view of slavery and Lincoln’s. Davis’ view of the institution was influenced by his upbringing and the benign way in which slaves were treated on his plantation. Lincoln’s view was influenced by his trips as a youngster to New Orleans – where he saw the WORST of chattel slavery in the auction houses.
Neither of them had an accurate view of the full spectrum of slavery.
““According to law enforcement, our children, our grandchildren, the children we teach, and the children we supervise and mentor are prime targets for traffickers.”
This would be enough to make me have big doubts. Cops lie constantly. They even have a term for it, ‘testilying” when they lie on the witness stand after swearing not to.
It’s so bad even judges and other government lawyers admit it and pretend to be concerned.
Maybe slavery isn’t such a bad thing? I mean seriously – with all the freedoms we have here in the west – with all the people you could RUN TO to gain your freedom … with all the people we have out there LOOKING for you so that they can SAVE you – if you haven’t “connected” with any of them – you must be one helluva dullard and maybe someone SHOULD look after your sad ass.
Fuck – you can flip burgers in California now and make $10 bucks an hour. Go WEST young man or … er woman.
What are we up to here … 32 million slaves worldwide? What does that say about law enforcement that they can’t catch even a fraction of them with a public that is most definitively “ANTI-SLAVERY”??
Back in the day … if you were an escaped slaves – civilians would rat you out to the cops and the cops would run you down and catch you and send you back to your master.
And even then – THOUSANDS of Black Slaves made their way North to freedom – where they raised their hand and said … “Hey look at me here, I was a slave – I just escaped!”
And here in the 20th century – with everyone on the slave’s side – we can’t even find a fraction of those folks?
These are either some really, really dumb slaves we have – or …
Maybe they just don’t fucking exist?
You have no fucking idea. I have Dictionary.com open in a separate tab along with Wikipedia in another.
Oh, here goes Krulac with the “I’m so stupid” routine. :rolls eyes:
You do realize that nobody believes that except you, right?
<3
I think I have a helluva lot of common sense but not much education. Only thing I learned in high school that I remember is typing and – I’m one helluva a typer.
Only reason I took that class though was it mostly full of girls. I fucking took “Home Economics” too and I can make some hella fig jam.
But if learning something didn’t get me closer to a girl – I simply didn’t learn it (unfortunately). Women are the inspiration behind everything I do (and learn).
That was how I got my second major in psychology.
I’d planned to just do psych for one year and major in physics alone but when I realised the psychology tutorials were over 90% women, most of them hot looking and nearly all of them happy to talk about intimate stuff, I couldn’t bear to drop the course. Just kept signing on year after year until finally I realised I’d done four years and it was one of my majors.
Never made a cent from psychology but it sure paid off – for four years at least.
Yep – I hear you. And when I was on my first submarine, I volunteered to be the Assistant Training Officer because that guy was the guy who coordinated sending people to Navy schools.
I was sending myself to schools left and right to meet girls in those classes. When I found a girl I liked – I got her name and then I WATCHED the sign-ups for every class (and there was at least a hundred starting every week) and when I spotted her name in one … yep, that’s when I enrolled too.
I probably violated some “stalker laws” there – but that was before they had any in the U.S.
Of course – I eventually went to so many schools the boat actually expected me to know that shit. The XO would go … “Submarine QA – who’s been to the school? We got a job for him!” And I’d be like … “Shit, I was just there for the girls I don’t remember any of that crap!”
I know I’m not a pretty girl or nothing, but there’s something I’d been hoping you’d educate me about krulac.
You know how in every WWII sub movie ever made there’s a scene where they get depth-charged or go way below design depth and all of a sudden this overhead pipe bursts and starts spraying high pressure water everywhere?
The whole crew looks like they’re about to sink the boat by pissing their pants except for Ensign Cool-as-Ice who races to a faucet in the pipe and with much grunting and face twisting turns the torrent off.
Do subs really have pipes inside the hull that carry external pressure water?
Can you really isolate burst sections with a faucet without fucking up the engine cooling or whatever?
If so, why don’t they just turn all the faucets off as soon as the destroyer pings ’em or the hull starts creaking?
Yes they do … for instance in the “trim system”, there are variable ballast tanks inside the “people tank” which change the buoyancy of the boat as necessary to maintain a neutral “trim” on the ship. High pressure water from the sea is piped to those tanks and they’re flooded “from sea” or pumped “to sea” in order to make the ship lighter or heavier. I was on a research and development submarine with a design depth of 4,000 feet. Let me tell you – when I flooded the Aux Tank from sea at that depth it was a sphincter tightening experience as it was deathly loud and the whole boat shook until the hull valves were shut and the evolution was secured. At 4,000 feet – you don’t have to hold the valves open very long in order to flood in an incredible amount of water. We used terms like “squirt” and “skosh” to describe how long to hold the valves open. The valves were slow open – fast shut. At depth – slow opening kept you from getting a shotgun blast and shocking the internal piping. “Fast Shut” … well it didn’t shut so fast but it always tried – more like “pinched” the flow off – but it did the job.
On any system that is pressurized with sea water – it will have at least two isolation valves … a “hull valve” and a “backup valve” and these are normally remotely operated with air or hydraulics – but they can also be manually operated in case of a failure.
A 688 class boat has an “induction mast” for the diesel and the low pressure blower. The induction piping goes through the hull – where there are a hull and a backup valve (VH-2 and VH-3 – “VH” is the designation for any valve in a ventilation system). Now … all that piping outboard all the way up to the top of the snorkel mast (which is where VH-1 is … and it’s sea-water activated … closes when sea water hits it so you don’t get sea water into the diesel or any other system on the boat. Sometimes that long pipe between VH-1 and VH-2 gets flooded – and so there is a “drain” for it – so you can drain the water before opening the hull and backup (VH-2 and VH-3).
My ship was doing ops off the island of Maui … and we were at 750 feet when we got an indication that VH-1 was open – just suddenly opened for no reason. So we proceeded to periscope depth … cycled VH-1 manually (using pneumatic remote operation from the ballast control panel) … it was fine … so we drained the induction piping with an installed drain system – that pipe was about as big around as my thumb – not big at all.
Problem is – the Chief Machinist FORGOT to close that little drain … which drained into Sanitary Tank (Shit tank) #1.
We went back to 750 feet … and fucking VH-1 opened again … this time, we couldn’t shut it.
Suddenly – people were screaming that we had “flooding” in the lower levels – I was DRIVING the boat on the sternplanes – my job was to keep depth – it’s chuckle-head job – all junior submariners do it. Anyway – guys were coming into control WET – a lot of water was coming in and I could hear it.
We didn’t do an Emergency Blow – because the OOD asked me if I still had depth control and I told him I did – so the flooding, though significant – wasn’t effecting the ship’s trim – if it had – we’d have had to blow.
But we did HAUL ASS to periscope depth again. With an incredible amount of water in the ship … your’s truly held that boat right at 62 feet while they determined the source of the flooding.
It was that little damn induction drain – so much pressure – it filled up San Tank #1 and everything that drained to that tank started spewing water – which included the trash compactor – and all the showers!
So the lesson was – it doesn’t take a big pipe to cause some pretty scary flooding!
Thanks heaps for that krulac.
I’ve always been interested in subs but know FA about them. Your patience helps me heaps.
Loved the bit about the sanitation tank getting plugged into external pressure.
That would make for one eye-popping bidet.
I’ve long wondered what they did with the engine exhaust on diesel submarines.
I’ve heard that Britain actually had a steam-powered submarine in World War I, and that it was a disaster.
Even I know that one.
On the surface it’s not an issue. At periscope depth they can use the snorkel if they’re charging batteries or run the electrics if they’re trying to be sneaky. Below snorkel depth they have to use electrics of course.
There are also the newer Air Independent Propulsion systems (AIP) that use compressed or liquid oxygen and diesel such as the French MESMA and the Swedish Stirling Cycle Engines, letting the subs run submerged for 14 to 21 days.
Did… did this article imply that there are 9×3 million slaves? That’s one slave for every 260 people! That means my high school had four students who were slaves!
They claim 27,000,000 in the world, not the US; even the “trafficking” fetishists haven’t grown that psycho…yet.
Storm Daughter got the math right:
27m slaves/7.1b people ~ 1 slave / 263 people
So, any high school of 1000 students must have roughly 4 slaves!
The numbers thrown around by the trafficking fetishists and the cult of rape culture just don’t pass the sniff test.
Yeah, you’re right; forgive me, I hadn’t had breakfast yet. 🙂
Give them time, Maggie. Give them time.
Nice analogy, nice metaphor with the paint-by-numbers thing. And excellent post too.
Although I tend to find more utility in the similar connect-the-dots puzzles of yesteryear since I think it ties in rather nicely with “problem of induction” (1), the tendency we all have to infer or leap to conclusions on limited subsets of data, to think, and insist dogmatically, that, having seen four white swans, all swans must – “must, I say, must!!” – be white. Causes some serious and pervasive problems with “civil” discourse. Reminds me of something from Michael Shermer’s The Believing Brain (highly recommended):
I sometimes wonder whether Americans are, generally speaking, more gullible than citizens of other countries as a result of the pervasiveness of fundamentalist Christianity. If one has believed a whopper, one of 17 impossible things before breakfast, like “Jesus died for your sins” then things like 911 conspiracies and the like – including much of the hype surrounding “trafficking” – become child’s play.
Not sure that the prognosis is all that great.
—
1) “_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction”;
The problem with your assertion is though, is that it’s not any of the White fundamentalist Christians who believe in 9-11 conspiracies.
It’s not the Christians who believe that the government can provide everyone free health care. Yeah sure, the Catholic Church kind of backed “ObamaCare” – much to their regret now (and I’m loving that!).
There has never been a lot of support in the Christian community for “Global Warming Theories” … and at the current moment, considering the new UN report on Climate Change – they appear to have been correct.
I am not a Christian – but I will tell you that the Christians are a lot smarter than the average non-believer. Oh sure – we may consider their core beliefs to be “silly” – but when it comes to real world beliefs – they’re a lot more on target than atheist liberals are.
Also – you have to remember that – within the Protestant Christian Community in the states – there are two traditions … the White Protestant Community … which is what I’m mostly talking about here – and the Black Protestant Community – which is as liberal as they come and DO believe in some of what you’re talking about.
Krulac:
Maybe because that particular conspiracy is inconsistent with the “conspiracy theory” they already believe? That is, that Jehovah and Satan are locked in a battle for each and every soul. But the 9-11 conspiracy was only an example of the types of things that people frequently believe with very little evidence, there obviously being a great many others.
And that assertion was more than any thing else just a conjecture as to whether the prevalence of Christianity has tended to make people more gullible in a broad range of situations than in any particular one. You might want to take a look at the results of the Pew Forum survey (1) on the topic, particularly question 39 (page 175) even if it doesn’t discuss that point in any great detail that I saw. But if people have a tendency to believe the things their “leaders” tell them about the salvation of their souls then they might be more susceptible to believing other leaders on equally questionable topics. Like trafficking.
However I’ll readily agree with you that belief in Christianity – or any religion for that matter – doesn’t necessarily make a person dumb or ignorant in other areas. One of my favorite cases in that regard is Francis Collins (2) who, while not strictly fundamentalist, is at least an evangelical Christian, but is also quite a clever man, having been a leader of the human genome project at one point. And I’m sure there are a great many other individuals who similarily qualify.
In any case, my point was more related to the question of the frequently contradictory or specious things we all believe – present company excepted, of course – as illustrated by that quote of Shermer. Which is maybe not surprising when the issues are complex and the data isn’t clear or all that easy to obtain. For example, as suggested by this statement of yours:
Seems the UN / IPCC is in the process of releasing the prelimaries for their “Fifth Assessment Report” (3) – due for finalization late 2014 – but from what I’ve seen so far the consensus is still:
Again, maybe a moot point as to the correlation between Christians buying the “no global warming” argument from their “leaders”, but buying Jesus – hook, line, and sinker. However, I seem to recollect reading of some fundamentalists claiming that “The Rapture!!!11!!” was imminent so whether global warming was true or not was entirely academic. And I also seem to recollect that others argued that even if it was true it was only a consequence of “Gawd’s” command to “be fruitful and multiply”, and therefore not a problem.
—-
1) “_http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report-religious-landscape-study-full.pdf”;
2) “_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins_(geneticist)#Christianity”;
3) “_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report”;
4) “_http://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/432343/UN-stands-firm-on-climate-change-and-blames-man-AGAIN-despite-earth-cooling-for-15-years”;
I’m a fundamentalist (how scary…eyeroll) Protestant who thinks the official story about 9/11 stinks and am convinced climate change is real. I’m hoping you’ve made the effort to actually talk to various Christian fundamentalists as 1 of the great things that comes out of that is finding out we’re not all like some like to believe.
Don’t worry Laura, we like fundamentalists here.
Come on, put on this special robe we keep for our most honoured guests.
Now lie down on this comfy altar we reserve for the special people who visit.
A bit sticky? Sorry, just let me clean it for you.
Now just lie back, close your eyes and enjoy the show.
LOL…that was a good 1! Thanks for making me smile this early.
Now just listen to the sweet voice of this babe La, visiting from Opar….
Oh, you know this story? I’m guessing that’s why you’re running.
Yes, I’m running…LOL.
Actually I have made that effort, and in some depth and over a rather lengthy period of time – mostly on the ABC News discussion boards. And while I will readily agree that not all “Christian fundamentalists” are the same, and that no few of them are more rational and sensible than others, I think that most of them are quite a bit less so, at least in some areas.
Seems to me that while religion in itself has had some lasting benefits in at least elucidating and advancing some fairly important concepts and archetypes, the literalists – fundamentalist Christian and Muslims in particular – are labouring under some fairly serious and problematic delusions. For instance, I think Richard Dawkins in his The God Delusion – highly recommended – mentioned that there have been something like 10,000 to 100,000 “gods” which have wandered across the stage of humanity’s “evolution” – such as it is. But if 99.999% of those have bitten the dust then why shouldn’t Allah and Jehovah – pretty much the same as all the others in their literalism – do likewise?
Not to say though that I think those religions are entirely without value, only the more literalist aspects and proponents of them. While I think there is some inherent difficulty, some “cognitive dissonance”, in less “virulent” strains of those religions, some groups do seem to manage it with, presumably, some benefits or justifications – The Clergy Letter Project for example (1).
However, the literalism inherent in fundamentalism is something that many, even some evangelicals if not fundamentalists, have decried for having some seriously negative consequences, both potential and actual. For instance, you might be interested in this NY Times article (2) by one evangelical, Karl Giberson, a salient point in which is this:
—-
1) “_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clergy_Letter_Project”;
2) “_http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/opinion/the-evangelical-rejection-of-reason.html?_r=0”;
Dear steersman, thank you for making the effort to talk to believers. That’s very important. Am wondering: did you look into the accounts of Christians whose belief in Christ turned their lives around for the better? 2 of my favorites examples of this: Karla Tucker and St. Paul. This is something willfully ignored by some, unfortunately. Thanks again for talking to believers instead of assuming the worst about them. Thanks also for the links.
Laura,
Yes, thanks, I do think it rather important to “talk to believers” – part of my “beef” with the “New Atheism” is that it has a tendency to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”. Seems that many of them have their hearts in the right places, although I think many also have their heads in the sand.
And I can’t credibly say that every aspect of their philosophy and ethics is without merit – as the American moralist Philip Wylie put it many years ago, there’s much in the Bible that is “profound psychology and exquisite logic”. For one thing, Christianity seems to promote the long view for humanity – as the Christmas carol puts it, “Man will live forever more, Because Christ was born on Christmas day”. Not that I believe in his literal divinity, but, as the Bible puts it, “Where there is no vision, the people perish”. Seems that belief in the future is somewhat of a guarantor for the present – an extended one.
Not that every long view, every vision of the future, has equal merit. Islam, for instance, hasn’t yet made the “quantum leap” from an Old Testament deity to a New Testament one, and suffers thereby. Ibn Warraq in his Why I Am Not a Muslim argues that Islam is intrinsically anti-democratic.
However, I still wonder whether it is possible to “separate the wheat from the chaff” in Christianity – as the Clergy Letter Project people are apparently attempting to do. Though many have argued that there is some substantial value in some of the mythology of Christianity – The Pagan Christ by Tom Harpur, for example. Certainly an idea that I think is worth considering.
But you’re quite welcome for the links – just call me Johnny Appleseed, scattering references and links in my travels. 🙂
I guess this is the best possible time to mention Atheists for Jesus.
I looked a little at the website and they say some great things. I’m very glad they don’t seem to revel in unfair blanket statements, stereotypes, etc., about Christian fundamentalists.
Thanks for the link – interesting site, notably this comment, I wonder what Laura thinks of it:
But while I sympathize and substantially agree with his focus on Jesus as a mortal man with some important and valuable insights, I still find rather problematic his apparent support for some deity and “the way to get to Heaven”. Maybe a concept of some utility but being dogmatic about it tends, I think, to vitiate that utility.
Whatever else Jesus was, it seems that he (or He) was a believer. This belief makes Jesus, Man or God, no more and no less moral or ethical than if He (or he) had no such belief.
That’s my position. Laura may have a similar or a less similar position. And I’m always willing to talk to Laura about positions. 😉
Sailor:
Moot point, I think, about belief making one more or less moral – as Pascal said, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Nothing like supposedly having “Gawd” in one’s back pocket to motivate a person – frequently without justification.
But different type of positions I expect. Which reminds me of a cartoon. Seems two guys were standing outside of a bookstore talking, apparently one the proprietor and the other a friend, while in the background there is a steady stream of people going in and out of the store which happens to have a sign advertising a new book for sale: “Fifty New Mating Positions; newly translated from the French”. And the first fellow says to the other, “First time I’ve ever seen a book on chess sell so well” ….
Reminds me of Bob Hope’s book, Confessions of a Hooker.
Laura:
Just out of curiosity, and since it seems to have some relevance to this site, I wonder what you and the, supposedly, fundamentalist Christian group you’re affiliated with think of prostitution. Seems to me that if you’re actually right then maybe we should be running the prostitutes out of town.
But if you’re wrong – the most likely situation given the literally thousands if not millions of “gawds” that have come down the pike over the millennia – then maybe we should be running the fundamentalists out of town. Considering the rather problematic effects, to say the least, that seems to have followed from the societal attitudes to the profession that largely derive from or are predicated on a belief in some anthropomorphic deity, I would think it of more than passing importance to decide which of those two cases is the correct one.
I think I know Laura’s answer to this, but it wouldn’t be right for me to try to give that answer. I await her reply with you.
Dear Steersman, I’ve yet to hear a sermon on prostitution. I’m not joking. I haven’t heard one in all my years as a Protestant fundamentalist. I have heard sermons on sex in general (i.e., what Christians should do and not do in the sexual area) but never specifically prostitution. It needs to be known that there are Christians for decriminalization. I’m one of them. You can not want to be part of something but be for it being decriminalized. I feel the same about drugs and am now against the Drug War (I used to be for it for many years). As far as this alliance talked about between Christian fundamentalists and anti-prostitution people that’s news to me. I’ve never heard of it in my years as a believer. I admit this could be because the churches I go to/have gone to don’t focus on this and instead focus on other things. I’ve been glad to find out online I’m not the only Christian for decriminalization. Even if I were the only one I would count. I’m wondering: have you read the stories of those who have had their lives changed for the better by following Jesus? My favorite example of this is the story of Karla Faye Tucker. It applies to my life also. I didn’t have as many things to resolve as Karla did from her childhood but have had some (especially things that happened to me in my early 20’s). I hope this answers your questions and thank you for talking to me decently about my beliefs, etc. Take care.
Dear Steersman, as far as comments like “running fundamentalists out of town” the most fair thing is to look at people on an individual basis. This fundamentalist is fed up with the unfair blanket statements, stereotypes, etc., about us plus other groups. I imagine you wouldn’t want to same done to any group you belong to.
Well, now that was interesting. Well done, both Laura and Steersman.
I have residences with family in a few different countries and I globe trot quite often and it is very evident to me how child slavery and sex trafficking can very easily take place in any number of countries, and it does.
Here in the States however, while I am certain it is going on to some extent, I can’t see how it could take place on such a grand scale without literally being a very obvious epidemic, such as America’s obesity epidemic.
Like the 1 in 4 rape statistics on US college campuses. If 1 in 4 college students were being raped, the campus crises hotlines would be ringing off the hook 24/7. They are not. High School seniors would be begging their parents NOT to send them to college for fear of being caught up in the campus rape epidemic like their older sisters, cousins, friends and neighbors have been. They are not.
Gotta disagree there.
While my instinct is that the 1 in 4 figure is an exaggeration it’s probably not much of one when you consider that the majority of college rapes are almost certainly date rapes.
And there are plenty of reasons the victim wouldn’t want to report – even to friends, family or counselling services.
Anonymous victim surveys of rape and sexual assault always come up with much higher figures than police reports or the stats from medicos, refuges and crisis centres. I find it hard to believe that they’re all lying or cooking the books.
Not lying but when surveys include “regretted” sexual encounters and sex preceded by the female consuming any amount of alcohol at all as rape, then the results have to be taken with a large grain of salt.
Rumney, N.S., “False Allegations of Rape”, Cambridge Law Journal, 65, March, 2006, pp.128–158 (journals.cambridge.org/production/action/cjoGetFulltext?fulltextid=430300) 2006 by N.S. Rumney Cambridge Law Journal account of studies of false reporting in the USA, New Zealand and the UK.[17]
“a lack of critical analysis of those who claim a low false reporting rate and the uncritical adoption of unreliable research findings… as a consequence of such deficiencies within legal scholarship, factual claims have been repeatedly made that have only limited empirical support. This suggests widespead analytical failure on the part of legal scholarship and requires an acknowledgement of the weakness of assumptions that have been constructed on unreliable research evidence”.
*Former Colorado prosecutor Craig Silverman once opined, “For sixteen years I was a kick ass prosecutor who made the most of my reputation [by] vigorously prosecuting rapists. I was amazed to see all the false rape allegations made to the Denver Police Department. A command officer in the Denver Police Sex Assault Unity recently told me he put the false rape numbers at approximately 45%.”
*A longitudinal study conducted by Professor Eugene Kanin concluded that over a period of nine years, 41% of rape allegations studied were fraudulent, concocted by the alleged victim to either create an alibi, seek attention and sympathy, or to seek revenge.
*205 (& growing) wrongly convicted people have been exonerated by DNA evidence since the beginning of the Innocence Project. 204 of the wrongly convicted were men. Most of them were falsely imprisoned for rape.
While I agree that false allegations of rape are an inappropriately taboo subject for public discourse these days I think that the kind of analysis your comment implies provides good justification for those who want to keep it that way.
Police reports, both statistical and anecdotal, about false rape allegations can be flushed down the toilet straight off. Police culture is as misogynistic as hell – even among female cops – and they have an agenda to both minimise the number of rape cases on their books and to rationalise away the fact they can so rarely progress from complaint to conviction.
Rumney is quite correct that critical analysis of the validity of false rape claims is lacking, but that is not the same as saying false rape claims are substantial. Unless there is someone there taking notes as it happens the best method we so far have of determining the truth or otherwise of rape allegations is the criminal trial and as the standard of proof is high and ability to disprove consent almost impossible in the majority of cases (in which the defendant is a previous associate of the victim) there is just no way of saying.
DNA exonerations only show that the wrong guy was convicted, not that the rape didn’t occur. In fact as DNA evidence in rape trials typically requires a positive rape test kit we can be confident from the start that intercourse – at the very least – has occurred. I can’t think of too many reasons a woman would have voluntary intercourse with one man then accuse another of raping her.
Kanin’s alleged study is particularly pernicious – again for the reason that the only people likely to know the truth of a rape allegation are the alleged victim and alleged rapist. He is clearly pulling the 41% figure out of his arse (as hinted by the fact he says ‘41%’ and not ‘approximately 40%’). And as for being able to mindread the victims so well he knows not only whether they’re lying but what they’re motives for lying are … What’s this guy a professor of? Applied Bullshit?
Anonymous victims surveys are far from perfect but as there are unlikely to be any obvious agendas on the part of those responding I am inclined to give them far more credence than anything you cite in your comment. And they consistently show high levels of rape victimisation across time and across cultures.
However I am pretty confident that there are a high number of false rape accusations made and that a very high proportion of them are not made by alleged victims at all but by police, prosecutors, forensic scientists, psychologists and social workers. Especially child rape accusations.
“Police reports, both statistical and anecdotal, about false rape allegations can be flushed down the toilet straight off. Police culture is as misogynistic as hell – even among female cops – and they have an agenda to both minimise the number of rape cases on their books and to rationalise away the fact they can so rarely progress from complaint to conviction.”
Or perhaps the police don’t make any progress because there is no forensic or any other kind of physical evidence such as bruising, ligature marks, drug residue, or independent witnesses hearing screams, seeing women being dragged or carried away etc.
Did all the girls who confided in you that they were raped make an immediate police report the moment they could? Or even report it to the college authorities?
If a woman gets drunk and has sex with a stranger and then regrets it the next day, that is not rape, even though feminists would like to expand the definition of rape to the point where it would include accidental touches. Since the man was likely just as drunk, then why not prosecute the woman for rape as well?
Real violent rapists, male or female, should be prosecuted and put away. There is no doubt of this. But the legal, social, and economic consequences of rape accusations are far too dire to allow anything but the most strict application of the principles of justice and evidence. Anything else is outright misandry not misogyny and that’s my last word on the matter.
Of course not.
The perpetrator is usually someone they know. They don’t want his studies and career ruined, to have him thrown into prison, to have his life trashed in such a way as he could very well go from being a dumb kid who made a single mistake into a twisted misogynist who will be a potentially violent threat to women (and men) for the rest of his life.
They don’t want to have to spend hour after hour making statements to misogynist cops who embody the idiotic nostrum that a lot of women who report rape are lying.
They don’t want to have to take a witness stand in front of a court made up mostly of men while some smart arsed attorney tries to make them out to be a liar, tries to blame them for their rape, tries to claim that they not only consented to their abuse but probably enjoyed it.
The women I am close to are not generally idiots.
Just because they may have been drunk does not mean they were not raped.
Just because they may have initially blamed themselves or been too ashamed to tell anyone does not mean they were not raped.
Just because they put on their sexy dress and let him pick up the dinner tab does not mean they were not raped.
And people who try to rationalise away rape like you do are precisely the reason we can’t rationally discuss the probably very rare occasions that women do make false accusations of rape.
Let me get this straight:
Women don’t report rapes, because the legal processes involved are difficult and stressful, and it sucks for the rapist too.
Are you serious?
It is not possible to decry the low rates of rape reporting and in the next breath say, “well it’s all just a waste of time anyway, the whole police judicial process is a farce”.
I don’t decry the low levels of rape reporting except inasmuch as it makes criminological statistics hard to gather and I think that is pretty much overcome by anonymous victim surveys.
Never, ever call the cops.
So how should rapists be dealt with?
The community conferencing system I worked on from 2000 to 2003 was far from perfect but even in it’s unresourced embryonic form it was a lot better than the criminal justice system because it didn’t add to the harm of the rape.
Well, not as much or as often anyway.
In a multicultural society you would probably need a stronger adjudication/conciliation arm to account for the possibility of victim and offender coming from mutually uncomprehending traditions. You would also need a way to make the sanctions imposed by such a system stick better – even if the rapist decided to move to another community.
It’s still a pretty painful process all round but I think the inner Sydney activist community deals with rape and sexual assault way better than police and courts do.
Sometimes it’s probably best to just ignore it and get on with your life – as you did with your sexual assault.
Not an answer. You had a system, but what did they actually DO?
And comparing my experience is hardly germane. I was not raped, beaten, traumatized or injured, just molested. A person who suffers a severe assault should try to deal with it and move on with life, to be sure, but she or he certainly has a right to expect the offender to be held accountable for their crime.
“Ignoring it” is not possible.
The point with community-based restorative justice programs is that it’s not up to me or politicians or judges or shock jocks to come up with the appropriate response. It’s up to the people who have been harmed by the offence.
That is primarily the immediate victim but extends to the community as a whole (e.g. other women who would feel threatened if the offender was allowed to continue on as usual).
What it discourages (but does not condemn) is mindless vengeance whereby someone says “You assaulted, beat, traumatised etc, etc therefore you have to be punished”. The main point is to ensure (a) that the person who has been traumatised receives the best help possible to deal with it – which might involve the offender coughing up for counselling and medical costs among other things and (b) that the chances of such an event recurring are minimised – which does not generally involve locking the offender up in a sick dysfunctional environment for five years then releasing him back onto the streets even more fucked up than he was in the first place. Nor does it involve putting everyone through a drawn out, traumatic and expensive legal process then just releasing the alleged rapist anyway with a sense of having won, as happens with around 90% of NSW rape cases that are reported.
The most punitive sanction I saw during my time there was when an offender refused to take part in any of the agreed restorative programs. As a result he was banned from participation in all the groups he’d been in, posters of him describing him as a rapist were put up all over inner Sydney, postings to that effect were made on IndyMedia and to various activist forums around Australia, he was evicted from the flat he was sharing with two other guys who were persuaded they shouldn’t be sheltering a rapist and when he moved back to the rural town he came from where his family lived it too was poster-blitzed (I think there were one or two other things that I can’t remember). But that was one of the huge FAILS of the program.
One of the successes was after a guy raped his ex-girlfriend. He not only handed over virtually all of life savings as compensation (not much, but everyone knew it hurt), agreed to stop drinking alcohol (with several other community members helping him out), explained to group meetings exactly how and why he understood what he’d done was fucked and what he was doing to make sure nothing like that ever happened again, helped the ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend repair his motorbike (he’s a mechanic) and promised to stay out of the streets his ex-girlfriend lived and worked in until she said otherwise, he was also accepted back into the community with remarkably little rancour by anyone, including his victim. As it happens, that case did my head in more than any other sexual assault or rape case I dealt with inside or outside the normal criminal justice system – but that’s a long story.
But that’s what restorative justice is about. Repairing the damage rather than adding to it.
“The perpetrator is usually someone they know. They don’t want his studies and career ruined, to have him thrown into prison, to have his life trashed in such a way as he could very well go from being a dumb kid who made a single mistake into a twisted misogynist who will be a potentially violent threat to women (and men) for the rest of his life.”
Rapists are not “dumb kids who made mistakes”. They are sociopaths.
If you define rapists like that it’s no wonder you think rape is rare and a lot of victims are liars. Obviously very few of them would have been targeted by the 1-2% of the population definable as sociopathic.
Maybe you’re getting your ideas of rape and rapists from all that television you don’t watch. You know, the creepy violent stranger in the shadows who commits nearly all the rapes in the movies but only a tiny proportion of the ones in real life.
It’s not only an exaggeration, it’s a wild one.
Be interested to know where your conviction about those figures comes from too Maggie.
If you’ve got such a great source of data I know several criminologists who are just dying to speak to you.
Follow the link; I’m not hiding anything.
Sorry, didn’t spot the link in the text.
I am not qualified to speak on rape rates in the US but what I can say is that if the Harris poll was the sort of face to face or telephone polling usually carried out by normal commercial pollsters it was almost certainly an underestimate. Women just don’t report those sorts of things face to face with strangers or being cold called while they’re cooking dinner.
The most respected criminological statistics organisation in Australia is the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR).
It’s victimisation survey defines rape as non-consensual penetrative sex which a woman could answer yes to slipping the finger in during petting or not – the definition of ‘sex’ is left up to her. But the question itself asks about ‘rape’ with the definition at the bottom of the page so the respondent should have little doubt as to what she is being asked about.
In 2003 it showed a lifetime risk of rape for NSW women as one in eight, with the rate showing a slow, steady upwards trend since figures were first collected in 1991. They find that over 70% of the victims report having been raped between the ages of 18 and 25, which correspond roughly with university ages in Australia (though it covers twice the duration of an average uni course).
The figure for university students is harder to get at as BOCSAR does not survey by that category and those who do use different forms of questions, usually sexual assault rather than rape (which, when you include ‘unwanted sexual touching’, as most do, shows rates of above 50% for uni students). But surveys like that also compare uni students with the general population and find that the students are between 50% and 100% more likely to report some kind of ‘sexual assault’ in any one year than their non-student birth cohort.
So if we assume (unsafely I know) that the increased risk of rape for students is comparable to the increased risk of sexual assault, a figure of of one in four is still high, but not out of the ballpark. I would give a guesstimate of between one in ten and one in six female NSW university students having been subjected to non-consensual penetrative sex based on a combination of the victim survey data available from Australian criminologists.
And all my data comes from criminologists, not sociologists. I was one of the people who spoke out against the methodology of a student rape survey carried out by UNSW sociologists that found rape rates of over 40% in three Sydney universities. They weren’t doctrinaire feminists, just statistical incompetents.
The reason I’m not inclined to be too skeptical is because I went to a university which – in common with many others – drew a substantial proportion of students from hung up rural areas and restrictive overseas cultures.
There were a lot of people there who were suddenly given their first chance to cut loose with drugs, alcohol and sex, knowing that the stories about their exploits wouldn’t get all over town and back to their mothers. They were also coming into contact with members of the opposite sex they hadn’t grown up with for the first time.
Add that to a fair bit of mutual cultural incomprehension on top of the already poor inter-gender communication between teenagers and you’ve got pretty much the ideal ingredients for date rape.
And a lot of girls I know tell me they were date raped at uni – nothing like one in four, but why would they all tell me about it?
I’ve read that rapes and sexual assaults on campuses are expected to be dealt with by on campus staff rather than local law enforcement. That’s a HUGE mistake right there. Rape and sexual assaults are serious crimes and need to be dealt with through proper legal channels asap rather than in some fu-fu psychoanalytical academic “committee” setting. “Conflict resolution” my ass.
As far as the 1 in 4 stats, I’m copying and pasting the following from another site;
” I provided excerpts from an excellent investigative article by Christina Hoff Sommers that showed how 1 in 4 should really be more like 1 in 14, 1 in 24 or even 1 in 50, depending on the study and what exactly was included. That article showed how the definitions were vastly broadened to include many cases where the women themselves didn’t even feel like they’d been raped, along with other shysterous tricks, all to juice the stats to fit the desired feminist and PC narrative.
The fascinating thing is that the Hoff Sommers article was published nearly 20 years ago, in 1994. But in all that time, the dominant narrative didn’t care about the truth and just kept propagating its false propaganda. The Mac Donald article is more recent, from 2008, and is equally revealing that the hysteria is thoroughly misguided.
She begins with this eye opener:
It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic—but no one calls….
The campus rape movement highlights the current condition of radical feminism, from its self-indulgent bathos to its embrace of ever more vulnerable female victimhood….
The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years…. The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.
A crime wave of unprecedented proportions? She continues,
If the one-in-four statistic is correct—it is sometimes modified to “one-in-five to one-in-four”—campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants—a rate of 2.4 percent. The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience. Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency—Take Back the Night rallies and 24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergrads would need to take the most stringent safety precautions. Certainly, they would have to alter their sexual behavior radically to avoid falling prey to the rape epidemic.
Reviewing how the stats are juiced:
None of this crisis response occurs, of course—because the crisis doesn’t exist. During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results—very few women said that they had been. SoMs. commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then classified as rape. Koss’s method produced the 25 percent rate, which Ms. then published.
Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.
All subsequent feminist rape studies have resulted in this discrepancy between the researchers’ conclusions and the subjects’ own views. A survey of sorority girls at the University of Virginia found that only 23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped….
It’s political:
None of the obvious weaknesses in the research has had the slightest drag on the campus rape movement, because the movement is political, not empirical….
Campus rape researchers may feel that they know better than female students themselves about the students’ sexual experiences, but the students are voting with their feet and staying away in droves from the massive rape apparatus built up since the Ms. article. Referring to rape hotlines, rape consultant Brett Sokolow laments: “The problem is, on so many of our campuses, very few people ever call.”
In spite of the low numbers of reported rapes and assaults, the campuses aren’t rejoicing:
Campuses do everything they can to get their numbers of reported and adjudicated sexual assaults up—adding new categories of lesser offenses, lowering the burden of proof, and devising hearing procedures that will elicit more assault charges.
Guilty until proven innocent:
As Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson point out in their book Until Proven Innocent, however, the rate of false reports is at least 9 percent and probably closer to 50 percent. Just how powerful is the “believe unconditionally” credo? David Lisak, a University of Massachusetts psychology professor who lectures constantly on the antirape college circuit, acknowledged to a hall of Rutgers students this November that the “Duke case,” in which a black stripper falsely accused three white Duke lacrosse players of rape in 2006, “has raised the issue of false allegations.” But Lisak didn’t want to talk about the Duke case, he said. “I don’t know what happened at Duke. No one knows.” Actually, we do know what happened at Duke: the prosecutor ignored clearly exculpatory evidence and alibis that cleared the defendants, and was later disbarred for his misconduct. But to the campus rape industry, a lying plaintiff remains a victim of the patriarchy, and the accused remain forever under suspicion.
Common sense advise to women that could wipe out many of the rapes and close calls that actually do happen is anathema to college rape bueaucrats:
[The advice is] specifically: don’t get drunk, don’t get into bed with a guy, and don’t take off your clothes or allow them to be removed. Once you’re in that situation, the rape activists could say, it’s going to be hard to halt the proceedings, for lots of complex emotional reasons. Were this advice heeded, the campus “rape” epidemic would be wiped out overnight.
But suggest to a rape bureaucrat that female students should behave with greater sexual restraint as a preventive measure, and you might as well be saying that the girls should enter a convent or don the burka.
Out of control at the College of William and Mary:
In October 2005, at a Delta Delta Delta formal, drunken sorority girls careened through the host’s house, vomiting, falling, and breaking furnishings. One girl ran naked through a hallway; another was found half-naked with a male on the bed in the master suite. A third had intercourse with her escort in a different bedroom. On the bus back from the formal, she was seen kissing her escort; once she arrived home, she had sex with a different male. Later, she accused her escort of rape. The district attorney declined to prosecute the girl’s rape charges. William and Mary, however, had already forced the defendant to leave school and, even after the D.A.’s decision, wouldn’t let him return until his accuser graduated. The defendant sued his accuser for $5.5 million for defamation; the parties settled out of court.
The incident wasn’t as unusual as it sounds. A year earlier, a William and Mary student had charged rape after having provided a condom to her partner for intercourse. The boy had cofounded the national antirape organization One in Four; the school suspended him for a year, anyway. In an earlier incident, a drunken sorority girl was filmed giving oral sex to seven men. She cried rape when her boyfriend found out. William and Mary found one of the recipients, who had taped the event, guilty of assault and suspended him. “
Not all rape victims agree with you – including those who’ve tried ‘proper legal channels’ in the past. You would suggest putting a traumatised victim through another traumatising process that will almost certainly make things worse for everyone because you think it ‘proper’? I’d rather be ‘fu-fu’ than ‘fuck-you. again’.
And if you check out the PDF I link to in response to Maggie you’ll see that criminologists in Aus agree that victimology surveys indicate the lifetime rape risk for a woman in Australia is one in eight – with groups such as uni students at significantly elevated relative risk. Don Weatherburn at BOCSAR is no neo-feminist academic, believe me.
I’m with Maggie in finding it incredible you’re ‘not a guy’.
“I’m with Maggie in finding it incredible you’re ‘not a guy’.”
That’s strange. I think this is the first time my “online voice” as ever been construed as male. I don’t understand what you find particularly masculine about it.
Partly your rhetorical style. Mostly your attitude towards women (rape victims at least) and female sexuality.
I just can’t read what you write and make a woman’s face stick to it.
It always comes out as a forty something male recent divorcee.
Seriously? I know literally HUNDREDS of women personally (family, friends, clients, acquaintances) who think the death penalty for rape is a good idea. As far as “my attitude toward female sexuality” – exactly what are you referring to?
My comment about your rhetorical style has nothing to do with your support for the death penalty, it’s something more subtle and pervasive.
An example is the way you use verbal aggression.
Instead of getting indignant like, say, Storm Daughter, you get arrogant like, say, me. I perceive that as a masculine attribute.
Regarding your attitude to female sexuality the clearest example is the one Maggie already commented on regarding the emphasis on orgasms but also the way you caricature rape it’s almost as if you’ve never felt sexually threatened by a male friend or acquaintance.
“Don Weatherburn at BOCSAR is no neo-feminist academic, believe me.”
I’d have nothing against him if he were. I am not an anti-feminist.
That’s BS too.
The physical assault victimisation rate for young men in Australia runs to over 75%.
Burglary victimisation rate is also well over 50%.
“That’s BS too.”
Could very well be. That was not part of the article but the interjected commentary of the blogger I copied and pasted the article excerpts from.
I’m with Culturephile on all counts.
One of the lessons to be learned here is to avoid having kinds of sex (such as group sex) that the woman may regret afterwards, because many women will turn it into “retroactive rape” afterwards, and even if a friendly witness was present, she will probably prevail. Especially when the judge or equivalent is a fundy or neofeminist.
Well, as you are a devotee of a woman who seemed to see deliberately degrading rape as the epitomy of sex I am not surprised by your opinion JD.
What I am surprised by is ‘not a guy’ Culturephile apparently believing that rape victims should report when they have very little to gain and a lot to lose by doing so while at the same time believing that a large proportion of alleged victims (‘closer to 50%’ apparently) were not raped at all and only want to subject themselves to a pointless and humiliating exercise as some way of getting revenge on someone because they woke up with a hangover thinking “Hang on, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea screwing him after all”.
I can certainly understand why someone who has been filmed while the drunken subject of a gang bang might cry rape even if it wasn’t. She knows she has been seriously sexually abused and ‘rape’ is the most serious term of sexual abuse she knows – even if not the legally correct one. But the suggestion that anything but a miniscule fraction of those alleging rape fall into this category or one remotely like it is preposterous.
You would have to have a pretty low opinion of women to think there is a sizable number of them out there who would engage in such a pointless and self-destructive act of revenge if there was not something serious behind their vindictiveness.
OTOH, if you’re the sort of person who insists that there must always be an attempt to punish the offender – even if it is very unlikely to succeed but will almost certainly further punish the victim – then maybe you imagine that sort of petty vindictiveness is the norm.
I’m also a bit surprised that a ‘Culturephile’ believes tabloid journal articles trump carefully gathered and analysed criminology statistics.
“Well, as you are a devotee of a woman who seemed to see deliberately degrading rape as the epitomy of sex I am not surprised by your opinion JD.”
Was that a dig at me? If so, where did I claim such as the “epitomy of sex”?
Are you JD?
Not unless you’re the reincarnation of Ayn Rand.
You know who John Galt is, right?
Or should I say “Who is John Galt?”
I’ve heard of him.
“What I am surprised by is ‘not a guy’ Culturephile apparently believing that rape victims should report when they have very little to gain and a lot to lose”
– The choice is of course theirs whether to go through police and the court system or not. But I’ve read several articles stating that campus rapes when dealt with by campus “committees” do almost nothing, and sometimes nothing at all, to punish the rapists.
I don’t consider being “suspended” or “expelled” as appropriate punishments for rape.
Rapists are sociopaths. They are a danger to society. Can they be reformed? I don’t know if Ted Bundy and men like him can be reformed, my guess is no. So then why should they EVER walk free?
Rape and walk free? You’ll rape again.
There are few crimes that I believe anyone should be jailed for life over. Rape is one of them. And only because I’ve swallowed the Kool Aid about the death penalty “not fitting the crime”.
But my gut reaction tells me it does in fact fit the crime.
The beauty of criminal conferencing is that it’s not up to clueless outsiders to decide ‘appropriate punishments’ or even if punishment is appropriate at all. It’s up to those affected, not the moralists in the peanut gallery.
But you sure seem to have a bad case of ‘TV rape delusion’.
How about you start by reading some basic facts about sex offending and come back when you at least know a little of what you’re talking about.
“The beauty of criminal conferencing is that it’s not up to clueless outsiders to decide ‘appropriate punishments’ or even if punishment is appropriate at all. It’s up to those affected, not the moralists in the peanut gallery.”
Its a good idea.
“But you sure seem to have a bad case of ‘TV rape delusion’.”
I’ve never bought or owned a television in my life and have never lived for more than 2 weeks in a space that had one, so I have no idea what this so-called “TV rape delusion” you refer to is.
Dear cabrogal, thank you for talking about restorative justice. I wanted to tell you this further up the thread but it had run out of reply space. This justice is a VERY controversial thing among those who are the survivors of murder victims. I’ve talked to survivors online who have been greatly helped by this justice as far as recovery goes. Also talked to survivors that hate that it exists to begin with. Personally I think it’s a wonderful thing for victims of all types of crimes, but also respect that some victims choose not to get involved in it. I understand that to a degree also.
A woman who drinks too much and engages in group sex as a result is not a victim of anything. She merely got careless, and did something she (sometimes) regrets after it’s over. If she deserves to be called an adult, she accepts responsibility for that choice and doesn’t blame it on others.
I’m not sure what your paragraph beginning “OTOH” refers to, because when this happens I don’t consider that anyone involved did any wrong during the sex. Reporting it as rape afterward, though, would be a crime of violence using the police as a weapon, and to the extent safely possible it should get the accuser treated accordingly.
As for whether “petty vindictiveness is the norm”, I’ve had on the order of one girlfriend for each year of my life, and about half of them, when angry, have threatened me with false reports of rape, DV, or both. I can’t believe I’m especially atypical in this respect. The way the system is set up now, a woman who does those things faces no consequences. That’s both a lot more unjust, and a lot more potentially harmful, than if rapists faced no consequences.
Rape has nothing to do with how much you drink.
It’s about consent.
Not just consent. Not just informed consent. Empowered consent.
A woman, whether drunk or not, faced with a large group of rowdy drunken men pressuring her into sex may not kick and scream and try to call the cops. But if she has not consented to group sex and it happens she has been raped.
If she does consent and someone films it without her consent or knowledge she has not been raped but she has still been sexually abused.
You are extremely atypical in my experience.
Nothing like that has ever happened to me with any of my girlfriends. Not once.
None of my male friends have ever complained about similar problems to me.
None of my female friends have ever suggested they’ve done anything like that to a partner nor been tempted to.
If what you are saying is true you are definitely prone to abusive relationships.
Do you drink a lot or something?
Maybe you have a definition of DV and/or rape that about half of all women would strongly disagree with.
Dear Sailor Barsoom: I think I know Laura’s answer to this, but it wouldn’t be right for me to try to give that answer. I await her reply with you-thank you! Am answering down here as there was no reply space left. I love that you do this and NOT answer for me. That really burns me up, ESPECIALLY when it’s in regards to my MVS status.
To Steersman, I imagine you wouldn’t want to same done to any group you belong to-correction: want the same done-sorry, it’s early-LOL.
What Laura really means here is, “Nice kitty; good kitty… let me sleep you creepy furball!” Thankfully, I’m around to let you all know what this thinking human being really means. It’s not like she can tell you herself. Well, she used to could, but then she got that cat…
hee hee hee
OK, let’s accept for a minute your thesis that the <10% of rapists who get convicted are sociopaths who will rape again given the chance.
So we lock them in prison for life – rapidly filling prisons with unreleasable rapists – so now the only people they can rape are the young drug offenders and housebreakers who come through for a year or so.
Now what do you suppose those previously non-violent kids are going to do when they're released after doing time in a completely dysfunctional institution dominated by long-timers who are sociopathic rapists?
Yeah, that’s the problem with jailing sociopathic rapists.
Death penalty from the get-go it is then.
That would free up space in prisons and possibly even shut some down.
I don’t “believe in” prisons.
De-criminalize possession and dealing of drugs and prostitution. Dish out death penalty for rape and murder. And the Prison Industrial Complex can sink into a distant collective memory.
I have to agree as far as that goes — prison is usually counterproductive (and that goes for all major crimes, except things that shouldn’t be a crime, like drugs).
But I’ve stopped supporting the death penalty because even the most “moderate” prosecutors and judges have shown over and over that they can not be trusted with that power.
My answer to rape and other violent crimes is to bring back physical punishments like whipping. Do them in public, for everyone to see, but only after conviction by a jury (and after any appeals are over).
And ban all plea bargaining. All it accomplishes is to enable prosecutors to railroad people, most of them innocent, into giving up the rights the system is supposed to guarantee them.
Sounds like good entertainment. For certain types at least. The types who enjoyed the sex scene in The Fountainhead perhaps?
And yep, what better method than violent abuse could there be for teaching people that it’s wrong to violently abuse people.
Works for dogs doesn’t it?
If you want a nice calm well balanced pet you should whip it for every infraction.
That’s what all the best dog trainers do isn’t it?
I know!
If you don’t want your kids to grow up to be rapists you should rape them!
No-one who has ever been raped has gone on to become a rapist, surely.
Oh, and before you say “death penalty” again – what do you suppose these irredeemable sociopathic rapists are going to do to their victims if they know they’re up for death row anyway if they get identified?
That assumes killing the victim would prevent them being identified. With DNA that is no longer true.
Indeed, if the law can make a fingerprint a condition of a driver’s license, they can do the same with a DNA swab and I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet.
DNA ain’t magic JD.
Except on CSI.
The very best it could do is show that someone had sex with the victim at some time – presuming the rapist didn’t wear a condom.
The main reason they haven’t made universal compulsory DNA testing mandatory is because all of the labs already have backlogs of 12 months or more. It will come some day and when it does DNA frameups and fuckups will become the single biggest cause of wrongful conviction. Forensic evidence is currently thought to be the second biggest cause of wrongfuls – after dodgy witness evidence – but only a tiny proportion of DNA based wrongfuls are detected so it may be the biggest cause already.