Where are all the Rapists?
Straight up front, the title of this post is a genuine question rather than an expression of skepticism that rape or rapists exist. I am not sure what might motivate an individual to want to believe that rape is less prevalent than it is, or is claimed and for who a world populated by pathological maliciously lying (mostly) women is preferable to the much easier to believe world where owing to our sexual dimorphism a lot of men force themselves on women with depressing regularity. At any rate if you were hoping for me or anyone to argue a case for the former, probably best you read on but prepare to sit with whatever negative emotions make you more comforted by the idea of living in a world populated by crazy psychotic women whom can't get equal representation in parliament or corporate boards and executive positions but can somehow implausibly get the legal system to enable their deceit.
So disclaimer out of the way, I believe that rape is an under-reported criminal offence not only because I've read that statistic from reputable sources but also because it makes sense. However there are two-tiers of underreporting the first most practical is the number of survivors that actually report the crime to the police resulting in investigation and/or a perpetrator being identified and charges pressed. The second tier are the acts reported to social workers, psychologists, doctors, family members or friends that are thus known but not reported to the police. And then I would imagine that there's a bunch of people living with the knowledge who have not confided in any third party to the crime.
My question 'where then, are all the rapists?' is a disparity I've only recently thought about. For me it harks back to a conversation with a friend of mine, where we were talking about rape and probably taking a shit on MRAs, and she said of the depressing statistics regarding... something like 2/3rds of women by age 16 have experienced a sexual assault of some kind (?) 'What it means is that if any female friend of mine told me they'd been raped I wouldn't be surprised.' which is depressing in and of itself, but there's an asymmetry worth noticing - I cannot, and I imagine she could not say 'If any male friend of mine told me they were a rapist I wouldn't be surprised.' because we would be surprised, and shocked.
Of course there's an obvious reason why, expecting a reasonable person to understand the difference between right and wrong and then confess a crime/series of crimes to us, that is shocking. Plus a part of us wants to believe that justice ultimately prevails and that any male friend of mine was in a position to confide they were a rapist, it would be from behind bars and not in the office break room or during a game of pick-up basketball on a Sunday afternoon in the park. Given my moral obligation to report them to law-enforcement, employers etc. I would be shocked by the poor judgement of any male that actually confessed a crime and such a serious crime to me.
Even so, I have many female friends but I am male so that means I'm generally excluded from the sleep overs where we braid each other's hair and talk about boys, or any of the kinds of situations where I imagine women confide in each other what has been done to them, but I know more than one woman who has been subjected to rape and I imagine if I were female given the same population of friends and acquaintances I would know of more.
I know of no rapists.
Of course I know of rapists as reported in the media, but I don't appear to live in the world of the media. I have in my life been in the presence of one man I knew to have been convicted and served time for the crime, and I can't claim to really know him. And here's the horrible but true thing to say, the numbers all suggest that I can only conclude that I do indeed know rapists, I just don't know who or when or how, thus it is probably true that I know rapists AND I know of no rapists.
Time perhaps, will wash them out. I'm of an age for example, where very very few of the people I know and grew up with have died. Unless I am the one to die young (and hey, I'm a cyclist in Australia's traffic culture so knock on wood) people I know dying will probably increase with frequency as the decades go by. In the same way, perhaps when I'm in my 40s and 50s I'll start to hear about men I went to school with, uni with, lived with, played pick-up basketball games on a Sunday with getting their dues for sex crimes, maybe some of them will be convicted for crimes they perpetrated while I knew them. And being judgmental and prejudicial, there are some men I've met I would be less shocked and surprised to learn were rapists relative to others, and those are the men I've met that I have never called friends of mine.
So there's that. That it may not be a question of 'where' so much as 'when' which makes sense because if you aren't immediately copping to a crime you have committed, your objective then becomes to avoid the consequences and steal as much freedom for as long as you can.
Would I like to know? No. Of course not, and obviously that's part of the problem. I don't think this predilection towards blissful ignorance even falls along gender lines - apart from the practical reason women might want to know which of the men around them are likely to rape them. But the act of moving from blissful ignorance to unpalatable reality is going to be viscerally unpleasant. As a trivial analogy, talking about 'wanting' to know who are rapists and where they are is mechanically the same as 'wanting' to pay bills, 'wanting' to find out biopsy results, 'wanting' a divorce.
Though as far as I know, not a rapist just a serial sexual harasser, for me an excellent case study in principle is that of former NBC Today Show host Matt Lauer purely because I've seen the footage of him conducting an interview with Bill O'Reilly whom was guilty of the same transgressions that Matt would be fired for. I have an interest in body language, and a cognitive understanding that conducting such a hypocritical interview was really Lauer's only play, but I'm amazed at his ability to just conduct the interview as he does where my instincts despite my current knowledge are inclined to presume that this is an innocent man interviewing a guilty one. That these men are not equals.
I feel, that it is a common hubris across the general population to believe we are good judges of character. As I assume is the case of all my friends in Melbourne, watching vapid morning news programs from another country is an experience we've probably accrued less than an hour of in our lifetimes, odds are we first heard of Matt Lauer when he got fired. But his ability to conduct that interview with a straight face and professional decorum exposes the lie we must be living.
I at least, am living in a reality that is a fantasy land where I expect that if any man I know were to have raped a woman or man or child the previous night they would be immediately plunged into a life of guilt and remorse, tortured like the narrator of Poe's Tell-tale Heart. That any attempt to wear a mask of normalcy would prove beyond their competence and eventually they would give themselves away or break down and confess. And that's just speaking of the perpetrators.
I don't know if you share my delusion, or having read my description have discovered that you share my delusion, but writing it out has exposed a double standard I find interesting as well. It's that I expect the perpetrators to find it impossible to live with the knowledge of their guilt, when evidently due to the under-reporting of rape by survivors, I simply accept that women can wear that mask of normalcy and more or less function without me suspecting anything even though they may bear an irrational burden of guilt as I understand some victims will reflexively see themselves as somehow responsible for what is done to them, something not helped by social phenomena like victim blaming.
Evidently though, given the disparity between how many rapes I know of, and the zero rapists I know of - to some greater or lesser extent the survivors can't keep the crime a secret as easily as the perpetrators do.
So where are all the Rapists? Perhaps on my part it is a failure of empathy. My illusion of a more or less benevolent male social circle that I live in is propped up by my inability to empathise with somebody who doesn't feel guilt or remorse aka psychopaths. Rape is certainly an anti-social behavior no matter which intellectual framework you are dissecting it in, and my limited reading on the psychological phenomena of psychopathy (very limited) indicates that it is more prevalent than we tend to assume.
I have to defer to the clinical psychologists as expert in this case, but while psychopaths are well represented in prison relative to the overall population, most psychopaths don't commit horrifically violent crimes. Psychopaths are also allegedly well represented among corporate management. If you estimate the population of psychopaths arbitrarily at 10%, with only 1% of them being the kind that is convicted of compulsively violent crimes then the 1000 or so people I've met in my lifetime would predict some 100 of the people I've met would feel no remorse upon harming another in a violent and anti-social act like rape.
This can only be a partial answer to the phenomena of the asymmetry though. And I don't for a second conclude that one has to be a psychopath to commit the offense of rape, just that it may help some people live with the crime and help bloat the disparity.
And I don't perceive an ethical imperative to feel guilt or remorse, but a biological condition. The ethical imperative comes for me, once guilt and remorse are an established fact.
Before dismissing biology as a topic of discussion it's worth mentioning Robert Sapolsky's lectures on behavioral biology, available free on Youtube for their thoroughness, their inconclusiveness and ability to diminish certainty that you understand the relationship between biology and behavior. Relevant to this question though is somewhere in the lectures on Aggression, or Sexual selection he discusses 'alternate strategies' for passing on genes beyond being the dominant male in a tournament primate species.
So in baboons a very aggressive tournament species where one Alpha male dominates the troop. Females still can exert some degree of sexual selection, where when an Alpha male approaches them, they get up and walk so he has to keep following her. They may do this until he is tired, or they may nefariously lead him directly to his biggest male rival in the troop where a violent altercation will then ensue. She will then disappear off into the bushes for a quick tryst with one of the troops more sensitive males in a behavioral phenomena dubbed 'stolen copulations'. This however is the moral equivalent of an affair of passion in a society that regards women as property, thus it is not rape and, I feel, a heartwarming phenomena. That is however one alternate strategy observed in primate species.
In Orangutan troops, the alternate strategy employed by non-dominant males is rape.
Which means in Baboon Troop 'Ted is dominant, I'm not, but Peggy appreciates grooming, so if I'm nicer to Peggy than Ted maybe she'll want some of these nice genes over Ted's strong genes.' and Orangutan Troop 'Ted is dominant, I'm not. Peggy won't want to have sex with me, but I'm stronger than Peggy, so if I catch her when Ted isn't around maybe I can pass on my rapey genes.'
Now if I paid sufficient attention to those lecture series, despite all the efforts of various researchers including the experiments with Nim Chimpsky even higher primates don't really have a capacity for languages that encompass grammer. So they don't actually 'formulate' strategies for reproduction, it would appear some complicated interplay between neurological systems that figure out social ranking and perhaps endocrine systems that inhibit/disinhibit sexual and aggressive behavior.
And that's all relevant because I find it useful to remember the feelings shape thoughts and thoughts with effort can shape feeling. But I guess just on plain evidence and also a bit of inference that rape has any correlation or necessary correlation to social standing in human society.
I'd be skeptical about a one-size-fits-all psychological profile like the Orangutan's for people. For one thing social standing is contextual, one may literally be the boss at work and have the lowest standing in your family. In some of the most severe cases it runs the extreme of the social spectrum - from Adrian Bayley in my home town and former home suburb, through to Harvey Weinstein. I'd defer to forensic, criminal and clinical psychologists if the general pattern is that rape is about control, but I'd reject any claim that with greater socioeconomic status comes a greater sense of control as naive, deferring to Biggie Smalls that 'Mo' Money Mo' Problems' in fact the #metoo social movement has been mostly successful at getting businesses and political parties to dump personnel from their books. I have no idea if it's had any impact on the vast majority of sex-offenders being quite ordinary low profile citizens and I imagine most numerously family members or people otherwise known to their victims - which would lead me to bet that even the sudden surge in voices speaking out via #metoo would grossly under-report the true problem.
So where are all the rapists? The answer then perhaps is 'Potentially Everywhere'.
Before unpacking the implications of that answer, I feel it's worth doing some speculating on numerical grounds. One explanation of the asymmetry between the visibility of survivors and perpetrators is a one-to-many relationship. Which is to say one perp can commit multiple offenses with multiple people. Larry Nassar is a safe example to sight given that he has pleaded guilty to some 20 or so offenses and is serving some 2 centuries of prison time, but had an estimated 250 accusers.
I want to believe, of society in general that those men who have never and would never sexually assault another human being are the clear majority. But what is a clear majority 60% of men? 80% of men? 95% of men? The 80-95 bracket seems like a stretch to me, at least on the front of sexual assaults or harassment that involve groping, exposure, unwanted repeated advances etc.
Sorry to drone on about statistics, but the fact is that the absolute best any individual man can do is have 0 offenses to his name, whereas if you are the psychotic son of a totalitarian dictator and completely above the law in your local jurisdiction, the worst case offenders of all time may have offenses against thousands of individuals.
So I expect/hope for a Pareto distribution, rather than a Normal or Bell-curve distribution even though given the impossibility of having -ve sex offenses means that it could only be a half bell.
I'm not going to draw graphs, but really the best case scenario for the general population would be something like 99% of men have 0 sex offenses, and then 1% have 10-300 offenses.
What I would guesstimate is that if the statistics could ever be knowable across an entire male population, it would be something like 60-80% of men have 0 offenses, 30-15% have 1 offense, 8-5% have serial offenses of 2 or more.
But all these numbers, are pulled straight out of my arse, with no research whatsoever just to illustrate the one-many concept. Even as I write it, I observe that there's a similar phenomena when it comes to culpable-driving or death by auto, in that I know of several people that have been killed by vehicles, and excluding those that killed themselves operating a vehicle, I know of nobody that has killed someone with a vehicle. But I don't question how many culpable drivers might be around me at all times, for one, the crime is hard to under-report given the herculean task of making bodies/vehicles etc disappear. The other thing is that if you divide daily opportunities for somebody to kill someone else with a car/incidence of someone killing someone with a car then I guess it's fairly likely I might go through my life and never meet someone who has killed someone as a result of their driving...
A brief scan says that in my home state of Victoria last year there were 259 lives lost on the roads in 2017 with 130 being the driver of a vehicle. By comparison the government statistics on sexual offenses had almost 13 thousand offenses plus almost 4 thousand alleged offenses (if I'm reading it right) which indicates that bearing in mind, once an offender always an offender so the numbers are mostly cumulative, there's a large disparity between the proportion of the population that are sex offenders and the proportion that are culpable drivers that would grow larger over time, given the frequency with which they each occur.
Okay, so that's really bleak and we are probably perhaps interacting with someone in our lives that has forced themselves on somebody and we are totally unaware.
Where are all the Rapists? Scattered everywhere. Hopefully rare, but not uncommon. And given the state of things, presumption of innocence rules for me. There's no way I, or any ordinary citizen, could or should be trying to sniff out who's who based on what? inference? stereotypes? hearsay? a vibe?
Sounds like a cop-out, but I find this answer even more difficult before conveniently coping out at this point.
Say hypothetically, someone waved a magic wand and every rapist woke up with a big red 'R' on their forehead. Which is to say, what if I and any other individual actually knew where all the rapists are?
Do I live in a world prepared to actually deal with such a revelation?
And for that I defer to the plight of Larry Kleist:
This is a sketch for comical purposes, but if my memory can be relied upon, I feel like I heard the DVD commentary say the aim of the sketch was to completely ridicule the notion that registered sex offenders could have any chance of living a normal and productive life. Louis Theroux did a more sensitive and much longer documentary on life among the sex offenders, I think in Los Angeles I'm like 80% certain it was Bay Area somewhere.
Personally, and these are just my personal convictions, such measures of transparency border into the 'cruel and unusual' punishments documents like the English Bill of Rights, 8th Amendment to the US constitution and UN's Universal Charter of Human Rights quite deliberately and consciously put in for very good reasons.
I don't know what those reasons were but I would hope they relate to a positive double standard, that the state and the people at large will not become the equal of the worst individuals within it. I believe for example, that capital punishment carried out by the state makes all citizens of that state culpable of murder and thus, I would hold my state to the higher standard of not killing anyone rather than stoop to saying 'well he murdered someone so it's okay for us to murder him.' Especially given that we have recourse to protecting society from a murderer without killing them, and having the added benefit of keeping someone around who may have been wrongly convicted, no matter how statistically unlikely that may be.
So I'm one of those people that would prefer that punishments were not cruel and unusual, or even poetic, but humane. To be honest I'm one of those people that feels when not engulfed by my passions that there is little to be gained from punitive actions at all, beyond restricting someone's freedoms to protect society at large.
So if it turned out that some 30% of the men I interact with throughout the course of a year were ousted as sex offenders, or worst case I found myself in the statistical minority of male population who weren't sex offenders. I would find myself with some reconciliation to do.
Because even in the absence of cruel and unusual punishments, which is not necessarily the reality I live in, I'm not a fan of extant penitentiary systems in my country, or much of anywhere. Put another way, even if the time has come in our culture for survivors to speak out about what has happened to them, I'm not sure the administrative logistics are in existence to cope with the guilty parties in a way where everyone doesn't lose. I'm not impressed at judicial and corporate entities' ability to get the best outcomes and they seem, like many institutions to be a mix of archaic barbaric traditions through to cutting edge world's-best-practice recent reforms. And by mix I probably mean mess.
I'd attribute the prevailing downfalls of our penitentiary systems largely to a felt need to placate an angry mob. Which is to say, the reason I believe the incredibly successful Norwegian prison system that treats its wards as people, hasn't spread rapidly throughout the G20 nations, is because it flies in the face of the common intuition that offenders need to suffer, not to be treated with compassion, and this intuition fails us if the suffering of offenders is at the expense of society.
What's a more concrete way to get at what I'm getting at. Okay, as far as I can recall I don't know anyone named Elmer, so my hypothetical friend Elmer gets charged with rape. I'm horrified, disgusted and feel violated to learn that someone I trusted and confided in had done this violence to someone else. Currently the way we deal with it, is that Elmer would get tried and convicted, thereby losing just about all prospect of working at the same socioeconomic level he could at the time of his offense. He is sent to a maximum security prison where he may be subjected to violent physical assaults and potentially sexually assaulted himself throughout the duration of his sentence. He is also put into the company and vicinity of people who via their own behavior on some level find his offence normal and permissible and may reinforce rather than dispel the convictions he had that he was entitled to rape someone. He winds up serving some portion of his term before he is paroled out of prison. Presuming the parole process is competent, he is released only as soon as he is deemed unlikely to commit recidivism and released into society less able to live a meaningful and happy life than before he was charged for his crime. Then Elmer commits the same offense, a worse offense, or a different offense, or suicide.
I do believe that life makes us pay for our mistakes. We are basically long-run incompetent in the task of living a lie, so from minor transgressions to the most severe we can imagine, I basically believe that payment is due.
I hold everyone to the standard of being responsible, and even in the case where an offender is facing a slow agonizing death pierced by one of Vlad Tsepes aka Vlad Dracula's pike from anus through to collarbone - I believe someone who committed the offence, capable of knowing they were committing a crime (mental competence) and knowing the potential consequences, should accept them with as much dignity as they can humanly muster.
Outside of the world of human ethos, I'm more concerned about the consequences for society. Here you, like me, may find you have more reconciling to do.
Firstly, what do you estimate the odds to be, that somewhere in your chain of ancestors you are the indirect product of a rapist (by modern legal definitions) considering birth control, relatively safe surgical and chemical abortions and criminal forensics are all very recent developments. Considering also that rape is and has always been one of the weapons of war, and the long history of the slave trade, where in just the recent case of the American, British and European kidnapping and enslaving of Africans, slaver crews are believed to have encouraged the crew to impregnate their female cargo because lighter skinned babies fetched higher prices (despite the disturbing non-reconciliation of the fact that slavers were siring their own children into slavery). Even with my presumed Anglo-Saxon lineage, I estimate the chances of my having a rapist ancestor at 100% which is about what I'd guess the odds are for anybody alive.
Does our probable descent from anti-social distant (or sadly in some cases, recent) ancestors have any bearing on our own moral character? I'd say no. Do all of us, likely owe our existence to some man's moral transgression? Yes. Does that mean we have to endorse their actions? Hell no. Would it be wonderful to live in a future that can know the practice of rape has been extinct for 100 generations? Yes, fantastically so. Would it be wonderful to live in any future at all? Yes.
The case I guess I'm building, is just an observation that humanity is evidently resilient to the suffering it inflicts on itself. We can as a species survive a degree of injustice persisting, without endorsing it, and forgiving ourselves for being unable to address it. Progress is slow, and not continuous. It is forgotten too often, that in many domains we can regress as society. And impatient calls for poorly conceived progress can lead to much more severe regress, as was the case with the French Revolution, The French Terrors and then the Napoleonic Empire.
Consider my ability to compartmentalize. Perhaps you share it, but we have in my lifetime had cases like Kobe Bryant, Mike Tyson and David Bowie. Mike Tyson was convicted and served his time, Kobe Bryant had criminal charges dropped and settled a civil suit out of court with his accuser, and David Bowie never had charges brought against him by the underage girl he allegedly slept with.
I find myself having to respect the judicial system as a civilizing force as low as my opinion of the penal system is, in that extends a presumption of innocence to everyone, and for criminal charges maintain a high burden of evidence with the onus on prosecution to prove guilt. This is a system I would defer my judgement too, because it overcomes my barbaric intuitions to simply bludgeon to death anyone I believe to have breached some social contract. Of the three men Bowie is almost certainly guilty, but there is simply no charge for him to be guilty of in the legal systems. Kobe is by my opinion, plausibly guilty and Mike Tyson the one of the three to be convicted and serve time is plausibly innocent, given that if you watch any footage of Tyson interviewed ever, you can imagine him turning even the weakest case in the eyes of the jury against him.
I don't believe and it is not one of my values, that excellence in some dimension, to genius level can place an individual above the law or render them somehow exempt from the standards of wider society. But again, I hold society as a whole to a much higher standard than any individual within it, including the time and care it takes to consider evidence and come to a conclusion.
What has to be weighed up as illustrated by a case like Bryant's are in my view the following:
1. The offense cannot be undone, all that could be controlled was what the consequences would be - and ideally the consequences to the offended party are what need to be optimized, within reason. I can't know if the victim was satisfied by the eventual settlement and apology, or if then, or in time they came to feel short changed. We can't know that had Bryant been found guilty and received the harshest punishment under the constitution she would have satiated her desire for justice and had her faith in humanity restored. But what is necessary and sufficient action in a criminal case should not be at the discretion of the accuser. I have no reason to believe it the case, but in general if the accuser is bearing false witness, the offended party is actually the defendant.
2. Even if you regard basketball as inconsequential to wider society, there is an irrefutable social cost to punishing offenders in a way that deprives society of the benefits they can produce if acquitted.
This loss to society however, is the responsibility of the offender - they in effect rob society of their own best contribution by putting members of the society at risk through their worst conduct. But, it should be the aim of society to protect its members while extracting the best use out of its transgressors. Penalties should be at as near-possible the exclusive expense of the offender.
3. One area that civilized societies I feel get right, are the aspects of our judicial system that require due-process, burden of proof, standard of proof (aka balance of probabilities for minor offenses, beyond reasonable doubt for serious charges) and presumption of innocence. Which is to say, outside of a Norwegian system that may be able to produce convicts that are better off for their time in prison, I would rather have a legal system that risks letting guilty parties walk than incarcerating and punishing innocent people. Both types of errors are evidently made, but I prefer to live in a world where more guilty men walk free than innocent men have their lives destroyed by the state - which acts on my behalf and I therefore hold to a higher standard than the individuals it tries in its conduct.
And of course, you get other exceptional cases like Mike Tyson, genius of boxing for which I am a huge fan, who was convicted of raping a woman, and the thought of being raped by the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world is one of the most terrifying scenarios I can imagine. Yet, to my knowledge neither Bryant nor Tyson ever re-offended meaning the outcome of protecting society at large was achieved in their case, perhaps a bi-product of their public profiles, and at any rate seemingly by accident. The amount of money lost to Tyson as a result of his incarceration would be hard to estimate, and he is one of those few people in the world that were in a position to serve their time and resume their lucrative career (most examples of this I imagine come from the world of organized crime, and possibly periods in history where conscientious objectors get jailed or ethnic groups interred).
David Bowie would be a statutory rapist, and that one I imagine far more people world wide feel conflicted over than Tyson or Bryant. In my case I'd again point to the lack of re-offending to my and I believe public knowledge with Bowie, meaning any missed punitive actions can be known in hindsight to have not made the public at large any safer. The underage girl to my understanding (but I haven't fact checked) perceived no harm as a result of her illegal liason, but does that make Bowie's lack of due diligence okay? It is more likely, a lucky escape for all involved than a case study whereby we can extract any general principles from.
Statutory rape is tricky, and I've avoided talking about it thus far. In fact you may have noticed I've avoided even defining rape thus far, which I at least, feel is unusual for me. But this is the powderkeg part of the whole question, and relevant to the question 'Where are all the Rapists?'
For example, I've met people that regard all Porn as rape. This is clearly not a universally accepted definition given the amount of porn that is sold legally and openly in the market. Porn is riddled with problems, and I do feel the notion of what constitutes consent is one worth exploring, and which I have explored on this blog before. I've never met, but have heard of a subset of feminist that hold the belief that all sex between men and women is rape, because the patriarchy oppresses women... somehow that translates to women can never consent to sex with men. (I don't know, this is hearsay but I find it plausibly may reflect real attitudes somewhere out there).
Let's take a brief diversion and just entertain a notion that all-sex-is-rape or rather, in order to exclude abstract concepts like 'the patriarchy' the extreme position that all-men-are-rapists. There's really only one way in which I can entertain such a suggestion, and that is that there's probably a phase in physical development, around sexual maturity, a lot of men (boys really, in terms of emotional maturity) enter a period where they simply don't know their own strength. They aren't calibrated to understanding their ability to hurt, coerce and physically intimidate others. While I realize that not everyone becomes sexually active in their adolescents, not everyone engages in sexual relationships with large physical dimorphism as a factor, but on this ground I can see a plausible path that almost all men and women who have some sexual encounter with the opposite sex generate an experience where one party is scared or physically intimidated during the sex act. Even just a brief and fleeting panic experienced by one partner at the thought of losing control.
I have limited personal experience of this, though those limits were insightful. One time while on the dance floor of a gay club, a large buff dude came up behind me and started dancing with me, dirty dancing style. I was after all, in a gay bar and one whose door displays a sign saying that it is a gay bar and if you are offended by men hitting on you, you can basically fuck off somewhere else. And as flattered as I was that I could be considered ambiguous in my sexuality, there was a fleeting moment of panic when I realised that if necessary, I may not have the physical strength to stop this from going further than I want.
Anyway, it was fine. I can even conceive that perhaps for some women, this disparity of recourse to physical strength may be part of what makes dating a guy exciting, because we are all weird like that. It was certainly exhilarating for me. But I can sympathise that my limited experience is what most women experience all the time.
For any man that has experienced multiple sexual acts, I would expect them to have fucked up, to have crossed a line at some point, to basically have had bad sex, compounded by the fact they are physically intimidating. But that expectation is crossing a line that results in temporary physical discomfort, or a fleeting experience of panic, or simply resulting in her being less into it than before. Do you want that line to be the line? (I would distinguish the 'fuck ups' I'm talking about from something like a 17 year old forcing his penis into the anus of his girlfriend without explicit consent, that is rape as far as I know.)
One interesting example I came across on a friend's relationship advice blog, In which a boyfriend didn't disclose that he'd taken MDMA before sex. That's a betrayal of trust and he obtained consent under false pretenses. Does he deserve to be dumped? Yes. Do we want a legal reality where he would be classed as a rapist? Maybe. (Maybe it is the legal reality, I don't know) That's the tricky thing because you can have the law allow for someone to be charged, and the charging to be at the discretion of the complainant.
And of course while talking definitions, there is that subset of vegans that believe 'all cheese is rape' and other dairy products, as well as the eating of animal ovum and so on. This is not a universally held definition, given social norms. So it's worth reflecting that all but those at the extreme definitions of rape, are taking rape lightly in the views of somebody.
Technological developments and other arguable progress might result in some future where any of these definitions do become the social norm, though I don't feel there's the existing will to steer humanity to such a future. Thus I am glad that for the most part we as individuals are only consequentially subjected to legal definitions of rape, and the evolution of such is interesting.
Linked here Table 4 of the document details the evolution of the definition under the laws I am subjected to, and these in turn are not universal. But a brief summary would be that a long time ago rape was seen as an issue of property, so a consensual extra-marital affair was rape against the husband's propery. There's a degree to which this definition made sense historically, if you subtract a few centuries of medical process, the harm of affairs and infidelity was very real, and there was no real recourse for proving paternity. Of course there was and is a massive historical double standard but these laws didn't come from nowhere, nor in context achieve nothing practical though they wouldn't now because we have better solutions for managing the risks of infidelity.
Then it seems our history leaped forward and begun to treat women as people, which is definitely positive progress - however it required physical evidence that consent was not given via defensive wounds indicating the physical struggle.
Now as it stands, the idea of consent has undergone much revision such that rape can be recognized under law as simply lacking positive consent for the complainant, such that rapists who may drug or simply psychologically dominate their victim can possibly obtain justice. (possibly in the face of the aforementioned living in a society whereby it isn't what we know or suspect but what we can prove.)
That's just a synopsis of the local evolution. Worldwide it goes all over the place, I happened to discover that in parts of Italy for example, the legal response to rape was to force the woman to marry her rapist in a 'reparation marriage'. Italy also had a 'tight jeans' defense where a judge ruled that because the complainant had been wearing tight jeans at the time of her assault, she therefore must have assisted in removing them for the sex act and thereby given consent. I doubt skinny jeans are in fact a rubix cube for assailants but it's worth noting that even if she did assist in removing her jeans that doesn't establish consent so much as a more likely aversion to any violence on offer.
There's also the many jurisdictions in the world that have with varying recency legally declared rape impossible between individuals who are married. That a man could basically help himself by force to his wife at any time and in any manner he pleased.
Once again progress is slow and sometimes and in some places not happening at all, and some places going backwards.
However, and here is where I might, or most definitely would take a controversial stance. The world I want to live in is the world I do live in. I would like legal definitions of rape to evolve somewhat a step behind the evolution of the socially accepted definition of rape. Which is to say, the debates happening now, that are furthering our collective understanding of the full costs and effects of anti-social behavior, particularly behavior directed by men at women need to be picked over and scrutinized in agonizing detail before being codified into law.
Despite being I feel, the non-majority view. This more or less describes how progress takes place. In a lot of democracies it became publicly believed that women or ethnic minorities could become heads of state perhaps a decade or decades before it actually took place. Does anyone believe a woman can't (is literally incapable) of being the president of the United States? It's worth noting that not even Trump voters believe it is impossible, because if they did, they wouldn't have gone to vote.
Same same with same sex marriage in Australia. Polling showed a majority approval of same sex marriage long before there was any move by lawmakers to make it possible. Arguably, if you, like me want your lawmakers to pass laws that are fair and just even despite majority public opinion, the precedents were probably there in the early 90s, or late 80s.
In both female or minority ethnic heads of state, and same sex marriage legalization the costs are generally applicable to one oppressed group, which is to say, you can't really go too far in establishing an equal standing for someone. Currently 'false allegations of rape' though significant to those effected are statistically rare, but tinkering with legal definitions and what constitutes admissible evidence might make it the reality some groups think it currently is.
It's very easy to say Larry Kleist is a rapist so fuck him, the fucking arsehole, why do I have to consider his welfare when he didn't consider his victims? And the reason is, because you aren't a rapist like him. You are expected to consider the basic dignity of every human out there, including those who have violated the social contracts that have held us together since we were much less conscious primates.
There are of course, non-legislative domains in which I would demand change, and demands for change, or at least reinforcement of social norms are justified. Like when political leaders fail to condemn rape or other sexual assaults along partisan lines. This is the wrong double standard, effectively saying there is one rule for 'us' and another for 'them' and morality is simply a question of membership to an in-group and the practical consequences of having one of your own taken down.
If society is arranged into some neat vertical hierarchy, then the positive double-standard (to hold yourself to a higher standard than the people you govern) increases as you climb up the rungs. I am less concerned about individual offenders, than the organisations failing in their duty of care.
I'd side with Camille Paglia when describing tertiary institutions holding mandatory classes on how to date as undignified and undesirable. But in cases where management, supervisors and people of authority are aware of the offenses, be they sexual harassment or rape and choose not to act for short term self interest (eg. Sure he rapes but he's our biggest moneymaker...) that is where the management, the board etc. need to be held to account for their inaction.
Sales figures, salaries, dividends etc are relatively inconsequential to society or even the individuals that orient their lives and moral compass around them. Being raped is very consequential to the individual who is raped, a single event that potentially redefines every interpersonal interaction from then onward.
So I have no answers. I feel if you can commit a crime in such a way as to make it impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you did it, we have to grudgingly let you walk, and presume your innocence as an expression of our confidence in social institutions. The onus is on forensics and police skills to make this ever harder to do. On the other hand, if someone I know were to add deceit to their crimes, and subsequently steal my or anyone else's friendship it is unambiguous to me as to how I feel about them.
I fundamentally believe that while redemption, and even the ability to change may be incredibly difficult and incredibly rare, everyone is entitled to the opportunity to reform and it is vindictive to frustrate their efforts to do so. It makes it hard to reconcile my belief that the rapists around me don't owe me a confession, but have a moral obligation to turn themselves in for their crimes (which is asking morality from demonstrably immoral people) but if the consequences of such an action are cruel and unusual, I have to acknowledge that we are incentivising irresponsibility after the fact.
What would I do?
Having never been tested in this way, I can only present what I would like to think of myself. I believe in taking responsibility, and I believe we are each capable of simply making mistakes that fuck up our lives. Whether that is a bad driving decision, or someway somehow getting to the psychological state necessary to force yourself sexually on another. Beyond the consequences that can be considered just, where former friends or loved ones in their dissappointment and disgust felt some visceral need to be cruel, to attack me in a position where I am responsible, remorseful and vulnerable before the court as simple understandable human excess.I guess at the point where I am an offender, I've forfeited my right to participate in this discussion and to treat the discussion of the humane treatment of prisoners as a separate one.
Perhaps Rumi put it best:
'If you would have mercy, show mercy to the weak.' and I can avoid the question all together. Words to live by.
So disclaimer out of the way, I believe that rape is an under-reported criminal offence not only because I've read that statistic from reputable sources but also because it makes sense. However there are two-tiers of underreporting the first most practical is the number of survivors that actually report the crime to the police resulting in investigation and/or a perpetrator being identified and charges pressed. The second tier are the acts reported to social workers, psychologists, doctors, family members or friends that are thus known but not reported to the police. And then I would imagine that there's a bunch of people living with the knowledge who have not confided in any third party to the crime.
My question 'where then, are all the rapists?' is a disparity I've only recently thought about. For me it harks back to a conversation with a friend of mine, where we were talking about rape and probably taking a shit on MRAs, and she said of the depressing statistics regarding... something like 2/3rds of women by age 16 have experienced a sexual assault of some kind (?) 'What it means is that if any female friend of mine told me they'd been raped I wouldn't be surprised.' which is depressing in and of itself, but there's an asymmetry worth noticing - I cannot, and I imagine she could not say 'If any male friend of mine told me they were a rapist I wouldn't be surprised.' because we would be surprised, and shocked.
Of course there's an obvious reason why, expecting a reasonable person to understand the difference between right and wrong and then confess a crime/series of crimes to us, that is shocking. Plus a part of us wants to believe that justice ultimately prevails and that any male friend of mine was in a position to confide they were a rapist, it would be from behind bars and not in the office break room or during a game of pick-up basketball on a Sunday afternoon in the park. Given my moral obligation to report them to law-enforcement, employers etc. I would be shocked by the poor judgement of any male that actually confessed a crime and such a serious crime to me.
Even so, I have many female friends but I am male so that means I'm generally excluded from the sleep overs where we braid each other's hair and talk about boys, or any of the kinds of situations where I imagine women confide in each other what has been done to them, but I know more than one woman who has been subjected to rape and I imagine if I were female given the same population of friends and acquaintances I would know of more.
I know of no rapists.
Of course I know of rapists as reported in the media, but I don't appear to live in the world of the media. I have in my life been in the presence of one man I knew to have been convicted and served time for the crime, and I can't claim to really know him. And here's the horrible but true thing to say, the numbers all suggest that I can only conclude that I do indeed know rapists, I just don't know who or when or how, thus it is probably true that I know rapists AND I know of no rapists.
Time perhaps, will wash them out. I'm of an age for example, where very very few of the people I know and grew up with have died. Unless I am the one to die young (and hey, I'm a cyclist in Australia's traffic culture so knock on wood) people I know dying will probably increase with frequency as the decades go by. In the same way, perhaps when I'm in my 40s and 50s I'll start to hear about men I went to school with, uni with, lived with, played pick-up basketball games on a Sunday with getting their dues for sex crimes, maybe some of them will be convicted for crimes they perpetrated while I knew them. And being judgmental and prejudicial, there are some men I've met I would be less shocked and surprised to learn were rapists relative to others, and those are the men I've met that I have never called friends of mine.
So there's that. That it may not be a question of 'where' so much as 'when' which makes sense because if you aren't immediately copping to a crime you have committed, your objective then becomes to avoid the consequences and steal as much freedom for as long as you can.
Would I like to know? No. Of course not, and obviously that's part of the problem. I don't think this predilection towards blissful ignorance even falls along gender lines - apart from the practical reason women might want to know which of the men around them are likely to rape them. But the act of moving from blissful ignorance to unpalatable reality is going to be viscerally unpleasant. As a trivial analogy, talking about 'wanting' to know who are rapists and where they are is mechanically the same as 'wanting' to pay bills, 'wanting' to find out biopsy results, 'wanting' a divorce.
Though as far as I know, not a rapist just a serial sexual harasser, for me an excellent case study in principle is that of former NBC Today Show host Matt Lauer purely because I've seen the footage of him conducting an interview with Bill O'Reilly whom was guilty of the same transgressions that Matt would be fired for. I have an interest in body language, and a cognitive understanding that conducting such a hypocritical interview was really Lauer's only play, but I'm amazed at his ability to just conduct the interview as he does where my instincts despite my current knowledge are inclined to presume that this is an innocent man interviewing a guilty one. That these men are not equals.
I feel, that it is a common hubris across the general population to believe we are good judges of character. As I assume is the case of all my friends in Melbourne, watching vapid morning news programs from another country is an experience we've probably accrued less than an hour of in our lifetimes, odds are we first heard of Matt Lauer when he got fired. But his ability to conduct that interview with a straight face and professional decorum exposes the lie we must be living.
I at least, am living in a reality that is a fantasy land where I expect that if any man I know were to have raped a woman or man or child the previous night they would be immediately plunged into a life of guilt and remorse, tortured like the narrator of Poe's Tell-tale Heart. That any attempt to wear a mask of normalcy would prove beyond their competence and eventually they would give themselves away or break down and confess. And that's just speaking of the perpetrators.
I don't know if you share my delusion, or having read my description have discovered that you share my delusion, but writing it out has exposed a double standard I find interesting as well. It's that I expect the perpetrators to find it impossible to live with the knowledge of their guilt, when evidently due to the under-reporting of rape by survivors, I simply accept that women can wear that mask of normalcy and more or less function without me suspecting anything even though they may bear an irrational burden of guilt as I understand some victims will reflexively see themselves as somehow responsible for what is done to them, something not helped by social phenomena like victim blaming.
Evidently though, given the disparity between how many rapes I know of, and the zero rapists I know of - to some greater or lesser extent the survivors can't keep the crime a secret as easily as the perpetrators do.
So where are all the Rapists? Perhaps on my part it is a failure of empathy. My illusion of a more or less benevolent male social circle that I live in is propped up by my inability to empathise with somebody who doesn't feel guilt or remorse aka psychopaths. Rape is certainly an anti-social behavior no matter which intellectual framework you are dissecting it in, and my limited reading on the psychological phenomena of psychopathy (very limited) indicates that it is more prevalent than we tend to assume.
I have to defer to the clinical psychologists as expert in this case, but while psychopaths are well represented in prison relative to the overall population, most psychopaths don't commit horrifically violent crimes. Psychopaths are also allegedly well represented among corporate management. If you estimate the population of psychopaths arbitrarily at 10%, with only 1% of them being the kind that is convicted of compulsively violent crimes then the 1000 or so people I've met in my lifetime would predict some 100 of the people I've met would feel no remorse upon harming another in a violent and anti-social act like rape.
This can only be a partial answer to the phenomena of the asymmetry though. And I don't for a second conclude that one has to be a psychopath to commit the offense of rape, just that it may help some people live with the crime and help bloat the disparity.
And I don't perceive an ethical imperative to feel guilt or remorse, but a biological condition. The ethical imperative comes for me, once guilt and remorse are an established fact.
Before dismissing biology as a topic of discussion it's worth mentioning Robert Sapolsky's lectures on behavioral biology, available free on Youtube for their thoroughness, their inconclusiveness and ability to diminish certainty that you understand the relationship between biology and behavior. Relevant to this question though is somewhere in the lectures on Aggression, or Sexual selection he discusses 'alternate strategies' for passing on genes beyond being the dominant male in a tournament primate species.
So in baboons a very aggressive tournament species where one Alpha male dominates the troop. Females still can exert some degree of sexual selection, where when an Alpha male approaches them, they get up and walk so he has to keep following her. They may do this until he is tired, or they may nefariously lead him directly to his biggest male rival in the troop where a violent altercation will then ensue. She will then disappear off into the bushes for a quick tryst with one of the troops more sensitive males in a behavioral phenomena dubbed 'stolen copulations'. This however is the moral equivalent of an affair of passion in a society that regards women as property, thus it is not rape and, I feel, a heartwarming phenomena. That is however one alternate strategy observed in primate species.
In Orangutan troops, the alternate strategy employed by non-dominant males is rape.
Which means in Baboon Troop 'Ted is dominant, I'm not, but Peggy appreciates grooming, so if I'm nicer to Peggy than Ted maybe she'll want some of these nice genes over Ted's strong genes.' and Orangutan Troop 'Ted is dominant, I'm not. Peggy won't want to have sex with me, but I'm stronger than Peggy, so if I catch her when Ted isn't around maybe I can pass on my rapey genes.'
Now if I paid sufficient attention to those lecture series, despite all the efforts of various researchers including the experiments with Nim Chimpsky even higher primates don't really have a capacity for languages that encompass grammer. So they don't actually 'formulate' strategies for reproduction, it would appear some complicated interplay between neurological systems that figure out social ranking and perhaps endocrine systems that inhibit/disinhibit sexual and aggressive behavior.
And that's all relevant because I find it useful to remember the feelings shape thoughts and thoughts with effort can shape feeling. But I guess just on plain evidence and also a bit of inference that rape has any correlation or necessary correlation to social standing in human society.
I'd be skeptical about a one-size-fits-all psychological profile like the Orangutan's for people. For one thing social standing is contextual, one may literally be the boss at work and have the lowest standing in your family. In some of the most severe cases it runs the extreme of the social spectrum - from Adrian Bayley in my home town and former home suburb, through to Harvey Weinstein. I'd defer to forensic, criminal and clinical psychologists if the general pattern is that rape is about control, but I'd reject any claim that with greater socioeconomic status comes a greater sense of control as naive, deferring to Biggie Smalls that 'Mo' Money Mo' Problems' in fact the #metoo social movement has been mostly successful at getting businesses and political parties to dump personnel from their books. I have no idea if it's had any impact on the vast majority of sex-offenders being quite ordinary low profile citizens and I imagine most numerously family members or people otherwise known to their victims - which would lead me to bet that even the sudden surge in voices speaking out via #metoo would grossly under-report the true problem.
So where are all the rapists? The answer then perhaps is 'Potentially Everywhere'.
Before unpacking the implications of that answer, I feel it's worth doing some speculating on numerical grounds. One explanation of the asymmetry between the visibility of survivors and perpetrators is a one-to-many relationship. Which is to say one perp can commit multiple offenses with multiple people. Larry Nassar is a safe example to sight given that he has pleaded guilty to some 20 or so offenses and is serving some 2 centuries of prison time, but had an estimated 250 accusers.
I want to believe, of society in general that those men who have never and would never sexually assault another human being are the clear majority. But what is a clear majority 60% of men? 80% of men? 95% of men? The 80-95 bracket seems like a stretch to me, at least on the front of sexual assaults or harassment that involve groping, exposure, unwanted repeated advances etc.
Sorry to drone on about statistics, but the fact is that the absolute best any individual man can do is have 0 offenses to his name, whereas if you are the psychotic son of a totalitarian dictator and completely above the law in your local jurisdiction, the worst case offenders of all time may have offenses against thousands of individuals.
So I expect/hope for a Pareto distribution, rather than a Normal or Bell-curve distribution even though given the impossibility of having -ve sex offenses means that it could only be a half bell.
I'm not going to draw graphs, but really the best case scenario for the general population would be something like 99% of men have 0 sex offenses, and then 1% have 10-300 offenses.
What I would guesstimate is that if the statistics could ever be knowable across an entire male population, it would be something like 60-80% of men have 0 offenses, 30-15% have 1 offense, 8-5% have serial offenses of 2 or more.
But all these numbers, are pulled straight out of my arse, with no research whatsoever just to illustrate the one-many concept. Even as I write it, I observe that there's a similar phenomena when it comes to culpable-driving or death by auto, in that I know of several people that have been killed by vehicles, and excluding those that killed themselves operating a vehicle, I know of nobody that has killed someone with a vehicle. But I don't question how many culpable drivers might be around me at all times, for one, the crime is hard to under-report given the herculean task of making bodies/vehicles etc disappear. The other thing is that if you divide daily opportunities for somebody to kill someone else with a car/incidence of someone killing someone with a car then I guess it's fairly likely I might go through my life and never meet someone who has killed someone as a result of their driving...
A brief scan says that in my home state of Victoria last year there were 259 lives lost on the roads in 2017 with 130 being the driver of a vehicle. By comparison the government statistics on sexual offenses had almost 13 thousand offenses plus almost 4 thousand alleged offenses (if I'm reading it right) which indicates that bearing in mind, once an offender always an offender so the numbers are mostly cumulative, there's a large disparity between the proportion of the population that are sex offenders and the proportion that are culpable drivers that would grow larger over time, given the frequency with which they each occur.
Okay, so that's really bleak and we are probably perhaps interacting with someone in our lives that has forced themselves on somebody and we are totally unaware.
Where are all the Rapists? Scattered everywhere. Hopefully rare, but not uncommon. And given the state of things, presumption of innocence rules for me. There's no way I, or any ordinary citizen, could or should be trying to sniff out who's who based on what? inference? stereotypes? hearsay? a vibe?
Sounds like a cop-out, but I find this answer even more difficult before conveniently coping out at this point.
Say hypothetically, someone waved a magic wand and every rapist woke up with a big red 'R' on their forehead. Which is to say, what if I and any other individual actually knew where all the rapists are?
Do I live in a world prepared to actually deal with such a revelation?
And for that I defer to the plight of Larry Kleist:
This is a sketch for comical purposes, but if my memory can be relied upon, I feel like I heard the DVD commentary say the aim of the sketch was to completely ridicule the notion that registered sex offenders could have any chance of living a normal and productive life. Louis Theroux did a more sensitive and much longer documentary on life among the sex offenders, I think in Los Angeles I'm like 80% certain it was Bay Area somewhere.
Personally, and these are just my personal convictions, such measures of transparency border into the 'cruel and unusual' punishments documents like the English Bill of Rights, 8th Amendment to the US constitution and UN's Universal Charter of Human Rights quite deliberately and consciously put in for very good reasons.
I don't know what those reasons were but I would hope they relate to a positive double standard, that the state and the people at large will not become the equal of the worst individuals within it. I believe for example, that capital punishment carried out by the state makes all citizens of that state culpable of murder and thus, I would hold my state to the higher standard of not killing anyone rather than stoop to saying 'well he murdered someone so it's okay for us to murder him.' Especially given that we have recourse to protecting society from a murderer without killing them, and having the added benefit of keeping someone around who may have been wrongly convicted, no matter how statistically unlikely that may be.
So I'm one of those people that would prefer that punishments were not cruel and unusual, or even poetic, but humane. To be honest I'm one of those people that feels when not engulfed by my passions that there is little to be gained from punitive actions at all, beyond restricting someone's freedoms to protect society at large.
So if it turned out that some 30% of the men I interact with throughout the course of a year were ousted as sex offenders, or worst case I found myself in the statistical minority of male population who weren't sex offenders. I would find myself with some reconciliation to do.
Because even in the absence of cruel and unusual punishments, which is not necessarily the reality I live in, I'm not a fan of extant penitentiary systems in my country, or much of anywhere. Put another way, even if the time has come in our culture for survivors to speak out about what has happened to them, I'm not sure the administrative logistics are in existence to cope with the guilty parties in a way where everyone doesn't lose. I'm not impressed at judicial and corporate entities' ability to get the best outcomes and they seem, like many institutions to be a mix of archaic barbaric traditions through to cutting edge world's-best-practice recent reforms. And by mix I probably mean mess.
I'd attribute the prevailing downfalls of our penitentiary systems largely to a felt need to placate an angry mob. Which is to say, the reason I believe the incredibly successful Norwegian prison system that treats its wards as people, hasn't spread rapidly throughout the G20 nations, is because it flies in the face of the common intuition that offenders need to suffer, not to be treated with compassion, and this intuition fails us if the suffering of offenders is at the expense of society.
What's a more concrete way to get at what I'm getting at. Okay, as far as I can recall I don't know anyone named Elmer, so my hypothetical friend Elmer gets charged with rape. I'm horrified, disgusted and feel violated to learn that someone I trusted and confided in had done this violence to someone else. Currently the way we deal with it, is that Elmer would get tried and convicted, thereby losing just about all prospect of working at the same socioeconomic level he could at the time of his offense. He is sent to a maximum security prison where he may be subjected to violent physical assaults and potentially sexually assaulted himself throughout the duration of his sentence. He is also put into the company and vicinity of people who via their own behavior on some level find his offence normal and permissible and may reinforce rather than dispel the convictions he had that he was entitled to rape someone. He winds up serving some portion of his term before he is paroled out of prison. Presuming the parole process is competent, he is released only as soon as he is deemed unlikely to commit recidivism and released into society less able to live a meaningful and happy life than before he was charged for his crime. Then Elmer commits the same offense, a worse offense, or a different offense, or suicide.
I do believe that life makes us pay for our mistakes. We are basically long-run incompetent in the task of living a lie, so from minor transgressions to the most severe we can imagine, I basically believe that payment is due.
I hold everyone to the standard of being responsible, and even in the case where an offender is facing a slow agonizing death pierced by one of Vlad Tsepes aka Vlad Dracula's pike from anus through to collarbone - I believe someone who committed the offence, capable of knowing they were committing a crime (mental competence) and knowing the potential consequences, should accept them with as much dignity as they can humanly muster.
Outside of the world of human ethos, I'm more concerned about the consequences for society. Here you, like me, may find you have more reconciling to do.
Firstly, what do you estimate the odds to be, that somewhere in your chain of ancestors you are the indirect product of a rapist (by modern legal definitions) considering birth control, relatively safe surgical and chemical abortions and criminal forensics are all very recent developments. Considering also that rape is and has always been one of the weapons of war, and the long history of the slave trade, where in just the recent case of the American, British and European kidnapping and enslaving of Africans, slaver crews are believed to have encouraged the crew to impregnate their female cargo because lighter skinned babies fetched higher prices (despite the disturbing non-reconciliation of the fact that slavers were siring their own children into slavery). Even with my presumed Anglo-Saxon lineage, I estimate the chances of my having a rapist ancestor at 100% which is about what I'd guess the odds are for anybody alive.
Does our probable descent from anti-social distant (or sadly in some cases, recent) ancestors have any bearing on our own moral character? I'd say no. Do all of us, likely owe our existence to some man's moral transgression? Yes. Does that mean we have to endorse their actions? Hell no. Would it be wonderful to live in a future that can know the practice of rape has been extinct for 100 generations? Yes, fantastically so. Would it be wonderful to live in any future at all? Yes.
The case I guess I'm building, is just an observation that humanity is evidently resilient to the suffering it inflicts on itself. We can as a species survive a degree of injustice persisting, without endorsing it, and forgiving ourselves for being unable to address it. Progress is slow, and not continuous. It is forgotten too often, that in many domains we can regress as society. And impatient calls for poorly conceived progress can lead to much more severe regress, as was the case with the French Revolution, The French Terrors and then the Napoleonic Empire.
Consider my ability to compartmentalize. Perhaps you share it, but we have in my lifetime had cases like Kobe Bryant, Mike Tyson and David Bowie. Mike Tyson was convicted and served his time, Kobe Bryant had criminal charges dropped and settled a civil suit out of court with his accuser, and David Bowie never had charges brought against him by the underage girl he allegedly slept with.
I find myself having to respect the judicial system as a civilizing force as low as my opinion of the penal system is, in that extends a presumption of innocence to everyone, and for criminal charges maintain a high burden of evidence with the onus on prosecution to prove guilt. This is a system I would defer my judgement too, because it overcomes my barbaric intuitions to simply bludgeon to death anyone I believe to have breached some social contract. Of the three men Bowie is almost certainly guilty, but there is simply no charge for him to be guilty of in the legal systems. Kobe is by my opinion, plausibly guilty and Mike Tyson the one of the three to be convicted and serve time is plausibly innocent, given that if you watch any footage of Tyson interviewed ever, you can imagine him turning even the weakest case in the eyes of the jury against him.
I don't believe and it is not one of my values, that excellence in some dimension, to genius level can place an individual above the law or render them somehow exempt from the standards of wider society. But again, I hold society as a whole to a much higher standard than any individual within it, including the time and care it takes to consider evidence and come to a conclusion.
What has to be weighed up as illustrated by a case like Bryant's are in my view the following:
1. The offense cannot be undone, all that could be controlled was what the consequences would be - and ideally the consequences to the offended party are what need to be optimized, within reason. I can't know if the victim was satisfied by the eventual settlement and apology, or if then, or in time they came to feel short changed. We can't know that had Bryant been found guilty and received the harshest punishment under the constitution she would have satiated her desire for justice and had her faith in humanity restored. But what is necessary and sufficient action in a criminal case should not be at the discretion of the accuser. I have no reason to believe it the case, but in general if the accuser is bearing false witness, the offended party is actually the defendant.
2. Even if you regard basketball as inconsequential to wider society, there is an irrefutable social cost to punishing offenders in a way that deprives society of the benefits they can produce if acquitted.
This loss to society however, is the responsibility of the offender - they in effect rob society of their own best contribution by putting members of the society at risk through their worst conduct. But, it should be the aim of society to protect its members while extracting the best use out of its transgressors. Penalties should be at as near-possible the exclusive expense of the offender.
3. One area that civilized societies I feel get right, are the aspects of our judicial system that require due-process, burden of proof, standard of proof (aka balance of probabilities for minor offenses, beyond reasonable doubt for serious charges) and presumption of innocence. Which is to say, outside of a Norwegian system that may be able to produce convicts that are better off for their time in prison, I would rather have a legal system that risks letting guilty parties walk than incarcerating and punishing innocent people. Both types of errors are evidently made, but I prefer to live in a world where more guilty men walk free than innocent men have their lives destroyed by the state - which acts on my behalf and I therefore hold to a higher standard than the individuals it tries in its conduct.
And of course, you get other exceptional cases like Mike Tyson, genius of boxing for which I am a huge fan, who was convicted of raping a woman, and the thought of being raped by the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world is one of the most terrifying scenarios I can imagine. Yet, to my knowledge neither Bryant nor Tyson ever re-offended meaning the outcome of protecting society at large was achieved in their case, perhaps a bi-product of their public profiles, and at any rate seemingly by accident. The amount of money lost to Tyson as a result of his incarceration would be hard to estimate, and he is one of those few people in the world that were in a position to serve their time and resume their lucrative career (most examples of this I imagine come from the world of organized crime, and possibly periods in history where conscientious objectors get jailed or ethnic groups interred).
David Bowie would be a statutory rapist, and that one I imagine far more people world wide feel conflicted over than Tyson or Bryant. In my case I'd again point to the lack of re-offending to my and I believe public knowledge with Bowie, meaning any missed punitive actions can be known in hindsight to have not made the public at large any safer. The underage girl to my understanding (but I haven't fact checked) perceived no harm as a result of her illegal liason, but does that make Bowie's lack of due diligence okay? It is more likely, a lucky escape for all involved than a case study whereby we can extract any general principles from.
Statutory rape is tricky, and I've avoided talking about it thus far. In fact you may have noticed I've avoided even defining rape thus far, which I at least, feel is unusual for me. But this is the powderkeg part of the whole question, and relevant to the question 'Where are all the Rapists?'
For example, I've met people that regard all Porn as rape. This is clearly not a universally accepted definition given the amount of porn that is sold legally and openly in the market. Porn is riddled with problems, and I do feel the notion of what constitutes consent is one worth exploring, and which I have explored on this blog before. I've never met, but have heard of a subset of feminist that hold the belief that all sex between men and women is rape, because the patriarchy oppresses women... somehow that translates to women can never consent to sex with men. (I don't know, this is hearsay but I find it plausibly may reflect real attitudes somewhere out there).
Let's take a brief diversion and just entertain a notion that all-sex-is-rape or rather, in order to exclude abstract concepts like 'the patriarchy' the extreme position that all-men-are-rapists. There's really only one way in which I can entertain such a suggestion, and that is that there's probably a phase in physical development, around sexual maturity, a lot of men (boys really, in terms of emotional maturity) enter a period where they simply don't know their own strength. They aren't calibrated to understanding their ability to hurt, coerce and physically intimidate others. While I realize that not everyone becomes sexually active in their adolescents, not everyone engages in sexual relationships with large physical dimorphism as a factor, but on this ground I can see a plausible path that almost all men and women who have some sexual encounter with the opposite sex generate an experience where one party is scared or physically intimidated during the sex act. Even just a brief and fleeting panic experienced by one partner at the thought of losing control.
I have limited personal experience of this, though those limits were insightful. One time while on the dance floor of a gay club, a large buff dude came up behind me and started dancing with me, dirty dancing style. I was after all, in a gay bar and one whose door displays a sign saying that it is a gay bar and if you are offended by men hitting on you, you can basically fuck off somewhere else. And as flattered as I was that I could be considered ambiguous in my sexuality, there was a fleeting moment of panic when I realised that if necessary, I may not have the physical strength to stop this from going further than I want.
Anyway, it was fine. I can even conceive that perhaps for some women, this disparity of recourse to physical strength may be part of what makes dating a guy exciting, because we are all weird like that. It was certainly exhilarating for me. But I can sympathise that my limited experience is what most women experience all the time.
For any man that has experienced multiple sexual acts, I would expect them to have fucked up, to have crossed a line at some point, to basically have had bad sex, compounded by the fact they are physically intimidating. But that expectation is crossing a line that results in temporary physical discomfort, or a fleeting experience of panic, or simply resulting in her being less into it than before. Do you want that line to be the line? (I would distinguish the 'fuck ups' I'm talking about from something like a 17 year old forcing his penis into the anus of his girlfriend without explicit consent, that is rape as far as I know.)
One interesting example I came across on a friend's relationship advice blog, In which a boyfriend didn't disclose that he'd taken MDMA before sex. That's a betrayal of trust and he obtained consent under false pretenses. Does he deserve to be dumped? Yes. Do we want a legal reality where he would be classed as a rapist? Maybe. (Maybe it is the legal reality, I don't know) That's the tricky thing because you can have the law allow for someone to be charged, and the charging to be at the discretion of the complainant.
And of course while talking definitions, there is that subset of vegans that believe 'all cheese is rape' and other dairy products, as well as the eating of animal ovum and so on. This is not a universally held definition, given social norms. So it's worth reflecting that all but those at the extreme definitions of rape, are taking rape lightly in the views of somebody.
Technological developments and other arguable progress might result in some future where any of these definitions do become the social norm, though I don't feel there's the existing will to steer humanity to such a future. Thus I am glad that for the most part we as individuals are only consequentially subjected to legal definitions of rape, and the evolution of such is interesting.
Linked here Table 4 of the document details the evolution of the definition under the laws I am subjected to, and these in turn are not universal. But a brief summary would be that a long time ago rape was seen as an issue of property, so a consensual extra-marital affair was rape against the husband's propery. There's a degree to which this definition made sense historically, if you subtract a few centuries of medical process, the harm of affairs and infidelity was very real, and there was no real recourse for proving paternity. Of course there was and is a massive historical double standard but these laws didn't come from nowhere, nor in context achieve nothing practical though they wouldn't now because we have better solutions for managing the risks of infidelity.
Then it seems our history leaped forward and begun to treat women as people, which is definitely positive progress - however it required physical evidence that consent was not given via defensive wounds indicating the physical struggle.
Now as it stands, the idea of consent has undergone much revision such that rape can be recognized under law as simply lacking positive consent for the complainant, such that rapists who may drug or simply psychologically dominate their victim can possibly obtain justice. (possibly in the face of the aforementioned living in a society whereby it isn't what we know or suspect but what we can prove.)
That's just a synopsis of the local evolution. Worldwide it goes all over the place, I happened to discover that in parts of Italy for example, the legal response to rape was to force the woman to marry her rapist in a 'reparation marriage'. Italy also had a 'tight jeans' defense where a judge ruled that because the complainant had been wearing tight jeans at the time of her assault, she therefore must have assisted in removing them for the sex act and thereby given consent. I doubt skinny jeans are in fact a rubix cube for assailants but it's worth noting that even if she did assist in removing her jeans that doesn't establish consent so much as a more likely aversion to any violence on offer.
There's also the many jurisdictions in the world that have with varying recency legally declared rape impossible between individuals who are married. That a man could basically help himself by force to his wife at any time and in any manner he pleased.
Once again progress is slow and sometimes and in some places not happening at all, and some places going backwards.
However, and here is where I might, or most definitely would take a controversial stance. The world I want to live in is the world I do live in. I would like legal definitions of rape to evolve somewhat a step behind the evolution of the socially accepted definition of rape. Which is to say, the debates happening now, that are furthering our collective understanding of the full costs and effects of anti-social behavior, particularly behavior directed by men at women need to be picked over and scrutinized in agonizing detail before being codified into law.
Despite being I feel, the non-majority view. This more or less describes how progress takes place. In a lot of democracies it became publicly believed that women or ethnic minorities could become heads of state perhaps a decade or decades before it actually took place. Does anyone believe a woman can't (is literally incapable) of being the president of the United States? It's worth noting that not even Trump voters believe it is impossible, because if they did, they wouldn't have gone to vote.
Same same with same sex marriage in Australia. Polling showed a majority approval of same sex marriage long before there was any move by lawmakers to make it possible. Arguably, if you, like me want your lawmakers to pass laws that are fair and just even despite majority public opinion, the precedents were probably there in the early 90s, or late 80s.
In both female or minority ethnic heads of state, and same sex marriage legalization the costs are generally applicable to one oppressed group, which is to say, you can't really go too far in establishing an equal standing for someone. Currently 'false allegations of rape' though significant to those effected are statistically rare, but tinkering with legal definitions and what constitutes admissible evidence might make it the reality some groups think it currently is.
It's very easy to say Larry Kleist is a rapist so fuck him, the fucking arsehole, why do I have to consider his welfare when he didn't consider his victims? And the reason is, because you aren't a rapist like him. You are expected to consider the basic dignity of every human out there, including those who have violated the social contracts that have held us together since we were much less conscious primates.
There are of course, non-legislative domains in which I would demand change, and demands for change, or at least reinforcement of social norms are justified. Like when political leaders fail to condemn rape or other sexual assaults along partisan lines. This is the wrong double standard, effectively saying there is one rule for 'us' and another for 'them' and morality is simply a question of membership to an in-group and the practical consequences of having one of your own taken down.
If society is arranged into some neat vertical hierarchy, then the positive double-standard (to hold yourself to a higher standard than the people you govern) increases as you climb up the rungs. I am less concerned about individual offenders, than the organisations failing in their duty of care.
I'd side with Camille Paglia when describing tertiary institutions holding mandatory classes on how to date as undignified and undesirable. But in cases where management, supervisors and people of authority are aware of the offenses, be they sexual harassment or rape and choose not to act for short term self interest (eg. Sure he rapes but he's our biggest moneymaker...) that is where the management, the board etc. need to be held to account for their inaction.
Sales figures, salaries, dividends etc are relatively inconsequential to society or even the individuals that orient their lives and moral compass around them. Being raped is very consequential to the individual who is raped, a single event that potentially redefines every interpersonal interaction from then onward.
So I have no answers. I feel if you can commit a crime in such a way as to make it impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you did it, we have to grudgingly let you walk, and presume your innocence as an expression of our confidence in social institutions. The onus is on forensics and police skills to make this ever harder to do. On the other hand, if someone I know were to add deceit to their crimes, and subsequently steal my or anyone else's friendship it is unambiguous to me as to how I feel about them.
I fundamentally believe that while redemption, and even the ability to change may be incredibly difficult and incredibly rare, everyone is entitled to the opportunity to reform and it is vindictive to frustrate their efforts to do so. It makes it hard to reconcile my belief that the rapists around me don't owe me a confession, but have a moral obligation to turn themselves in for their crimes (which is asking morality from demonstrably immoral people) but if the consequences of such an action are cruel and unusual, I have to acknowledge that we are incentivising irresponsibility after the fact.
What would I do?
Having never been tested in this way, I can only present what I would like to think of myself. I believe in taking responsibility, and I believe we are each capable of simply making mistakes that fuck up our lives. Whether that is a bad driving decision, or someway somehow getting to the psychological state necessary to force yourself sexually on another. Beyond the consequences that can be considered just, where former friends or loved ones in their dissappointment and disgust felt some visceral need to be cruel, to attack me in a position where I am responsible, remorseful and vulnerable before the court as simple understandable human excess.I guess at the point where I am an offender, I've forfeited my right to participate in this discussion and to treat the discussion of the humane treatment of prisoners as a separate one.
Perhaps Rumi put it best:
'If you would have mercy, show mercy to the weak.' and I can avoid the question all together. Words to live by.
