These are not mutually exclusive concepts. One may oppose rape, and also oppose baseless, stale rape allegations from 13+ years ago. These are concepts that apply to all legal issues, not just rape. It's not particular to rape. I am against people being punched in the face without legal excuse or justification. However, I am also against people reporting their alleged punch in the face from Jimmy's Pub and Eatery in 2004, at a time when memories are 13 years old, witnesses are inaccessible, and the capacity to refute or defend the allegations has significantly deteriorated by nearly a decade and a half of water under the bridge.Hermit wrote:I'm beginning to think this is a great concept.devogue wrote:...if more women come forward with impossible to prove/disprove claims then the weight and pressure of impossible to prove/disprove claims will become the truth.
No. Wait. Let me rephrase that. I wish the people who so volubly complain about the injustice of men being regarded as sexual predators without the prerequisite guilty verdict in a proper court of law would expend a proportionate effort on expressing their opinions about the six out of seven rapes that don't even get reported, let alone result of a conviction, mindful that 93% of the perpetrators are male.
Most everyone understands that rape is an injustice. I don't know of anyone who supports rape. The legal system punishes it strongly. People who hear about a woman being raped general talk about the perpetrator deserving castration, life imprisonment, and some even the death penalty. It's not as if the cultural zeitgeist in western countries is "ho, hum, rape - no big deal."
Moreover, it's not about "men being regarded as predators." Making a rape charge against a man is an accusation that the person is not only a criminal, but a violent criminal - a rapist. It is the accusation of a crime of significant moral turpitude, and has the possibility, for most people, to significantly injure that person's reputation and other injuries. If a person tells people that 42 is a rapist, it's slander. If a person publishes a writing in that regard, it's libel. These are serious accusations, with serious consequences to the person being accused.
So, the system has to be set up in a way that takes that significant interest into account. Accusation of a crime like that is sort of like someone alleging David Blaine burgled my house and kicked my dog in 2004. If he did that, oughtn't it have been reported shortly after it occurred? If not, why not? That's not a comparison of the significance of the crimes, as rape is more serious than burglary and dog kicking -- it's the rationale.
Here's the thing. None of us was there in 2004 with David Blaine and his accuser, if they were even in the same room together then. We simply don't know. We can't know. So, the only accurate position for any of us to take is "I don't know." So, the question becomes, how are these things to be evaluated. Normally, the answer to that is "based on the evidence." So, what's the evidence? If all we have is the accusation, then all the work still lies ahead. Even if an accuser is honest and trustworthy, we still cannot know if the accusation is true, because an honest and trustworthy person can: (a) have a faulty memory, (b) be operating under a different set of definitions, (c) be telling the truth, but still be wrong, (d) have conditions which create or alter memories, among many other things.
Also, in a rape case, it's possible for both parties to be telling the truth, and for the woman to have not consented to sex and thereby believe that she was raped. Was she drunk? How drunk? Was she not consenting internally, but otherwise seemingly agreeable from Blaine's perspective? Did she consent to much of the sex, but not a particular act, so that Blaine was under a misapprehension of the degree of consent?
How do we assess state of mind and the details of two people's sexual encounter, if any, 13 years after the fact? It becomes much more difficult.