Our Shared Shelf discussion

Dada wrote: "I don't know why people keep referring to Jing Wen's scenarios as "extreme", as if we weren't aware of it already. I would think that any rape, involving any combination of people, is viewed as "ex..."

The reason why people keep referring to the scenario as "extreme" is because no one wants to admit that women are given preferential treatment from men when it comes to rape cases even when the men are the victims.

Also those that conveniently use the law to justify why women should be given preferential treatment, fail to realize that the law was written by human beings and can be flawed. People once thought the world was flat. A case that can be lawfully right can also be morally wrong.

You can choose to turn a blind eye and deny moral equality and fairness. You can choose the easy way out and do things as the "law" says. But do remember that slavery was once permitted by the "law". It is only great people like Abraham Lincoln who can look at the law and admit that it is flawed, and must be changed.

Jing Wen wrote: "Elizabeth wrote: "Jing Wen wrote: "Elizabeth wrote: "Jing Wen wrote: "Elizabeth wrote: "Given the unfortunate recent history of forced sterilization of women in prison, I'm really against making a ..."

The relative risk of pregnancy is always greater than the risk of abortion. This would apply in some degree in all scenarios. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22...
Medically the choice to go through with the procedure or not should be up to the person who would be having it done to them.

It is not legal to force prisoners to have elective medical procedures. It should not be legal. To make this legal would set a dangerous precedent. Do you really want a government that can mandate forced abortions? China had forced abortions until fairly recently. It doesn't matter whether someone is a criminal, you can force them to have an abortion. Like some have said, two wrongs don't make a right. But maybe that's just me, I'm against the death penalty as well.

Looking back on Moonlight Reader's comment, this all might be a moot point anyway. Rape victims can take a while to come forward and then you have to set a date for the trial, and then the rape baby might already be born before a verdict is reached. I hadn't considered that and now this whole hypothetical seems a bit pointless.

This is the same reason why elective abortion "only in the case of rape or incest" doesn't make sense either. If a woman is raped and pregnant, there is a limited time window in which to prosecute the accused rapist before the pregnancy is considered too late-term to abort for many people, and then you'd have to find a doctor willing.

Did you hear in the news about the woman prisoner in Vietnam who got herself pregnant by buying sperm from a male inmate? She did it to get her sentence commuted from death penalty to life in prison, since women with offspring under 3 years of age cannot be executed in Vietnam. I wonder if you think they should have forced her to have an abortion so that they could kill her honestly?

Dada wrote: "It'd be a waste of resources (time, effort, money) to abort and then execute her. One procedure can accomplish both.

I truly hope to see the last time that someone says that hypotheticals are poin..."

I agree. Sweeping uncomfortable matters under the rug, thereby refusing to discuss them, is what have stalled the evolution of many a topic.

What matters in the case of men, who have been raped, is for societies to take a stand for them, even when aborting an unwanted child may not be a possibility. Because in that case, more men might actually step forward very soon after the incident, with a feeling that nobody will laugh at them or judge them or something else equally ridiculous, but they can get justice at least in theory.

So while women do have the upper hand still, and quite frivolously use the don't-touch-me card in a seriously screwed up power play situation, at least on a moral level, the victims would know that someone is on their side, collectively. And while women could keep raping still, if it was normal to come forward and prosecute, I doubt as many would rape, because as is the case with domestic abuse done by women on men today, we sort of don't even think of it as a thing yet. Also, custody of children in divorce cases goes in the same boat, same train of thought, since men are secondary often still.

We keep swinging back and forth on whether this is a purely rhetorical ethics puzzle, or an actual widespread problem. I know that men being raped is a problem. I'm not trivializing the people getting raped.I just don't think there are tons of pregnant female rapists, convicted, in prison, in their first trimester, whose male victims are trying to get those pregnancies terminated. Too many different factors have to converge for this to happen. If it has happened more than once in history I would like to hear how that went down.
Another thing to consider: genetic paternity is more difficult to prove than maternity. If this case would have happened several decades ago, it would have been impossible to prove that the rape victim was biologically related to the fetus, forget even getting to the stage of debating whether he has a right to determine the medical care of his rapist. This sort of case might not have come up because science has only recently caught up.
But, even if we can determine paternity prenatally, the procedure to collect a genetic sample does carry some risk, especially in the first trimester. Now this raises a whole thorny mess of new medical ethics questions. Do you risk miscarriage to prove whether or not the victim's seed has actually been appropriated? If you do and there is a miscarriage, in scenario A the victim loses what he thinks of as his child, in scenario B, the rapist has a miscarriage anyway which solves the problem of the rape victim if he doesn't want a child, but creates more problems if the test turns out to be negative. If the rapist wasn't pregnant by the victim after all, she has basically had her human rights violated for no reason. Now you have a case for a lawsuit. The courts and prison might not want to take that risk. Or do you wait until later in the pregancy for the test, in order to decrease the risk to the fetus, and in waiting for all the proper channels of approval, etc, you risk getting nearer and nearer to viability. Some states have "fetal pain" laws which determine abortion illegal after week 20.( North Dakota almost once got abortion made illegal after 6 WEEKS).Then if you leave abortion until too late in the pregancy, you have to appeal for the law to allow it in this case, and I have no idea how many appeals and how much paperwork would be involved in moving the rapist to one of the few states that have no restrictions on abortions and a clinic that does late-term abortions. Last time I checked, there were nine states without any restrictions on abortions but only four doctors qualified and willing to do late-term abortions (the job is very thankless and not that appealing after the murder of Dr. George Tiller). And then while everyone's waiting for that, one day the prisoner could induce premature labour and medical ethics determine you can't terminate at that point. It's a sticky wicket.

.As I've said before, we've considered this hypothetical to death and I can come to no conclusion except men and women will never be truly equal until both are equally likely to get pregnant from sexual intercourse.

Until then we can only enforce the law, and Roe v. Wade says that any person with a uterus can have a legal abortion on demand up until a fetus is viable. And that rape is illegal. But we have to consider these things separately. Rape is sexual assault. It is not theft.

Our energies would be better focused on making it easier for victims of rape to be taken seriously by the justice system( even FEMALE rape victims have this issue), harder for rapists to rape, and seeing to the tons of untested rape kits in hospitals. One thing at a time. We can't even get to all the rape cases in a timely fashion at this point.

There are a myriad of ways to support male victims of sexual assault that do not involve a discussion of the pregnancy that may or may not result therefrom. And, yes, I agree with Elizabeth that rape is a sexual assault, not theft.

We don't charge male rapists with theft for "stealing" the victim's virginity, her bodily integrity or her peace of mind. The fact that the male part of a sexual assault involves an emission of sorts, as opposed to a penetration of sorts, does not convert the crime also into a theft of genetic material.

There are other ways to handle the financial piece of the paternity - pass a statute holding men harmless for child support if they are the adjudicated victims of a sexual assault resulting in pregnancy. Require the rapist to pay restitution to the victim in compensation for the added harm of being involuntarily forced into fatherhood. Provide a presumption of child custody to the victim of a sexual assault over the perpetrator of the sexual assault. But forcing the perpetrator either to have an abortion or to forbid the perpetrator from accessing an abortion is simply outside of the realm of realistic possibility for, at least, the United States. I can't speak to other countries. It's not denigrating the experience of male victims to acknowledge that reproductive biology is a complicating factor when there is a female perpetrator and a male victim.

Dada wrote: "Moonlight Reader wrote: "Provide a presumption of child custody to the victim of a sexual assault over the perpetrator of the sexual assault."

What if the man doesn't want to be a father -- not ju..."

Did you miss the first part of my paragraph where I said: pass a statute holding men harmless for child support if they are the adjudicated victims of a sexual assault resulting in pregnancy.

There are two possibilities in this scenario: 1) victim does not want to be a father but is forced to be one biologically and 2) victim wants to be a father and the custodial resource for the child. I was trying to account for both of them within the legal framework as the individual victim will have an individual preference.

The perpetrator would absolutely have custodial rights unless she is in jail/prison. It is a total fallacy that a person who commits a crime loses their kids, even if the crime is a sex crime. Plenty of rapists (male or female) have kids prior to or after they commit a rape and, if they don't go to jail, they retain all parental rights with respect to those children. There is no legal mechanism for terminating parental rights due to conviction of a crime. This is true of men and women both.

Dada wrote: "Um...as you just admitted, children don't live with their parents in jail.

I read your entire post, and child support is not the same as forcing parenthood upon a person."

The majority of individuals who commit a sexual assault don't go to jail at all. The ones who do go to jail will get out at some point that is either in the near term or the long term, depending up the jurisdiction of their crime and the sentence imposed. So, if you are assuming that the perpetrator will be in jail, your assumption is largely not consistent with the way that sexual assault cases unfold in the real world. Most of them go unreported, and the perpetrator spends nary a day in custody. The ones that are reported may or may not be charged by the prosecutor in the jurisdiction, and if they are not charged, against, the perpetrator spends nary a day in custody. The ones that are charged may or may not be won at trial, and if they are won at trial, the sentence is dependent upon more factors than we can even discuss right now, but, again, conviction can mean anything from being placed on probation (which doesn't involve a jail sentence) to a short jail sentence to life in prison. It is a long road between the sexual assault and a conviction leading to prison sentence.

Dada wrote: "Well, Aglaea, as has been pointed out, some countries don't even recognize that a woman could possibly rape a man. That alone means that a male rape victim of a female aggressor has limited legal o..."

What countries? Be specific, please, because I am unconvinced that this is true.

Dada wrote: "Moonlight Reader wrote: "What countries? Be specific, please, because I am unconvinced that this is true."

Robert, who has not participated in this thread for a while, was the first to note this. ..."

I don't know English law, but the fact that something is not labelled rape doesn't mean that it is not a crime under some other, similar statute. Based upon the article that you linked to, it appears that in fact a woman who "rapes" a man does not commit the offense entitled "rape," but she does commit a different serious sexual assault. A man can "rape" either a man or a woman, but because of the way the crime of "rape" is defined under English law, only a man can commit a rape because the instrument of the rape must be a penis (it is equally true that a man who does not use his penis as the instrumentality of his sexual assault against a woman does not commit a rape either).

In my jurisdiction - the state of Oregon in the U.S. - rape is defined differently as sexual intercourse through forcible compulsion, which means that it can be committed either by a man or a woman, but it must involve sexual intercourse (penis in vagina sex). If a sexual assault involves two parties of the same sex, it cannot be a rape, and if it involves some act other than sexual intercourse, it cannot be rape. Deviate sexual intercourse in my jurisdiction is called sodomy (anal or oral intercourse with forcible compulsion) or unlawful sexual penetration (penetration of the vagina or anus with an object other than a penis) or sexual abuse (sexual touching without consent under certain conditions). The fact that the offense is not labelled rape is irrelevant to the legal consequences of the behavior. A sodomy I or a unlawful sex pen I are just as serious as a rape I, they just involve different sexual acts. The sentences are the same.

So, your link satisfies me that under English law when a woman sexually assaults a man having sexual intercourse with him using forcible compulsion that it is not called "rape." Reading further, it appears that the crime involved would be "causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent ( link) or sexual assault (link). It also appears that there is a variance in the maximum penalty for each offense: maximum sentence of life in prison for rape, maximum sentence of ten years for sexual assault/causing sexual activity without consent.

I've sort of gotten lost in the weeds of the legal discussion here. I guess I'd just wrap up by saying that if you are only looking at the definition of "rape," it is true that there is nothing covering female aggressors. However, when you look at sex crimes as a whole in the UK, there are statutes that cover female aggressors, as well as men who commit sexual assaults that don't involve their penises.

As for your other question, about what happens after the legal stuff is all over, I would say that it is fairly dependent on the facts. Do you have a specific question?

Dada wrote: "Well, Moonlight Reader, as your own research shows:

1) Men and Women are treated differently under English law.

2) A woman who forces a man to have sex faces 10 years in prison whereas a man who ..."

I'm from the U.S., where this is not the case.