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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34138 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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(I wish we had some better phrase to refer to the offense than 'child rape', which includes this but also abducting and violently raping kindergardeners.)

Isn't the distinction already made in rape vs aggravated rape? We can be certain that a 12 year is a child and that the crime committed was rape, I see no issue with the term 'child rape'.

Usually, the distinction is to call it "statutory rape", distinguishing two concepts, factual consent and legal consent. That is, "rape" is often used to describe cases where the victim did not factually consent to the sex act, and "statutory rape" captures a range of scenarios where the victim may or may not have factually consented, but in either case, the statute would not have accepted that factual consent as providing legal consent (and thus, it is not actually necessary to even ask/answer the question about factual consent). My sense is that, usually, cases involving children are pretty trivially easy to prosecute as "statutory rape", and it's only when there are significant other factors (usually clear evidence of force/violence) that can be shown, where it is 'promoted' to your category of "aggravated rape". There's often little point, from the standpoint of what is actually prosecuted, to pursuing a 'partially-promoted' case, where they try to show that there was no factual consent, but without sufficient evidence to bump it all the way up to "aggravated". Like, sure, it can help you with the jury to have the victim say that it felt bad and icky and they said they didn't like it and didn't want it, but I don't think it 'bumps the charge up' in a lot of cases.

Thus, I would generally find an unqualified use of "rape" to be rather ambiguous, as well as the slightly-qualified "child rape". It's still not entirely clear which bucket it would fall into.

...of course, if you start asking more pointed questions about whether children can factually consent, why/why not, and why/why not a statutory regime should accept that factual consent, you open a whole box of absolute conceptual mess, which is a historical sore spot for the more Foucauldian-inspired left.

Except he didn't rape her, in the commonly understood way of forcing her against her will. The law decides she was too young to consent (and I'm fine with that line existing) but the only reason we're using the word rape is because the law calls it 'statutory rape', not because it corresponds particularly to a violent sexual attack.

Would you say the same thing if she had been 9? 7? 5?

Are 9,7,5 year olds generally sneaking out to get laid?

In practice neither are twelve year olds.

And yet, here we are discussing that exact case.

She was quite clearly groomed into it; I have no doubt that a younger child could be groomed into the same behavior because it has happened before. Children want to please adults.

Children want to please adults.

And deliberately disobeying them to get laid is clearly them wanting to please the adults.

I guess I have to ask because it's not at all clear to me- have you ever even seen a child before, let alone interacted with one? They're kind of the opposite of people-pleasing robots, and generally need to be subtly threatened to do things that they don't want to do (which is what grooming implies).

Where was that threat here? (And no, the tradeoffs of "I'm not going to be your friend any more" are not beyond even a small child's grasp.)

They're kind of the opposite of people-pleasing robots, and generally need to be subtly threatened to do things that they don't want to do (which is what grooming implies).

Wait what? Is that what people mean by grooming?

I thought 'child grooming' referred to actions in the reference class of love bombing them online without their parent's consent.

Would you draw the same linguistic distinction if I say a man is a thief, when he's accused of embezzling from his employer by having supplies charged to the company but sent to him? Or if I say he's a thief when he convinced a senile old woman he was her son who went MIA in Vietnam and she willingly gave him her savings?

For that matter I have no problem with a fentanyl dealer being charged with murder, as the killer of my neighbor's son is currently being sentenced.

Hmmm, 'thief' is a little more broad, but yeah it does have connotations of stealing an old lady's bag. I'd prefer embezzler or fraudster in both those cases.

I agree we could use more linguistic precision in distinguishing between a violent rapist and one who operates by fraud (either deception or taking advantage of those without the capacity to make choices on their own). But alas, we lack the language.

I have been doing my best to add "whoremonger" to my own vocabulary, as the insult I apply to eg Deshaun Watson when discussions of such come up. "I don't care whether he did it or not, I still wouldn't want my team to spend nine figures on a whoremonger."

The problem here is that sleeping with a 12 year old isn't a central example of anything. Rape, diddling, pedophilia, molestation, predator, there's just not a good term for it.

A quick Google search indicates that "theft" has for many centuries been a generic word that covers larceny of physical items, embezzlement of entrusted funds, and taking of money through false pretenses. Is larceny the central example of theft, so that calling an embezzler or a fraudster a thief is misleading? I'm not sure.

But "killing" someone by consensually selling to him drugs on which he happens to overdose definitely is not a central example of murder.

In some states, Pennsylvania included, if the victim is younger than 13 the offense is Rape of a Child and it doesn't matter whether it was coerced or not.

I think that's largely fair too. While the legal choice of 13 in so many laws often seems somewhat arbitrary (including linguistically), it's not actually a terrible separator. It seems to me that there's some massive moral cliff somewhere at age 14 or below, and it's a absolute cliff, not a slope. For example this link talks about psychological development in the 10-12 range with phrases such as: "Write stories, Like to write letters, Read well, Enjoy talking on the phone or texting" and so to take advantage of a girl just at the tail end of learning how to, uh, talk to people independently is super duper messed up in a way that still applies but less strongly to someone in their mid-teens, where gradual gaining of independence is a normal psychological process. And while many states have legal systems that are often capricious and illogical, taken broadly they do seem to reflect at least some awareness of these dynamics. But yeah, personally I'm much more inclined to say that having sex with someone 14 or under indicates something deeply wrong with you, not a temporary "mistake" in this kind of context and knowing what we do about the actual maturity of 12-year-olds.

And in some countries this incident wouldn't be an offense at all, since the age of consent there is less than or equal to twelve. Now I think such a low AoC is wrong, but it is just applicable to the incident under discussion as the laws of PA, USA; not at all.

There are then two ways to determine if it is appropriate to call the volleyball player guy a "rapist": we can either look up the exact offense for which he was convicted or each of us can try to use our own idiosyncratic defintion of a "rapist" and attempt to judge if the Dutch person's behaviour fits.

How they do things in Philly doesn't factor in.

How they do things in Philly doesn't factor in.

There’s a joke in here about the Pennsylvania Dutch …

Even in Pennsylvania, calling a tail a leg doesn't make it so. There's a difference between the two different acts even if the law fails to recognize it.

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