[continued from previous message]   
      
   are identical to those of muggers and burglars. But a man who is capable   
   of rape generally commits the crime only if he believes it will be   
   excused by his peers, and that punishment can be evaded. There seem to   
   be a remarkable number of men who meet these criteria; most of the   
   college-age rapists studied were not only unafraid of punishment, but   
   blissfully unaware that what they did was criminal.   
      
      
      
   ..we should see large variations in rates of sexual violence from   
   country to country, depending on the degree to which it is condoned or   
   punished. To cut to the chase, we do. We might remember that 6 to 14.9   
   per cent of male college students in the US confessed to rape. This   
   statistic seems terrible until you learn that, according to a study   
   published in The Lancet, the percentage of men who self-identify as   
   rapists in China is just under 23 per cent, and in Papua New Guinea,   
   it’s a brutally depressing 60.7 per cent.   
      
   Sexual assault by soldiers in wartime also differs dramatically from   
   army to army, and offers an interesting test case, because the   
   disciplinary environment in which it occurs runs the gamut from   
   deliberate encouragement of sexual violence to harsh and summary   
   punishment of sexual violence.   
      
   The resulting picture is very clear. At one extreme, we have the Rape of   
   Nanjing ahead of the Second World War, where Japanese commanders   
   actively incited soldiers to assault civilians, and 20,000 women were   
   raped within the first month of the occupation. Meanwhile, incidents of   
   sexual violence are historically low among Left-wing guerrilla groups;   
   for instance, after the 12-year civil war in El Salvador, a UN Truth   
   Commission report in 1981 found NO reported cases of rapes being   
   committed by insurgents, although sexual violence by government forces   
   was common in the first years of the war. This is probably due both to   
   the freedom of such groups to enact extra-legal punishments, and to   
   their existential need to win the hearts and minds of the population.   
      
   The commonsensical conclusion is that rape, like other crimes, can most   
   effectively be prevented by deterrence. This seems obvious; which makes   
   it only more surprising that so much energy has been devoted to avoiding   
   preventative thinking.   
      
   The history of research into rape’s causes is a history of trying to   
   redefine rape as something that needs a medical solution, or a political   
   solution, or as the inevitable result of male sexuality, which cannot   
   have any real solution: as anything but a crime that must be punished.   
   This bias almost certainly springs from an unwillingness to acknowledge   
   that the suffering of female victims is important enough to merit the   
   punishment of male perpetrators. Victims’ advocates have also often   
   failed to emphasise penal solutions, fearing that the criminal justice   
   system is incorrigibly hostile to their concerns. Even when punishment   
   does enter the discussion, it is usually framed as a means of obtaining   
   justice for individual victims, rather than as a means of preventing   
   future crimes. All the research done to date shows that this is a   
   mistake. Even if the criminal justice system is resistant to change,   
   that is where our efforts must be directed if we want to eradicate rape.   
      
      
      
   ..What we must not do is...act as if the solution for rape is a   
   profound and unfathomable mystery.   
      
   With robbery, arson or fraud, we all know that punishment serves not   
   only as retribution, but as deterrent. We grasp that, if murders go   
   unpunished, it’s not just a matter of private conscience but a public   
   safety issue...We know that if we want to reduce identity theft, we must   
   direct police and prosecutors to make that crime a priority, and give   
   them sufficient funds and training to successfully convict the people   
   involved. It’s time we applied the same common sense to rape.   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)