From: ddfr@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com   
      
   In article <1iltki6.v1s5b59dnrq3N%zeborah@gmail.com>,   
    zeborah@gmail.com (Zeborah) wrote:   
      
   > Jonathan L Cunningham  wrote:   
      
   > > Where does it end? Are murder victims blamed for being murdered? (It's   
   > > your own fault. If you hadn't gone to that motel, the psycho mad axeman   
   > > wouldn't have wanted to chop you to pieces. You should have gone to a   
   > > different motel.)   
   >   
   > With rape victims, I think there's two things going on:   
      
   ...   
      
   > The first of these, I think, does get generalised across a lot of   
   > crimes; the second is more specific to sex-related crimes (including   
   > domestic violence).  Murder victims generally get a dispensation even   
   > from the first because they're dead, and one Must Not Speak Ill of the   
   > Dead.   
      
   There's an important difference between rape and most other serious   
   crimes. Intercourse is, in most circumstances, legal and fairly common;   
   killing people isn't. The difference between legal intercourse and rape   
   is (aside from the special case of statutory rape) in the mind of the   
   parties--consent or absence of consent. There may or may not be physical   
   evidence, and if there is it may or may not be conclusive.   
      
   That means that rape cases involve two possible victims--one the person   
   who has been raped, the other the person accused of a rape that didn't   
   happen. Attitudes to the cases should, and do, take that into account.   
   One can also be accused of a murder one didn't commit--but only rarely   
   of a murder that didn't happen. And whether you committed the murder   
   depends, under almost all circumstances, on more than who consented to   
   what.   
      
   A different point this thread raises is the distinction between being   
   blamed for something and being a cause of something. If I go strolling   
   in a dangerous part of a city at night and get mugged, the person who   
   deserves blame is still the mugger, not me. Nonetheless the mugging is,   
   in an important sense, partly my fault. I didn't do anything morally   
   reprehensible, but I did do something imprudent. In that sense, quite a   
   lot of crimes are partly the victim's fault--he failed to take   
   precautions that would have made the crime less likely.   
      
   --   
    http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/   
    Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.   
    Published by Baen, paperback in bookstores now   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)