why is this a common story?

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Young woman raped, photographed, harrased into suicide.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013 ... ged-photos

Is it actually common? I can think of maybe two other examples, but I wouldn't go so far as to call that common. It's still terrible that it happens at all, but I don't see any greater significance to it beyond the sex crime element.

It's a common story because some people are a**holes. The punishment for rape and harassing people to suicide aren't harsh enough either--and these crimes are almost de-facto legal in many countries.

Considering how much young people use social media, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more to be honest. There is kind of a catch 22, rape is a very hard crime to prove so it is good that idiots out their incriminate themselves on the internet when there might not be evidence otherwise but it can have tragic consequences on the life of the victim as well.

I guess the part that I really don't get is that these girls get raped, and then their classmates harass *them* rather than the rapists.

Care to quote some statistics on "Rape + Photography + Harassment + Suicide"?


It has its roots in religion - the only women who get raped are those who "ask for it", according to fundamentalist beliefs.

"God's judgement", the "Will of Allah", and all that rot.

statistics: 'way too fracking often.' In one radio discussion about the Steubenville case, at least half a dozen women called in and said, 'yeah, this happened to me, too... it was before cell phone cameras, though.' or 'yeah, this happened to me, too, and I had to change high schools.'
You couldn't pay me enough to get me to date a footballer, much less get drunk with one.

Isn't it odd how none of these women seem to have come forward when these alleged events took place, but only long after the statute of limitations has run out? It's just like when one person gets accused by another person of sexual abuse 20 - 30 yeas after the alleged event, and suddenly dozens of other people come forward with the same claim, and there is no material evidence to support any one claim, yet the alleged perpetrator still gets tried, convicted, sentenced, and jailed.

I think it simply comes down to the fact that rape is so hard to prove, especially acquaintance rape and doubly so when drugs/alcohol is involved. A lot of times those cases come down to he said she said and there is no way of determining guilt without reasonable doubt. There is an unfortunate fact that there are people that lie about being raped as we saw with the Duke lacrosse case and its not totally uncommon. In our legal system there is supposed to be a presumption of innocence so the credibility of an accuser is almost always going to be called into question in these situation. The court of public opinion on the other hand doesn't work that way, people have their own agendas and their own beliefs and their own preconceptions. A lot of people believed the Duke accuser because of their own preconceived notions about lacrosse playing frat boys at an elite private university and the thought that these kids might get away with it because the accuser was a poor black woman and the players were mostly privileged white kids.

I don't know the specifics of this case up in Canada but I do recall the Stuebenville victim being harrassed online as well, I imagine the most reasons people didn't believe her for most that were actually from the community was because they were friends of the alleged perpetrators, had preconceived about the victim, or were just fans of the football team.

As for what can be done about 'cyberbullying', I don't know. You get into some really murky waters over the topic, I don't believe cyberbullying when the victim knows the people doing it is really any different bullying someone IRL and usually it follows them there too I would think. In America we have freedom of speech but there are certain restrictions, libel is hard to prove IRL even amongst professionals so over the internet and for hurt feelings it is basically impossible. What is the alternative to that tho?

Cyberbullying is a relatively recent phenomena which modern laws are not prepared to address, also, how would such a crime be prosecuted, how can it be defined? If 20, 30 people engage in it, how are they all brought to justice, or is it only with the more obvious ones? How can evidence be recollected? I hate bullying because a smart one would be able to do it without leaving damning evidence of it, but as much as I don't like it I don't know of a practical way to address it apart from moving places or using physical violence.

Why would they be harassed by their classmates? Beats me. Part of the culture I guess

It's not odd at all. It's a product of a culture that tends to disbelieve rape victims, to always ask what she was wearing (if a man gets raped, is he assumed to have asked for it if he was wearing short-shorts?), why was she drunk (if a man gets drunk, is it assumed that he is asking to be raped?), why was she out alone at night (if a man is out alone at night iin his own suburban neighborhood, is he being irresponsible with his own safety?). The reason women come out of the woodwork when someone comes forward is 1)they realize that it wasn't just them, and want to support the woman who was brave enough to risk public censure by coming forward; 2)they realize that it wasn't just them, and want to help prevent it from happening to other women, and 3)they realize that it wasn't just them, and feel that the weight of many women saying the same thing will make it harder to ignore their claims. And 4)they didn't come forward earlier because they *expected* the harassment that these girls faced to occur to them if they did.

In addition, many of the young women in the recent stories have been drinking underage; they may or may not have ever been drunk before, and they realize that they were doing something illegal (ie, drinking underage) and don't want to get into trouble for it. Several of them were actually unconscious when the rapes actually occurred, and didn't understand what had happened to them until after the photos had gone out.

In case it isn't obvious, I'll say it again: being stupid-drunk isn't asking to be raped, and having someone your'e attracted to be stupid-drunk isn't an excuse to rape them. Both of these things apply to women as well as men. I know I've declined to have sex with men I was attracted to, who were drunk at the time, because I didn't want to be 'that guy' even though I'm not a guy.


Wrt. 'he-said, she-said,' why is rape treated differently than other crimes? If I accuse the guy down the street of taking my car without my permission, and he says, 'no, she agreed to let me borrow the car,' is the same process of he-said, she-said going to occur? What if it's my brother's car that's stollen, and the guy says, 'he agreed to let me borrow the car'? Do the police just shrug their shoulders and say, 'sorry, there's no evidence for grand theft auto, we can't do anything about it'?

Last edited by LKL on 10 Aug 2013, 11:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think it's more of a case of not wanting to be legitimately connected with the alleged rapist - even though the relationship ended decades previously - so they will claim to have been victims too just to protect their reputations. Again, without any evidence to back up their claims, they are automatically believed.

But that's just my opinion.

Well, clearly they are *not* automatically believed, yourself as example. And you're not alone. Rape victims are NEVER automatically believed, even if they've had the tar beaten out of them.

Not even if the rape was photographed and publicized.

If rape accusations were automatically believed there'd be a lot of innocent guys in prison.
Luckily, the law doesn't always automatically label all men as rapists.

There wouldn't be that many innocent guys, but there might be a lot more rapists in prison:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/03 ... 65823.html
different source on the same study:
http://www.policymic.com/articles/41583 ... ight-think
quote:
"The study was conducted in response to a 2010 court appeal in which a woman pleaded guilty to falsely retracting true accusations of rape she had made against her husband and was sentence to 8 months in prison for "perverting the court of justice.""
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

http://cogentcomment.com/2013/03/20/why ... sations-2/

Most studies have there being much higher rates of false accusations of rape, apparently somewhere between 2-8% from what I've read.

Also reading that study, it says that only 35 out of 5651 were prosecutable for false accusations. That doesn't mean there wasn't more false accusations, just those are the ones that they could go after the accuser criminally. There are an estimated 90,000 cases of rape reported a year in the US so .06% would still be 5400 false accusations, that's still very statistically significant even you believe this lower number. To put that in perspective, for all the whining people do about rifles only about 300-400 people are murdered with them a year.

Do you not believe in the presumption of innocence LKL?

Last edited by Jacoby on 11 Aug 2013, 12:47 am, edited 2 times in total.