Tell me if I am being sexist, realistic, naive, all of the above…
February 24, 2009 – 10:10 pm by JohnI’ll get right to the point: When I hear about a rape case or a rape accusation, my default reaction is to side with the accused man or boy until I hear compelling evidence of his guilt. My default reaction probably should be to side with no one and have no opinion until hearing any evidence, but, well, that’s why it’s a reaction, not a drawn-out thought process. This tendency has resulted from a very small number of high-profile cases and some other lesser-known cases of false rape accusations that have been in the news: the Duke lacrosse disgrace, Kobe Bryant’s lying accuser, Genarlow Wilson receiving oral sex from another consenting teenager (not quite rape but still a disgusting outrage), Willie Williams (the Atlanta man whose accuser was “one hundred and twenty” percent sure he was the rapist), some local high-school girl who accused a basketball or football star (a black guy) of raping her because she would be ashamed if her family and community found out she voluntarily had sex with a black person, probably some others I can’t remember.
I think my complete ignorance (everyone’s ignorance?) of the relative prevalence of false rape accusations to cases of real rapists going unpunished and even untried makes my default-accused-favoring stance less legitimate. A lot of times I’m right, though. Maybe that’s only because a lot of cases of lying rape-accusers make the news and the blags while unsolved or acquitted rape cases aren’t nearly as high-profile.
Like this case of a British woman who accused a man of raping her 40 times, but then changed her mind and decided she wasn’t raped after all. She faces no formal or informal consequences of any kind. I’ve never heard of a false rape accuser (even those who blatantly lie) facing any consequences other than a few news stories or blag posts. Perhaps the fact that women in the Western world know full well that they can cry “Rape!” at any man, anywhere, at any time, and the man will be arrested before she can draw another breath is an indication that something is very wrong with our legal culture and with the basic nature of gender relations in our society. The anti-male bias that I and many others perceive in rape cases and family law cases is an indication that political correctness and male-bashing have gone way too far and my pro-male reflex holds water. If there weren’t a problem with this type of thing, then no woman would be so confident that she could simply fabricate a story of being raped 40 times by a man she doesn’t like and suffer no consequences for it, or to cheat on her husband and get high on crystal meth with other men while her husband is away and her daughter is in the next room and then have the audacity to cry, “I’m divorcing you and taking half your money!”
Face it: On a college campus at 2 a.m. or a dark city street, the cards are stacked against women, but in the justice [sic] system the cards are stacked against men.
An acquaintance of mine was recently convicted of rape. His case is in appeal but he is in prison right now. After hearing a third-hand account of how this happened, I am far from convinced that he should have been convicted. It sounded like alcohol was more to blame than he was. I don’t know how innocent (an ethical term) he is, but my feeling is that he is not guilty of the crime he was convicted of. He will most likely be a convicted felon for the rest of his life, maybe because he did rape someone or maybe because a girl regretted having sex with him. I have no idea how fast a rape case usually gets to trial, but his trial was several months after the alleged incident, maybe almost a year, and his story stayed the same the whole time while hers did not, and she failed a lie-detector test, so it sounds like she started regretting the incident and, after a while, decided maybe she could get this guy convicted of rape. What did she have to lose? Exactly nothing. It is these types of cases that make me want to take juror conscription with a sense of duty and justice, to help keep innocent drug users and non-rapists and the like out of prison. I’ve never been conscripted to a jury, but I’m sure my time will come, and I just hope it’s worth my while.
Hat tip: Wendy McElroy.
2 Responses to “Tell me if I am being sexist, realistic, naive, all of the above…”
Agreed. I think people tend to reflexively trust women over men in these cases, regardless whether the woman is actually telling the truth. Men only “think with their dicks,” we’re told, so they’re presumed guilty in all of these cases. The thing is, since rape (or alleged rape) happens in private without a lot of witnesses, we often only have two stories–the guy and the girl’s–of what happened.
I tend to be skeptical of our justice (sic) system in general. It’s amazing how when people hear a story about some person being arrested, they automatically assume he’s guilty (because, as we all know, they never make *any* mistakes).
By Cork on Feb 24, 2009
Yeah, after sleeping on it, I realize defending the accused is only considering people innocent until proven guilty. The burden of proof rests on the plaintiff in any trial or accusation, especially when women like that British idiot give women a bad reputation. It might not be long before the story of the boy who cried “Wolf!” will be replaced with the woman who cried “Rape!”
By John on Feb 25, 2009