I disagree with the idea of different levels of criminality depending on violence. Its a small pet peeve that violent felonies are subsumed by a charge of rape.

If I were designing a rape statute, each act of non consensual sex (manual, oral, anal, vaginal) would be a count of rape and each act of violence – assault, threats, etc – used to perpetrate the rape would be a separate count REQUIRING consecutive sentences.

So if someone date rapes a person using threats to keep the victim there, the rapist would be charged with rape, kidnapping, and terroristic threatening.

If someone rapes another at knife point and then stabs them repeatedly, the rapist would be charged with rape, kidnapping, terroristic threatening, attempted murder/assault with a deadly weapon.

My feeling was much the same as your point 3 – offering a lower level of punishment for, say, sex without consent while both parties are drunk or in a relationship (both suggested yesterday), on the grounds that the man might honestly misinterpret the woman’s ‘no’, seems to undermine feminist attempts to change cultural attitudes to rape.

I’ll check out that blog you mentioned – thanks for the tip.

It’s not hugely relevant to this thread, but I do think that it’s an interesting question. I haven’t spent a lot of time weighing different arguments, but my initial thoughts are these:

Firstly, I think that there are many more pressing problems with rape law. Like the fact that so many laws are outdated that they might not even include spousal rape, they may say that only men can be rapists and only women can be victims (it’s quite uncommon for a woman to rape a man, but sadly common for a man to rape another man and increasingly common for a woman to rape another woman), may not take anal and oral rape into account, may allow intoxication of either party as a defense, or as above, allow states of dress to be a defense or sexual history admissible in court. Another big problem is that almost all U.S. sexual assault laws are on a state level. There are few clear national standards for states to work off of, so we’ve got a patchwork thing going on, currently.

Secondly, some if not most states already seem to do this. (I was unable to find a comprehensive resource listing rape laws from all over the U.S. Anyone know of something like this?) And anecdotal evidence confirms my first suspicion that there are more pressing issues. Take this case where a man was acquitted of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct and attempted third-degree criminal sexual conduct, even though he admitted to what he had done. Fourth-degree and third-degree “criminal sexual conduct” is pretty far down on the hierarchy of heinousness, but this didn’t convince a jury to convict him. The problem wasn’t that the charges were too severe — the problem was that the law was sufficiently vague, the judge was sufficiently sympathetic to the accused and the jury was sufficiently indoctrinated with rape myths that it didn’t do a damn bit of good. Of course, this is only once case. But the fact remains that sexual assault convictions are rare and difficult to get. If there’s evidence out there that defining severity of assault increases convictions, I’d love to see it, but I still have yet to come across it.

Thirdly, I feel like any practical enforcement of such a system would tend to feed into rape apologism. The first question is how to define the “degrees.” There’s the option of premeditation, as the degrees for murders are largely based on. I think that premeditation is difficult to prove in the best of cases, and with rape it would be even harder. Further, if we then define the lowest tier as “spontaneous,” it could feed into the idea that rape is actually about a man being unable to control his sexual urges, rather than being unwilling to stop himself from committing a morally-disgusting act of violence. Doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.

The next idea would be based on the sexual crime itself. But there would be a lot of debate about which crimes fall into what category — for example, oral rape would probably be an issue of strong contention. There’s also the fact that there are going to be instances where an act of oral rape would be much more violent than vaginal or anal rape, so it wouldn’t be a fair measure by which to bring about justice.

Which leads us to the last option, which would be level of force/violence. This seems to me to be the most workable — and I don’t disagree with the argument that a man who threatens a woman with a gun or beats/stabs a woman before raping her deserves a harsher sentence than one who does not. After that point, though, you get into a far more subjective level, and of course the rape is violence in itself. It also seems to me that we don’t really need to define different degrees of sexual assault to do this. That’s where sentencing comes in, and why a man stealing a purse while threatening the woman with a gun is likely to get a harsher sentence than one who just snatches it, or why someone who stabs a person 20 times is likely to get a harsher sentence for murder than someone who uses a single bullet.

I’m interested in other thoughts on this one, though.

Also, Moz, if you’re interested in learning more about feminism/feminist issues, I highly recommend the Feminism 101 Blog. They are still working on a comprehensive sexual assault FAQ, but they do have a slew of other great resources that you might be interested in.

Can I ask a question? If I shouldn’t ask it here, redirection to somewhere more suitable would be much appreciated. I’m male, and while I try to learn what I can about feminism I can’t pretend to know much.

I was involved in a conversation about rape this evening with three friends (two men, one woman). They argued that more people would be convicted if laws were changed to recognise a range of categories of severity of rape, as for other crimes like murder and assault.

What do you make of this? I wasn’t a big fan of the idea, but would appreciate another point of view.

At 18 I picked a friend off the dorm bathroom floor. Earlier that day she had been at the preliminary hearing for her rape case with her mother and father by her side. The defense attorney said loudly to the prosecutor that they were planning to argue that this rape was really consensual because she had a history of exchanging sex for drugs. (She had slept with a boyfriend with whom she smoked pot.) She went back to the dorm and swallowed all the pills her psychiatrist had prescribed. Thankfully she survived. Unfortunately, her case was dropped since her suicide attempt made her an unstable witness. So her rapist walked, because a defense attorney was allowed to surreptitiously threaten the victim. And that threat carried weight. (The prosecutor even admitted the defense might have been able to get that in at trial.)

It will always be this way until we place the burden of proving affirmative consent in this case on the defendant if he raises consent as an affirmative defense.

Or until all lawyers get together and say that they will not participate in this sexist bullying. But of course I deserve disbarment for that suggestion. :)

In relation to this topic, however, I wanted to share with you a story I came upon a couple of weeks ago that describes Democratic presidental candidate Senator Hillary Clinton using this exact tactic when defending an accused rapist who allegedly attacked a 12-year-old. Here’s the article from the Long Island publication, Newsday:

http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/ny-usark245589997feb24,0,718575.story

Sadly, the story is touted as a positive example of how Clinton handles crisis.

Food for thought.
Peace.