Judge says man who raped sleeping woman is not a “classic rapist,” just “lost control” [View all]

[redqueen]

A British man was just sentenced to five years in prison for raping an unconscious woman. According to a report from the Hull Daily Mail, it took the jury just over two hours to unanimously conclude that Lee Setford was guilty of raping a woman who was asleep on his couch. But here’s what the judge told him upon sentencing, “I do not regard you as a classic rapist. I do not think you are a general danger to strangers. You are not the type who goes searching for a woman to rape.

“This was a case where you just lost control of normal restraint,” Judge Michael Mettyear continued in his assessment of Setford. ”She was a pretty girl who you fancied. You simply could not resist. You had sex with her.”

Not a classic rapist. Simply could not resist. Not a danger. This is everything that is wrong with how we view and talk about rape, and this is hardly an isolated incident. There are scripts that most people assume all rapes should follow, and roles that rapists and victims are both expected to play. The persistence of these myths about who counts as a “classic” rapist — and who makes for a good victim — is astonishing considering how much we know about perpetrators of sexual violence, particularly in the United States.

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And this erasure has consequences. It’s what allows ignorant people like George Will to pretend that most sexual assaults are just “ambiguities of the hookup culture.” It’s what allows politicians and law enforcement to ignore the experiences of survivors on college campuses, in the military, in prisons and every other place where sexual violence occurs. (Which is everywhere.) It dismisses the women and men who told their assailants “no,” but were ignored. The wives who told their husbands “no,” but were ignored. The sexual assaults that don’t involve a weapon, but instead feature much more insidious forms of coercion. This is what sexual violence really looks like, but these aren’t the stories we tell ourselves about sexual violence.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/07/03/judge_says_man_who_raped_sleeping_woman_is_not_a_classic_rapist_just_lost_control/