Reply #54: Because rape is primarily a psychological crime.

[politicat]

It is a product of our culture. If our culture did not consider that women should be secure in their persons and that sexual violence against them are abhorrent and aberrant, then we maybe could consider rape as just another form of assault and battery.

Rape becomes singularly damaging to that security of self because it damages the victim's ability to have normal and safe social and intimate relationships in a way that a random mugging or beating does not. Sure, this is cultural, but this is the culture we have, and changing it will take generations. It's not so much an expectation of a feeling of violation, horror or shame as an actual violation of personal security, a disintegration of trust and faith in human nature, and a diminishment of the victim by the attacker from person to thing. People who have been raped are made to feel as if they are not human and that is the major component of the crime.

When you compare rape to a physically brutal mugging, they're totally different crimes. A mugging does not leave the victim with the possibility of STD or pregnancy.

A victim of a mugging is not usually subjected to questions about how much s/he had had to drink, what s/he was wearing, or why s/he was in that location at that time. A victim of mugging is rarely accused of "wanting it to happen." A victim of a mugging is almost never accused of complicity in the mugging, and never has to watch videotapes of the mugging as a part of the prosecution of the case.

Muggings are not used specifically as genocidal tools in warfare.

Muggings are not used to break down a victim's defenses to coerce other actions out of them, and and are not considered a prelude to murder.

Most men who are murdered are not raped beforehand. Most women who are murdered are.

Very few people are drugged into a mugging, lured into a mugging or forced into a mugging by going to the wrong party or dating the wrong person.

The reason the psychological harm needs to be considered in cases of rape is because it is primarily a psychological crime. It is torture, pure and simple, designed to dehumanize the victim, committed to damage the victim in very specific ways and committed with the intention of punishing the victim for being who s/he is. It is committed to damage zer psyche and to make zer think s/he is worthless.

You are unlikely to ever have to deal with rape directly. Men just aren't raped as often or as brutally. You can't know what it is like to live in this culture after a rape. You'll never have to. Count yourself lucky and don't presume to tell us how we should feel about our bodies.

And while it would be nice if our culture would all of a sudden become a paradise where