Facebook supports rape?

[MotherPanda]

Have we a thread on this yet?

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/04/facebook-hate-speech-women-rape?newsfeed=true

I am really shocked.

I think the world is a bit depressing, unfortunately. There are lots of women on the Relationships board who have indeed been raped by their partners, who are all someone's brothers, sons, fathers ("but he's such a good dad, the dcs adore him" etc) .

Crap, but true. Which is why it's important to counter the idea of rapists as always "Other", and why we have to tackle the culture which leads so many men to feel entitled to ignore women's right to bodily integrity.

Uppity, I understand what you are saying and you are right that you cannot tell the difference by looking at someone or even knowing them for a short period of time. The most prominent members of society are abusers. My mother is a church-goer, a foster carer and has adopted 2 mixed race children, to others she is a saint. To me she is a controlling abusive neglectful and selfish woman. I can now see psychological traits in here that others cannot, because she puts on a face to them but in private she was and is very different.

But I try to steer away from including personal experiences because there is always someone with an opposing experience that contradicts what you are trying to say.

So me saying that I think rapists do share some common characteristics is not the same as me saying that you can tell a rapist a mile off. Not at all. The whole reason for profiling is to try and identify traits to help police investigations, to help support groups, to help raise awareness, to help prevention.

Would you say that all rapists have a sense of entitlement then? And an arrogance that sex is theirs to take and they will not be caught?
So a selfish attitude towards women? Or at least, to the women he believes he 'owns'?

rhubarb, both of my rapists were my partner at the time. One of them is my son's father. Both were someone's brother.

All three men who sexually assaulted me were friends at the time.

They were all someone;s son. None of their parents would want to accept their son was a rapist or capanle of sexual assault.

These ARE the average men in the street. None of them fit the criminal profiling, although my ex fits the description of a domestic abuser in every way. Btu that's a seperate issue. I was over the abuse. I'm in no way over the rape.

I understand that Lenin and I agree that blaming women is common, even by other women. Call me naive but whilst I see your point I do not think that an ordinary man is no different to a rapist. There are many men out there who work tirelessly for rape victims, who dedicate their lives to rescuing children from sexual slavery, who hunt down paedophiles and who campaign for changes in the law to protect women. They are very different to rapists and I think Elliott is missing this.

I think there's always going to be risk with laypeople saying they can recognize criminals. None of us is (AFAIK) a criminal profiler and there's no case we're looking at. I think that is why I find the profiling a bit of a problematic discussion. And then, we end up with this problem of wanting to believe - as I'm sure we all want to believe - that we would know rapists if we saw them and that the men we love could never do such things. Not everyone who genuinely believes such things can be right. So yes ... it really is depressing.

I see what you are saying, Rhubarb. But I think that rather than focussing on the pathology of individual rapists, we would be better off looking at what is happening in society at large that is giving so many men the message that they can rape and get away with it. The problem is endemic, and part of this screwed up systemic male privilege. You could almost say that given how powerful the messages we all receive about male entitlement, the question should really be why don't even more men rape? And the jokes on that facebook page just illustrate that we DO live in a rape culture. Combatting that, rather than profiling, is the way forward, I think.

I guess that is what is meant by 'radical' feminism- getting to the root of what is wrong, rather than the sticking plaster approach of trying to understand what is wrong with particular individuals rather than our society as a whole.

I've just skimmed this but I have no faith in profiles. The men who raped me wouldn't appear on any profile. Very different people, both successful and popular, both attractive, all that kind of thing. They raped me because they could.

We live in a society where the common perception of rape is about screaming and fighting, struggling against some stranger who steps out of a dark alleyway. The truth is so much more prosaic. Generally I suspect rape is about being asleep or so out of it that you can't give consent - well that's how I was raped anyway. Neither of those men thought they had raped me but they did. They don't identify as rapists, no one would think they were rapists and in fact I've been told by several friends (women) that it was my fault and I wasn't actually raped. And I'm sure that's what those men have told themselves too. As far as they are concerned, they're not rapists. But they are

frothy, there is a difference between rape profiling and domestic abuse profiling. Have you read the Met Police's report? That is not to say that I am dismissive or disbelieving of you by the way, but as you can see we all have experiences of abusers in one form or another.

When experiences are brought in it makes the argument very personal and very sensitive and so I am going to take my leave now.
I hope you can see now that just because my views are different, I am not in any way dismissing rape or rape victims or anything of the sort.

Agree to disagree?

Agree to disagree

Mainly for my sanity though seeing as I'm normally an argumentative cow :(

Lenin - of course it is not. I have repeated that it is impossible to know who is a rapist. But that statement is very different to thinking that rapists are not any different to ordinary men.

I go back to my other point. Do you agree that acquaintance rapists have a sense of entitlement, are selfish to this point and believe that they have a right to sex?

Are these not therefore characteristics that might be shared?

Hope we can move on from that frothy.

I think as well, with profiling of rapists, they are only profiling the reported rapists.

And seeing as how most rapists aren't reported, they aren't going to show up.

Is a continuum a useful idea?

I think rapists are ordinary men, sadly. Or at least 'within the norm'. They're not so very unusual. 1 in 4 women get raped, and most rapes are not by strangers (so most rapists are not going around raping huge numbers of women). So it cannot be very unusual (in terms of numbers of men in the population) to be a rapist.

This is awful, and sad, and depressing. It is inexcusable.

I agree with that Lenin.

Uppity - they can only profile convicted criminals and that is a letdown, but profiling has proved very useful in searches for serial criminals and has been used in court by the prosecution. So whatever you may think of it, it does have its place. But yes, it is flawed because you cannot profile everyone.

Same with psychology and sociology - they are flawed because they cannot analyse everyone.

Ella, sorry but I disagree. 3 out of 4 women are not raped thank god.
But you have made your conclusions and I doubt I would get anywhere if I were to argue with them at this time of night, no doubt you feel the same about me.

It's time for bed.

To return to an analogy made earlier - and I'm really sorry if this is the wrong thing to do, I hope it's not - it seems to me it's like saying that, in Nazi Germany, it was 'ordinary' to be a Nazi. We would all say now that that society was deluded, and sick ... but within it, it wasn't so very unusual to be a Nazi, was it?