Quote:
Originally posted by Illumina Drathiran'ar:
About the second one: WHAT?! Rape is rape. It's not sexual, it's about power
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I'm not sure that these can be separated so readily. It's about both IMO; they feed off the power and that is sexual to them.
Quote:
[/qb]Originally posted by Illumina Drathiran'ar:
Are they saying that it's less serious to, say, rape a slutty person? Are they out of their flippin' MINDS?
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I not convinced its right for judges to base their judgements on it, but I'm surprised that this is controversial from a moral point of view.
Rape is a crime, nobody denies that. But to take someones virginity in the process is surely an even worse crime? You deny them the chance to give that gift to the person they love - more is taken away from the virgin in the assault. Plus, from a purely practically point of view, being sexually inexperienced they are much less likely to be able to cope mentally with the rape and therefore more seriously affected by it.
The same reasons underlie the age of consent - we assume that having sex with a girl of 15 year 11 months is infinitely worse than one of 16 years and a day. It may be arbitrary, but the crime is worse because in the former there is assumed to be a taking of innocence that doesn't occur in the latter.
The age of consent law is trying to acknowledge the fact that
more occurs during the losing of virginity than simply the breaking of the hymen. The 15 year-old is not deemed legally capable of assuming the responsibility for losing her virginity and it is this 'something extra' which is lost that the judges are trying to quantify when they are deciding the seriousness of a crime.
Not altogether crazy in my opinion, although they should be saying that 'raping a virgin is an even
more serious crime' rather than 'raping a non-virgin is less of a crime'. The distinction I'm trying to point out above doesn't have to lead to leniency.