gregfrankenstein wrote:Well yeah. I was just saying it's strange that when someone is accused of something, my instinct is, "Gosh I hope that actually happened." Because false accusations hurt victims.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with the wife of a mate of mine not too long ago. Basically we were all at a wedding up the north, and I was getting a lift with them back home. Naturally given that we were just at a wedding the conversation turned to the topic of rape, as it's want to do, and she began giving her view on the state of things in colleges over in America at the moment. Basically she was under the impression that American colleges were essentially rape factories and that any woman who set foot in such a place was bound to be raped or attacked in some form. And that she wouldn't let any of her nieces ever go to one if they tried because to her, being a woman in an American college today was akin to being a Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994.
I started trying to tell her that this wasn't an accurate picture of things as while of course rapes happened, it wasn't near as bad. Like that 1 in 5 thing is a myth based on faulty assumptions and mentioning some of the highly publicised rape cases that turned out to be false, like the Duke Lacrosse one, which I pointed had the hysteria that involved people smashing the windows of the house the guys lived in and holding up signs demanded for them to be castrated and whatnot, only for them to be proven innocent.
To which she added- "Oh yeah totally. False claims of rape are awful, because they make it so much harder for real victims of rape to be taken seriously."
And I was like- "No, false accusations of rape are horrible, becaue an innocent person is being accused of rape. Like if an innocent man is accused of rape, then HE is the victim there, not future hypotethical people."
To which she responded with a smile and a shake of head- "Well yeah, of course
you'd say that, you're a man, you're bound to sympathise with your own gender first."
To which I replied "So ... it was a lovely service back there wasn't it?" It was a loooooong drive back home, may as well keep things cordial.
:)
Not just yet, I'm still tender from before.