KleinerKiller wrote:Even if you want to believe the victim in most cases, there is no reportable victim in this case.
Here's the thing about this though, if I know someone is a victim, want and belief doesn't come into it, I know they're a victim so I'd just be for them getting justice. If however I don't know, if all I've got to go on is accusation alone without anything else to go with it, then no, I don't believe that's a fair case for condemning someone as a rapist or sexual predator of some kind.
If I know the person making the accusation and I trust them, sure 100% I'll believe them. Or, and this is somewhat controversial for some I suppose, there's enough as well as an accusation, like numbers of accusers and other witnesses or I have other knowledge about the accused previous behaviour etc. then I can feel comfortable making a judgement then, I mean I'm not a robot who has to remain utterly impartial until a judge has banged a gavel and said 'guilty'. But I will never be a part of the 'Just Listen & Believe' crowd.
Because people literally do make false accusations. We've covered many in this forum, that woman in England who falsely accused 15 men of rape. Or that girl in Germany making up a story about migrants raping her to get away with getting in trouble at school. Just recently a woman in
Britain was given a 5 year jail sentence for making false claims against a soldier who was repeatedly arrested and held in custody. There was a story I was watching about that musician lad
Conor Oburst who had a woman falsely accuse him online of raping her, which she later admitted she made up for attention, which is heresy for some people to even suggest even though it literally happens.
What jars me is the idea of being against calling a potential victim of rape a liar(which is a good thing obviously) while at the same time being willing to call a potential victim of false allegations a rapist, which if you're of the 'I always believe an accusation' bunch is inevitable. I mean I'm sure the answer for some is along the lines of "well I gotta pick one don't I?"
And it doesn't though. You don't have to just pick one. You can just be fair. If all you've got to go on is accusation, and that's it, you can either chose to give the accused the benefit of the doubt or reserve judgement until more information comes along, and that doesn't mean you're calling anyone a liar or are classifying the accused person as some kind of Schrodinger's rapist, as in "well I've no evidence he is a rapist, BUT I have no evidence he ISN'T a rapist either, sooooooooooo, I'll put him in a rapist/non-rapist limbo which he can have hanging over his head for the rest of his life."
I mean when you look at the stories that some of these victims go
through-
James* was falsely accused of rape three ago.
"You will almost certainly feel that the police believe that you're guilty before trial"
James says his wife accused him of rape as an added bargaining chip in ongoing divorce proceedings: "She told me to back off in the family courts - she was losing the case to have residency of our children. I said I wouldn't. So she went down to the local police station and alleged that she'd been repeatedly raped by me during our marriage."
Almost immediately, James' life became a nightmarish whirlwind: he was arrested during his twins' 7th birthday party, had various personal effects seized, and was required to attend police stations for interviews in the dead of night.
James lost residency of his children, resigned from his job and, he says, was pushed to the brink of suicide. However, justice prevailed: the charges against James were dropped within the year.
"Things did sort of turn out all right," he says. "But not until I had almost ended my life. You will almost certainly feel that the police believe that you're guilty before trial.
"Do not underestimate how awful this feels," James continues. "The suicidal thoughts are pervasive."
Chris, another false accusation victim, is passionately averse to the lack of anonymity offered to the accused. "It's like a sick joke," he tells me. "It is such a stigmatised accusation that it doesn't feel as if you're innocent before being proven guilty, but the other way round.
Jay Cheshire was cleared of rape in June. Allegations made against the 17-year old were withdrawn by the complainant just weeks after being filed, resulting in the investigation being closed. Yet, two weeks after the teenager was acquitted of the charge - and with his adult life still ahead of him - Jay was discovered hanging from a tree in his local park.
Jay was a sensitive young man who had "found it difficult to cope with the police investigation" - a conclusion reiterated by the boy's mum, Karin, who said of the accuser: "She accused him of rape and said he was a sexual offender. He was absolutely distraught."
And if it's a case of just not caring as much about men, well it happens to women too. I've come across many cases of women who've been falsely accused of sexual abuse, and I imagine we're going to see more of that. I mean lately people are finally starting to take things like the rape of teenage boys by female teachers seriously and that's great, but there's going to eventually be some spiteful little bastard who decided to falsely accuse a female teenage and fuck up her life. I haven't seen any examples of that yet, but it's bound to happen.
And as to the whole 'rapists or sexual abusers don't know it's wrong' stuff, I call bullshit on that. Unless they're literally delusional, of course they know. To get away with it you have to actually do stuff to get away with it. Look at Weinstein, he threatened his victim's careers and those of their loved ones, he ensured he'd be alone with them, he had people cover up for him, there were protections written into contracts. I mean, efforts were made to get away with it. You don't do that if you don't know it's wrong.
When I buy a coffee, I don't wait until there's no one else around, then go in and threaten the person serving me not to tell anyone I bought said coffee and bribe people to cover up said transaction, because I know it's not illegal.
And this whole Hollywood stuff, the sexual abuse and harassment that's going on, I mean this is a criminal conspiracy, if you know people are being abused and you turn a blind eye to it because the abusers pay your wages or could harm your income, then you're their accomplice. That's what that is. If I know my next door neighbour is a serial killer but I keep my mouth shut because he's friends with my boss and could get me fired or I wanna work for him some day and I don't wanna make waves, then I'm a part of it!
I mean if you're one of the victims and you're too traumatised to speak that's one thing, you can't fault anyone for that. But if you're not a victim and are looking the other way because you don't wanna have anything affect your pay cheques or are straight up being paid to go along with it (and there have been plenty of stories of assistants essentially delivering actresses to Weinstein's room. You telling me they didn't know what was happening when they left? Not one of them, given that apparently it was an open secret?) THEN YOU'RE A MONSTER TOO!
I mean all that is about MONEY pure and simple. Sexual predators with enough green to throw about to get people to help them cover it up and let it keep happening, because it suited their interests for things to go the way they were. Not everyone of course, but enough.
So that's why I'm iffy about the whole 'teach boys not to rape' mind-set people have been throwing about. As though being rapists or abusers is just something males naturally are and us needing to have the rapiness trained out of us like we were dogs. I mean forget about the derogatory nature of that, it also lets sexual abusers off the hook a little- "yeah I know Johnny molested all those people, but don't forget he is a man, and he never had the proper training to keep the rapey instincts all men have in check, so it's not all his fault, poor little mite, society's the real villain here!"
No, it's not society. It's Johnny. Unless he has some kind of mental illness that would impair him to the point he couldn't tell right from wrong or control his actions, he knew damn well what he was doing and should be punished accordingly. There's no mitigating factors based on being a member of a bad gender.
Now of course you should teach kids how they need to behave when they grow up, they certainly did in my school, although it ammounted to basic common sense. I mean whipping your dick out at women you're not in any kind of relationship with where you know they're okay with it, is not something most people are going to be unsure if it's okay or not, come on.
But yeah some people are going to have problems with intuitively understanding basic human interaction and they will need extra help to ensure they can get by. But they're not everyone, and just assuming everyone is some potential sex pest time bomb from the get-go is IMO unfair to the majority.
So as for all this. I dunno. I know there's enough here to some people to assign Mr. CK sexual predator or Schrodinger's sexual predator status. But for me, no. I'm going to have to go with what I assume everyone is until given enough of a reason or reasons not to, assume they're a normal citizen.
And if it turns out I'm wrong, so be it. But I gotta be what I think is fair till then. That's just hows I rolls dawgs. Everyone else has their own standards of what’s fair to meet and their own conscience to answer to. People's is always gonna be differents.
Not just yet, I'm still tender from before.