re: #252 goddamnedfrank

When a rich person gets mugged in a bad part of town, there may be some commentary to the effect that wearing a giant gold Rolex or flashing a wad of $100 bills there isn’t a very good idea, if that what actually happened. But somehow society manages this without it sinking to the level of blaming the victim. The responsibility of the robbers for their crime is always absolute, no matter what the victim did.

Rape should be handled the same way, as much as possible. Consent being a basically a ‘he said’ ‘she said’ issue does make it an intrinsically more difficult case than robbery. One reform to consider is that if the case is allowed to get into the victim’s past history, then it should be allowed to get into the accused’s past history to the same degree. Conversely, if the accused’s history is off limits, then so is the victim’s.