Monday, March 18, 2013

How drunk is too drunk to consent?

The Steubenville rape trial is over. The two boys who took advantage of an extremely drunk 16 year old are going to jail.

I have to admit I haven't really been following the story, but apparently in addition to raping her they took videos and shared them online, and joked about raping her, etc.

Do they deserve to go to a prison with hardened criminals, though?  there's a difference between forcibly raping someone who is struggling to resist or who is too scared to resist on pain of death (a woman who removes her tight jeans so a guy can rape her because he threatens to slash her face if she doesn't  is still raped and is *not* giving consent, regardless of what some judge has said in the past!), and just taking advantage of some stupid 16 year old who got herself so drunk that she didn't even know what was happening to her.

Perhaps they should just be sent to a work farm and have to send her all their wages for a few years, rather than go into a prison with violent rapists.

But the thing is...I do wonder... all these young girls - and guys - who drink themselves insensible. Why do they do it?

And whose fault is it if someone else takes advantage of them while they are in that state?

If it were a lawsuit, with a poor person going up against a rich company, you know the poor person would be 10% responsible, as for example ignoring warning signs about electricity, ignoring no tresspassing signs, and going onto a dangerous railroad platform, touching a live wire, and losing arms and legs in an electrocution, and the train company that put up the warning signs about electricity, put up the no trespassing signs, etc. would be found 90% guilty because they didn't have barbed wire on the top of their fence, or didn't have a security guard to cover every ten feet of the fence, to ensure that stupid people who ignored signs wouldn't get electrocutred.

But in a case like this, where a woman - not even a woman, a 16 year old girl for whom it was illegal to drink in the first place - gets herself so drunk that she can't even stand up, let alone walk away from people - would she be 10% responsible for her own rape? 90%?

I'm not trying to "blame the victim" in the sense that, just because a woman wears a plunging neckline or a very tight dress, she is "asking" to be raped.  And even when a woman is dead drunk, she has a right to assume that some guy won't see her and say, hey, I think I'll have my way with her...

Except...come on. This is the 21st century. Anyone who watches Law and Order or Law and Order SVU (and who doesn't?) would know that that happens and if you're dead drunk you're going to be *somebody's* victim!.

They haven't revealed the identity of this girl in the news, though presumably everyone in Steubenville knows who she is.  I just wonder...does she still drink herself blotto regularly, or has she sworn off drinking entirely?

It would be interesting to know...just like the people who drink and drive and kill people....more than once!  You'd think after you'd killed your first person in a drunk driving accident, you'd never drink again, but that apparently is not the case...

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