Some interesting links, the first two from Man Boobz regulars:
Holly Pervocracy on Ten Shades of False Rape Accusations
[S]ometimes it’s easier for a survivor to live with the knowledge that their rapist is free than it is for them to go through years of being under constant suspicion of being an evil false accuser. It ends with misogyny justifying and reinforcing itself, as the concept “women lie about rape” becomes both proof of and proven by “women are untrustworthy, manipulative, and malicious.” It ends with rapists who tell their victims “no one will ever believe you” being right, with society standing behind them.
Every time we reinforce the common wisdom that “women lie about rape all the time,” rape gets a little easier to commit.
Ozymandias on No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz: Take My Social Movement– Please!
All too often, the mainstream men’s rights movement is not gender egalitarian at all. All too often, those of us who support equal rights for everyone– no matter what our differences in opinion– have found our voices drowned out by misogynistic, rape-apologist and frankly stupid asshats. That has to change.
Gawker’s Adrian Chen on How a 14-Year-Old Girl Became an Unwilling Internet Pin-Up
Reddit is home to a whole network of proud pervs, and through Jailbait I came across another board dedicated to creeping on someone named Angie Verona. … Three years ago, when she was 14, Angie took some photos for her boyfriend and stored them in a private Photobucket account. The account was hacked and the photos leaked. Pictures of 14-year-old Angie posing provocatively in a bikini and lingerie were thrown all over the internet, showing up on message boards like Reddit and 4chan, and posted on porn sites. …
[E]very teen with a Facebook account has pictures like Angie’s. What’s fucked up is this trafficking of pictures of random underage girls that falls just this side of child porn, with no regard for the real life that might be ruined in the process.
God forbid we wait until Bob is proven guilty before condemn him
Where did Holly say we should condemn nebody?
What actions did Holly say we should take after believing a rape victim? o: What actions did she advocate for against any (if any are named) alleged rapists? o:
@Holly They seem adding in some advice in their heads from what you did not say xD Imaginary you seems like a horrible person tho! O:
I’m waiting untilt hey discover my horrible blog XD Then again I have a feeling my style and the pink keeps away the MRAs just like it turned off the rad fems :3 The only ones who are willing to attack me are vegetarians xD
Wow, what are you even talking about? DSC misread your first comment, where are you getting any of this other stuff from?
Magdelyn continues to fight for “All white men are innocent even when proven guilty.”
Not surprising considering he doesn’t understand Due Process or just about anything else.
I recall, in the same vein, a high school pole-vaulter, who had an article done about her, and then had few guys show up at her matches to take photos.
Since pole vaulting involves some awkward postures, and the camera allows them to be frozen, well the images were sort of revealing, and the various comments were a bit disturbing.
@Snowy
Wow, what are you even talking about? DSC misread your first comment, where are you getting any of this other stuff from?
Without weighing in on arguments dating back to–what, early this year?–I will say that there’s a history. That’s what Kave is responding too.
I guess I’m just not familiar with the history. I try to keep up with the comments, but there’s so many of them!
I think the history that Kave is responding to might even have been back when this blog was on blogspot… I don’t recall if you were active at this blog back then, Snowy, so you might not have encountered it.
@ Holly Pervocracy
I believe that I can understand the point that your making in your blog post, that is, one should believe and support one’s friends and family members when they tell us that they’ve been raped. And that by doing so we might make the ordeal less unpleasant for them and, possibly, this show of support would encourage other victims to come forward.
I agree with you in principle here, however, if we believe the accuser (alleged victim / victim) then we must therefore not believe the accused (alleged rapist / rapist). In theory this doesn’t sound so difficult, but in practice this might not be as easy as you make it seem, it all depends on who is accusing who. For example, if my best female friend tells me that she’s been raped by someone who I’ve never even met then I’d most certainly believe her. But if my best female friend said she’d been raped by my best male friend, and he denied it, then quite honestly I wouldn’t know who to believe. Or if my best male friend was accused of raping an acquaintance of mine, I’d have to believe my friend, right?
If I was falsely accused of rape I’d hope that every one of my friends and family believed me, but I understand that, depending on who my accuser was, some of them might not.
Or if my best male friend was accused of raping an acquaintance of mine, I’d have to believe my friend, right?
It would depend on the type of accusation. I have a friend who was accused of abusing prisoners. Could he have done such a thing? Maybe. Do I think it likely he did what was alleged (on several occasions choking a prisoners to the point he had to be revived/resuscitated, because their hearts had stopped)? No.
So, to this day I have some suspicions that one of my best friends has done things I would consider to be torture.
Charges will never be filed (the FBI investigated it, but it happened in Iraq, and no one here cares enough to see if there is real merit to them), and I will never know for sure.
So, I carry on. I give him the benefit of some doubt, but will wonder to the end of my days if he did it. I don’t condemn him, because I don’t know, but I don’t just say, “Oh!, That could never happen.”
So too with a rape allegation. Someone who tells me someone I know really well broke into a house, and raped someone at knife point, I’m not likely to believe it. If they tell me he got someone more than a trifle tipsy, and then didn’t take her no for a “real” answer, I’m going to consider it possible.
You have a point, for sure. People do tend to side with their friends. But please don’t ignore the fact that a disproportionate number of rape victims are not taken seriously. Male rape victims are stigmatized by the fact that they are men, and society demands that a man must never be vulnerable, but rather tough. Rape victims that are women are dismissed on the grounds of what they were wearing, their relationship to the rapist, what they were doing at the time, if they were drinking, seen as flirtatious etc. More often then not it’s the victim of rape who is blamed, and MRAs seem to almost always if not always assume the victim is a liar.
qwert:
It’s definitely a more difficult situation when you know and care about both people involved, but there’s a lot of grey area between “I believe you unconditionally, and Bob is rapist scum whom I will never ever speak to again” and the sort of response a lot of rape survivors get that can be explored in those situations. Even if somehow it works out that the two people involved are your two best friends, and there’s no evidence besides both of their words, and both of them have always struck you as honest, respectful people who are equally unlikely to be lying, you have the option of telling the alleged victim something along the lines of, “I don’t have any reason to think you’re a liar, so I believe that you feel that you were raped, and I’m going to be as supportive as I can…but Bob is still my friend and I’ve never known him to lie either, so I feel like I have to trust him when he says he does not feel that he raped you.” While it’s not exactly the ideal response, I cannot imagine any rape survivor wouldn’t take a response like that from a friend as a BIG step up from the far more typical variations on, “How DARE you say that about Bob! He’s a good guy! You’re such a liar! You totally wanted it, you lying slut bitch!”
Kave, I seem to have misunderstood your first comment, and for that I apologize. However, your classism in response was disgusting.
Dismissing my anger and/or my opinions based on my income class is ridiculous and classist as hell. Seriously, this is nothing more than a personal attack trying to use your upperclass status as leverage. And, no, I will not take your ignorant privileged whining about being a poor little rich boy and shut up about it either. Class based privilege and oppression is real and your denial of your privilege and your class based attacks will get you nowhere with me.
@ Pecunium
I understand what your’e saying about the different circumstances that might be involved and I agree that the possibility exists that my friend could be lying or didn’t understand that consent wasn’t given. But if he told me that he was innocent then what reason would I have not to believe him, if it was a case of his word against hers? And what kind of friend would I be if I didn’t believe him?
You have to factor in the character of the people concerned, for instance, the way my friend interacts with women, or has done in the past, his past relationships etc etc. What is he like as a person, friend, brother etc etc. The possibility exists that I’d be wrong, but without evidence to the contrary, I don’t see how I wouldn’t believe him. If I was proven wrong, then I doubt I’d feel any sense of guilt for believing him in the first instance.
Holly’s point, unless I misread her, seemed to be that we should automatically believe the accuser / alleged victim / victim because it’s more likely they are telling the truth than the accused / alleged rapist / rapist. Even if this is statistically correct, I still think it unwise to apply the idea to all cases. Even if I agreed with this in theory, in practice, It would be almost impracticable when the accusation was made against someone whom I knew and loved.
qwert666: The real problem with perceptions of rape accusations isn’t what friends and family believe as far as facts — it is that, even if they believe the sum and substance of the accusation, they will still side with the accused, at least in cases where the woman is either socially equal or inferior to the alleged rapist. “Her outfit was slutty,” “She shouldn’t have been partying,” “She shouldn’t have flirted,” “She’s just pissed that he won’t date/marry/call her,” “She’s just looking for attention,” “She should have acted more prudently,” “She should have hit him,” “She should have used a more forceful tone of voice,” — all these, and many more, have been offered as rationalizations for conduct that everyone agreed constituted having sex without consent.
It’s sort of related to those studies that demonstrate that a lot more men will admit to having forced women to have sex or having had sex with unconscious women than will agree to the term “rapist”.
@ Jenn93 & Polliwog
I’m not sure that rape victims are most often assumed to be at fault or that most people would believe rape accusations to be false. To be honest, I don’t know enough about the topic to comment on this. I just find it absurd to assume that either party be believed based on the likelihood of there being statistically more likely to be telling the truth or not.
qwert666, if you were actually raped, would you hope that every one of your friends and family believed you? Would you be understanding if some of them decided you were delusional or a liar depending on who you were accusing?
@ mythago
I’d hope for the exact same thing that I would hope for if I was falsely accused.
“I’d hope that every one of my friends and family believed me”
“But I understand that, depending on who my accuser was, some of them might not”. How this would make me feel I have no idea, probably pretty fucking horrible, but I understand that it is possible that they might not believe me: there’s nothing I could do about it.
Re above post:
““But I understand that, depending on who my accuser was, some of them might not”. How this would make me feel I have no idea, probably pretty fucking horrible, but I understand that it is possible that they might not believe me: there’s nothing I could do about it.”
I’ll try that again:
But I understand that some of them might not believe me.
How this would make me feel I have no idea, probably pretty fucking horrible, but I understand that it is possible that they might not believe me: there’s nothing I could do about it.
@ Holly Pervocracy
Incidentally, “a world where a hundred false accusers are told* “I believe you, I care about you, and I’ll stand up for you,” is also a world where a hundred innocent people are told I don’t believe you, I think your lying, your’e a rapist!
qwert666: A problem with that though, is that abusive people (I’m counting rape as an abuse here because… well, it is) don’t “seem” abusive to the people they aren’t abusing — it’s WHY people’s families refuse to believe their son/brother/sister/daughter/whoever is a rapist/abuser because “they’re a good person, they’d never do that!”
A lot of abused people are disbelieved by the family members of their abusers. Because people don’t get that someone who is abusive/a rapist is pretty much impossible to tell apart from other people unless you are being/have been abused/raped by them.
Though you did mention looking at their history of how they treat/respond to women(/men if it’s a woman abuser/rapist), and past relationships, and that is pretty much the closest one can get to knowing if a friend really is capable of doing it, you really can’t be sure.
It’s why rape victims are so often not believed; the rapist of course has friends and family, who of course all totally know that zie could never do such a thing, and so — especially if the friends are mutual — the victim so often gets left all alone.
It’s why rape-victim/survivor advocates often say that we would rather side with a victim and be wrong than side with the accused and risk being wrong. Because I think the emotional damage done by a friend not really believing you were raped (on top of having BEEN raped) is more than that done by a friend not knowing for sure if you are capable of rape or not. I mean they both obviously would suck major monkey balls, but I think the former would be even more painful and isolating than the latter (especially since that kind of thing can often worsen a survivor’s trauma).
@ Herp Derp
I think that I understand what you’re saying about the friends and families of abusers not believing, or wanting to believe them to be guilty. But I personally would have to believe my friend unless I had a good reason not too. I’d expect the same from them, after all, when you are accused of a crime or are the victim of a crime, who would you turn to other than your friends and family? I wouldn’t be comfortable being the one to turn my back on them. This, of course, is in both the case where my friend is the accuser or the accused. In the case that I was friends with both parties then I’d frankly have no idea who to believe.
qwert666: Well that’s entirely understandable, and I think I (and pretty much everyone) would have similar problems deciding whom to believe. But because I so personally know just how many people are raped (I work with rape victims), I would be inclined to keep in mind that statistically, it would be way more likely that my friend is lying than the accuser.
I of course wouldn’t condemn my friend, as pecunium, but because of the statistics and the knowledge that I could never know 100% that my friend ISN’T a rapist, I would accept the idea that they may be. I would not stop talking to them and cut them out of my life unless there was more evidence to support the victim, but I would be more inclined to believe the victim.
I wouldn’t be all “YOU’RE A LYING LIAR PANTS AND A RAPIST!” to my friend, but I would be aware that statistically… they are far more likely to be. This may be because for me, the statistics are not an abstract number but people I work with almost every day. And the idea of ever telling any of them — even though they’re strangers — that I don’t really believe them is just horrifying to me. On top of all the shit they’ve gone through already? I’d rather say to a friend “Look, you’re my best friend and I think you’re a wonderful person and to me you don’t seem like the kind of person who would ever commit such an act… but it really is more likely that the victim is telling the truth”.
Don’t get me wrong, it would be fucking hard, and I’d feel terrible. But I think that’s what I’d go with.
@ Herp Derp
I appreciate that it’s a lot easier to talk about these things when you don’t have to deal with the people involved directly.
However, I would never consider saying to my friend ““Look, you’re my best friend and I think you’re a wonderful person and to me you don’t seem like the kind of person who would ever commit such an act… but it really is more likely that the victim is telling the truth”, even if it is the truth.
I’d say “I believe you” the same as I’d say if they told me they’d been raped. For me personally, statistics, however slanted they might be, would mean nothing to me when compared to my trust and belief in my friend. Even if it was statistically a one in a million chance that my friend was innocent then I’d still believe him / her, because I know that if I was innocent / a victim that I would want them to believe in me.
Here’s the essential missing part, MRA’s and their allies focus on “False Rape Reports”, which statically aren’t any more frequent than false murder reports or false theft reports.
The difference is when an alleged rape victim are immediately put on trial rather than their alleged accusers. We rarely see people quickly and vocally defending murder suspects, drug suspects or theft suspects.
Yet report rape and the woman is “Unreliable,” “Overly sensitive,” “lying,” or “a slut.”
And honestly, anyone not in friends and family or paid defend the alleged rapist, who spends more time defending the alleged rapist is a rape apologist.