Ohiodad51 - it becomes an unwanted sexual advance in that case if the female objects and that objection is not respected or if she is incapacitated and not able to chooses. If groping is done by force it would be pretty obvious. Those situations are less nuanced than you are making them out to be. In the Stubenville case, for example, the young woman was in no shape to consent to that action. It was not a mutual situation, it was something that was done to her. That would be rape (or sexual assault or sexual battery or something else depending on where you live).
If you are on a date or in some kind of encounter and your partner of either sex makes a move that is too far for you and you make that clear it would not be assault if the partner politely gets the message and changes course. I don’t think there would be any danger of a regular encounter being mistaken for an attempted forceable rape.
Women don’t mind sensitive, respectful contact that is initiated by men and certainly women are often also out to “hook up” or whatever you want to call a more casual physical encounter. It’s about agency and choice and not having people do things to you that you haven’t chosen and have no power to stop. It seems that you are operating from a place of believing that somehow these reported rapes and attempted rapes are just a case of misunderstanding.
That one’s easy: when the person doesn’t want it and didn’t agree to it.
In every state that I know of, it’s a defense that the perpetrator believed (or, in some cases, reasonably believed) that he had consent for his actions. That’s what would happen in the 3rd base example above: the couple were going at it hot and heavy, hands all over each other, and in the heat of the action the guy inserted his finger in the woman’s vagina, but she hadn’t wanted that. She is not going to press charges, but just in case she did, the prosecutor is going to refuse to put the case before a jury because the perpetrator believed he had consent, and if by some mischance the case goes in front of a jury they will acquit.
“a girl and guy are making out and the girl sticks her hand down the guys pants without asking.”
At the risk of appearing unprofessional, I’m going to say that I have never asked. It has never even occurred to me to ask or to wonder what the answer might be.
Girls shouldn’t just go around grabbing a guy’s “junk”. If it’s a random thing then it would be sexual assault. If you are having a consensual mutual encounter where one might think that was the next step and he made it clear that it wasn’t then it might also be sexual assault if she didn’t stop.
What @saintfan said. Rape/sexual assault/whatever it’s called in your jurisdiction (not to mention simple boorishness) can be perpetrated by both males and females.
Like I said, write the definition, or more pertinently, write the survey question. The law can’t operate by saying well, if the guy is sensitive or respectful, then it is ok, but if he is not it is a felony.
And what is “it”? Digital insertion? Skin on skin contact with genitaliia? How far do you have to go before there is an attempt? Unbuttoning pants? Removing panties? Where in the questions you have cited does it make any of those distinctions? Where are the survey questions asking about whether the guy thought the advance was welcome?
Where is the explicit distinction that a woman objected to an act but the objection was not respected? At what point in the process does a successful objection stop a potential rape but still remain an attempt?
And what I am saying is that the cited studies seem to capture a ton of interactions which are not in any way criminal, but yet the findings of these surveys are trumpeted as evidence that violent rape is a commonplace occurrence.
The reprehensible conduct is easy. No one in their right mind would argue that the Steubenville case was not rape. But it is equally wrong to conflate those situations with a 17 year old trying to see how far he can get with his girlfriend.
It is not as simple as many of you appear to believe.
“Where is the explicit distinction that a woman objected to an act but the objection was not respected? At what point in the process does a successful objection stop a potential rape but still remain an attempt?”
What the heck? Gosh . . . if a guy is holding a woman down and overpowering her and pulling up her skirt and getting his penis out and she is able to kick or struggle or make enough noise that he is not actually able to complete a rape attempt then you could say that she objected and it remained an attempt. If your husband tries to get frisky and you say, “not tonight honey” that is not a foiled rape attempt. If your boyfriend starts to lift your skirt and move towards coitus and you say, “no, I’m not ready” that is also not a foiled rape attempt. He attempted to have sex with you but did not attempt to rape you. If he instead held your arms or threatened you and continued on but you were able to struggle free and jump out of the car that would be a foiled rape attempt.
I agree with your conclusions in all of those situations. The issue, again, is designing a survey or writing a policy that distinguishes between them and everywhere in between. If you are saying, like Potter Stewart once did in a pornography case, I know a rape attempt when I see one, then we need to give up on trying to quantify the incidents of unreported rape by reference to surveys.
Is that correct? I don’t think so. I am pretty sure the definition of rape when a guy is the victim is not limited to the anus. A woman can rape a man by performing sex acts on his genitals. Therefore, since we know that unwanted sexual contact of a male organ is rape, and we know that any contact with the female genitalia (including digital contact) is rape, then I think we can safely assume that unwanted handling of the male genitalia is rape.
If not, don’t you think it should be? How is unwanted fondling of one sex’s genitalia rape but unwanted fondling of the other sex’s genitalia isn’t?
Really, I strongly disagree. Why? If * some* women turn regret sex into accusations of rape then why shouldn’t we think that they might turn a case of a partner “going to far” into a rape accusation? Also, it doesn’t matter if the guy politely gets the message and stops, or not. The original act was still technically rape.
Most of you seem to think that most men are rapists. I say that, because I would bet that a large percentage of men have tried to get farther with a woman (or a man in a small percentage of cases) at some point than the person wanted at the time. In many cases the women went on to be girlfriends or wives and happily consented to intimate contact and obviously didn’t have any intention of pressing charges. That does not change the fact that technically all those initial unwanted advances were rape (or sexual assault of some kind).
I hope some of you understand where I am coming from. I have 2 daughters and am very afraid that they will run into some kind of sexual assault or rape. As college girls, the threat to them of acquaintance rape is very real and very scary. The threat to all women is appalling but I still can not get onboard with some of the arguments being made here.
Are you thinking that if a person foiled an attempted rape they would not be able to check the appropriate box on the survey? Are you saying that the person completing the survey would not know how to classify their experience or that they might call all sorts of preliminary activities attempted rape rather than waiting for him to whip it out and get within some official target range before she could accurately call it an attempt? I’m not understanding where accurate reporting would be challenging. I am saying that in any of those hypothetical slippery slope or "pushing the envelope"scenarios a woman will not perceive herself as having been threatened with rape unless she is actually threatened with rape.
I agree, unfortunately the law does not. The odds of finding a woman to press charges in a case like that is extremely low, and the odds of finding a prosecutor to try a case if someone actually did file a complaint is also minuscule. That does not change the fact that technically the examples you gave are attempted rape. They aren’t attempted forcible rape. They aren’t attempted incapacitated rape. You (and others) seem to be conflating the force and/or incapacitation issue with the actual wording of the law. The law says “unwanted…etc, etc”. Words have to be taken literally. That is where I have the problem. I take words literally and look for crazy examples to highlight flaws in statements/laws etc.
As others have pointed out, these cases are full of nuances and I doubt we are very different at all in what we think is acceptable and unacceptable conduct.
Can you cite any American jurisdiction where rape (under whatever name) does not require penetration of the mouth by a sex organ or penetration of the anus or the vagina by something? Can you cite any college code where fondling of the genitalia, without penetration, counts as rape? Where does this safe assumption come from?
@Cardinal Fang I know I have read cases where a male was restrained and forced to have sex with a female. That does not involve “penetration of the mouth by a sex organ or penetration of the anus or the vagina by something”. So, you are saying that such cases do not exist?
In you last paragraph and question are you asking about code etc perpetrated against a male or female?
As you describe it, it involves penetration of the rapist’s vagina by the sex organ of the victim. And I would certainly call that rape; I’d also call forced oral sex on a guy rape.
@saintfan, at base, I am saying that under your argument we are relying on each individual woman to make her own decisions as to what does and does not qualify. When the questions are as broad as many of these are, a large element of discretion is then invested in each responder. Since there are a range of reasonable responses for each responder, it is not helpful to take the raw data from these surveys and use their findings as proof of the most egregious conduct. Also, well done surveys are not captioned “rape survey”, the operative questions are usually buried within a larger pool. So, if the responder does not know the point of the survey is to find out about forcible rape, is it really that hard to believe that a woman would read a question literally, and respond honestly? Are you willing to rely on what must at that point be an almost subconscious self selection?
One reason there are comparatively few rape indictments given the survey numbers is that the opportunity cost of reporting an interaction to the prosecutor is higher than simply filling out a questionnaire, so from the jump you are dealing with self selected more significant situations. Add to that the questioning and investigation done, a process Mattress Girl reported as too tiring, and the pool shrinks. Does that account for all the discrepancy? No. But I think it accounts for more than some here are willing to admit.
I have no idea what this comment was referring to. Can you give me a post #?
ETA- I think I figured it out and I am not making anything up. Some have argued that if a man inserts a finger into a woman’s vagina without asking first that it is rape. You specifically qualified that as long as it was a partner and the partner stops when asks that it doesn’t count. As I said earlier: I believe technically that does count as rape.
Let’s try it another way. If your husband has sex with you one night while you are drunk, or have been deep asleep and you wake up with him in you, what do you think if you say “no”, you aren’t in the mood, and he says he is pretty close and initiates a few more thrusts until he is satisfied? Were you raped? How about if he immediately pulled out? How about if he went on for a minute? Where along that continuum do you personally draw the line? (that’s a rhetorical question, not a personal one).
This hypothetical woman who was making out with the guy, and then he inserted his finger in her vagina when she did not want that… which of the survey questions are you saying she would answer yes to? Did the guy threaten to physically harm her? Obviously not. Was she too drunk or out of it to stop him? No, up until then she’d been an active participant. Did he use force, for example by holding her down, pinning her arms or having a weapon? Nope. So, why are you imagining that she would say one of those things were true, since none of them were true? Those questions don’t seem broad to me; indeed, they seem quite specific.