juries. It's not something that is within the community standards of DU.

...and that it even comes up to have to get hidden says something.

they get looked at by juries. It's impossible to control what people write in advance of the writing. That's not what DU is about. But, when someone waxes enthusiastic about prison rape and the like, the community almost always rejects it. If such things continue from a DUer, the likelihood is that the DUer won't be here long.

In any case, such sentiments are not those of most DUers. They are an exception.

...the rage differential is there, seen in the number and type of comments that different stories will generate.

At Mon Mar 18, 2013, 02:09 PM you sent an alert on the following post:

Probably the first of many beatings this guy earned. nt
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2529472

REASON FOR ALERT:

This post is disruptive, hurtful, rude, insensitive, over-the-top, or otherwise inappropriate. (See <a href="http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=aboutus#communitystandards" target="_blank">Community Standards</a>.)

YOUR COMMENTS:

Barbaric to suggest punishment like this is desired. Please hide it.

JURY RESULTS

A randomly-selected Jury of DU members completed their review of this alert at Mon Mar 18, 2013, 02:15 PM, and voted 1-5 to LEAVE IT ALONE.

Juror #1 voted to HIDE IT and said: I can't support advocating violence, regardless the target.
Juror #2 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given
Juror #3 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given
Juror #4 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given
Juror #5 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given
Juror #6 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given

The one you list is about getting beaten, not castrated and serially raped, though. There's a difference, although I oppose beatings as punishment, too.

... it was a clear "hope he gets raped in jail" alert but was allowed to stand 5-1.

The crime was henious, horrible. I too was outraged and had an immediate desire to see the perpetrator punished.

But then I thought about what it means to our society if we condone such things. I do not wish to be part of a society that would do that.

DU is not a homogeneous place. We have all sorts of people who come here. Some of them either don't get it or deliberately refuse to understand that violence as retribution does not cure violence.

sadly, a lot of people dont understand that

but it's espeacilly important in a system that from time to time convicts the innocent

Which is why you see it pop up when the crime involves sex more so than drunk drivers.

If it involves man on man violence this is seen as just accepted and part of our makeup so people tend not to care - in fact many such abuses in bars and such are under reported because men don't want to feel weak when they have lost in a fight.

All of this bubbles up in subtle ways on a small scale through certain key words and actions (note the lack of desire of both men and women to hold open doors for men unless they are under a heavy load - men are expected to be strong and able to defend themselves).

Man - this shit is easy.

never stop

If you don't, I may have to compose an OP to roundly chastise you.

Yes, you've made it clear that you find stirring the shit here is as easy as breathing.

"microagression" (sic) indeed.

Once you get out of DU, they are commonplace, even ordinary.

I used to teach a unit on lynching; the students would often be shocked by what actually went along with "hanging," such as the castrations and rape by object and burning alive. They'd relegate such things to the "old-timey" nature of it all, just unreal black and white images of stuff people did "back then." Then I'd show them an internet thread about an arrested child molester. Oh, right.

The punishment fetish and, indeed, the sexualization of punishment is not getting better. It's getting worse. We certainly relegate it to behind prison walls, rather than indulging in it ourselves in the public square, but the desire seems even more severe, more widespread.

"That guy will get raped a lot!"
"Put him in gen pop! He won't last long."
"Inmates hate these kinds of offenders. Boo hoo!"

My personal favorite, if only for its utter cowardice devoid of even enough ethics to affirm the thing: "I'm not saying I condone such things, but if they happen, oh well!" (Anyone who utters a variation of this is a sad and broken little person).

Promoting prison rape for sexual offenders is part and parcel of rape culture. It is part of the very thing that those promoting prison rape are supposedly against. It says very simply: power should be exercised through sexual aggression - society gets its recompense through forced sexual aggression. It turns all of society into a rapist.

Thank you.

for the

in the culture. ..a very deep sickness indeed

notable.

The great dream, the widespread desire is that the child molesters and rapists will be sexually victimized or otherwise brutalized by other (upstanding? ethical?) inmates.

But this is not the reality of prison rape and violence in the majority of cases. Who is actually sexually victimized in prison? Young, weaker offenders, often non-violent - drug offenders and car thieves and burglars; the very fact that they don't have violent proclivities makes them targets. Who does the targeting? Gangs, violent offenders, and, often, sexual offenders themselves! We laugh at prison rape, and it is actually the rapists we send to prison who are committing them (as one would very logically assume, if the whole discourse wasn't a mishmash of twisted fetish and stupidity). We actually funnel new victims to the very offenders we hope to be victimized! And then we laugh about it, or offer weak tea "Can't do the time, blah blah" and "Oh well, don't drop the soap har har har."

I sometimes think people can't hear themselves. It's sickening beyond description.

I think this paragraph states it well;
http://www.brissc.org.au/resources/for/for_12.html

"Rape is one violent form of oppression and is a mechanism by which individuals or groups gain, express and maintain their dominance and power over others. This is evident when rape is used as a tool of war, when men are raped in jail, or when rape occurs on the basis of someone's race, age, ability or sexuality. Rape is about the use and abuse of power to intimidate, degrade or control others with less status. The fact that women and children are raped more often than men is a manifestation of lesser power and inferior status in society."

Are they being "rewarded" with that and what about their victims? Do their victims deserve this idea they are having a good time indulging their violence in prison?

We are a very punitive authoritarian culture and you are not alone in noticing that it is getting much worse very quickly.

Most people who hold these harsh views I believe have likely never had any close contact with real prisons, real inmates, or the corrupt and incredibly dysfunctional justice system.

Eloquence of your post. Well put. I applaud the clear and understandable point you made.

worse than "many sexual offenses" i.e. beating each other up, drunk driving deaths and paralyzing a kid
the only sexual offense you mention in detail is "inappropriately touching" a young female.

Just curious what other of "many sexual offenses" does or does reach your critical threshold.



Tikki

To get into specifics is to trigger the very visceral responses I'm talking about -- which I really think is less about the specifics, no matter what they are, and really about how a connection to sex fuels outrage.

I spend less time here talking with others about current events.

People here are increasingly less rational and logical, and more about emotion and hate - even though the hate is directed at people who have done things that are criminal or sociopathic.

Liberals believe in rehabilitation. Yet I don't think we've had a single solitary thread about rehabilitating prisoners and lawbreakers here in the last six months. Or if so, it dropped off without a single reponse.

JMHO.

...to corporate/warmongering interests.

World is going to hell in a handbasket.

People fixate on what punches their buttons.

And contrary to popular belief, this long downward slope started before Obama ever won his first primary...

My visceral reaction is to hope and work for an end to rape culture driven by patriarchy, which will go along way to heal many, many things wrong with society. But that's just me.


I take your meaning though. My SIL, who is a prison guard works in the special offenders unit. He knows what these people have done, vile, horrible things. He's as polite as he can be he says, treats them as human beings, but doesn't really think they are. He feels that rehabilitation is beyond the reach of most if not all. He knows that many of them will leave prison, and reoffend.

He says put them in a warehouse and burn it down.

I find that disturbing, very, as I look for the humanity in my grandsons father's eyes.

To a degree, it`s understandable even. These people spend their entire careers dealing with the worst of society.

I think a straight adult male beating up another straight adult male...can be a far worse thing that an adult male "inappropriately touching" a young female.

I was merely emphasizing and de-emphasizing the things that trigger strong emotional responses.

Pretty much a perpetrator and a victim have to both be straight adult males for the crime itself to be the main thing that people consider, otherwise any incident or conflict gets examined from the standpoint of being an extension and manifestation of some larger issue.

I see you survived that during your stay.

I've been a victim of an adult male "inappropriately touching" me as a young girl and I've also been a victim of being mugged at gunpoint by 2 youths. I can say that the inappropriate touching has done more damage to my self-esteem, my interactions with men, depression since the age of 14 (including 2 suicide attempts) and has left me with trust issues that years of therapy hasn't been able to solve. However, I'm sure to someone that was hit by a drunk driver and paralyzed for life as similar issues of their own.

The idea that you're even attempting to quantify that one crime is worse than another is stupefying because when a crime happens to a person, it's very personal. So, yeah, you may think that being paralyzed by a drunk driver is worse than sexual violence but I bet the woman or man or had sexual violence visited upon them doesn't agree.

...even though there was no force or pain involved, when I was around 10, at the hands of a relative about 6-7 years older. I must say I didn't find it all that traumatic. It was certainly not as traumatic as being paralyzed for life, or having to defecate through a colostomy bag due to a severe beating -- things that people can and will get upset about, but not so quickly or viscerally as something dealing with sex.

I sometimes wonder if my 10-year-old sexual encounter had been discovered, if some people trying to help me through the "trauma" of it wouldn't have actually created the trauma by making a big deal of it.

The way some people are so very certain that anything sexual happening to a young child must be extremely traumatic, I think that if the kid, like me, doesn't think much of such an event, they'd insist that my lack of reaction was itself a symptom of being traumatized.

Far, far more traumatic for me as a child was the non-sexual taunting and bullying of other children, and sexual rejection as a teen, that came from being a nerdy kid, bad at sports, who didn't fit in.

But for many it is a traumatic experience and using your standard as a ruler to how others should react is just plain insensitive and demeaning when you then draw comparisons to other traumatic events--because all trauma is personal and how each person deals with their trauma is personal. I could go into detail that my life has been informed by not only sexual abuse but physical and emotional too. Which is why drawing comparisons is silly. It then turns trauma into some sort of competition that shouldn't be there in the first place.

By saying that sexual violence isn't as "valid" a trauma as being paralyzed, you're putting some into a position where they feel they have to somehow justify how their experiences affected them. You may as well say, "Get over it! At least you aren't wearing a colostomy bag."

I now have a dead sister, who died at the age of 50, because her childhood sexual violence led her down a road of heroin addiction and self-destructive behavior. For the majority of the time I was being sexually abused, she was a runaway, living on the streets, selling her body so she could get drugs to blunt the pain she endured--in comparison, I turned out great.

I guess my rambling point would be, please don't belittle my or other women's experiences by implying that our trauma isn't as valid as someone who has been paralyzed. You don't know everything about my life, you don't know everything that has happened to me, and though I'm happy you're okay, some of us aren't.

The reasoning you give applies in reverse. If one person can't say their non-sexual trauma was worse than another person's sexual trauma, then the person with the sexual trauma also can't say that their sexual trauma was worse than someone else's non-sexual trauma.

Nevertheless, if you post news stories about sexual trauma, they elicit far more rage and sympathy than non-sexual issues.

This amounts to a kind of collective judgement that any trauma involving sex is intrinsically worse than a non-sexual trauma. There also seems to be a fear, that doesn't exist with other types of trauma, that to even loosely ranking sexual traumas in severity is to somehow excuse or justify anything that ends up lower on the scale, so we'd better treat anything involving sex, on a scale of 1 to 10, as if it's severity 10 or higher.

If you ask someone which is worse, being punched or being stabbed, I think most people will quite readily say being stabbed. Are all stabbings worse than all punches? Of course not. Could a punch from a loved one be more emotionally traumatic than a stabbing by a stranger for some people? Certainly.

But those possibilities won't leave people paralyzed in fear by the idea of casually ranking stabbing as worse than punching, as a general case.

it is intrinsically worse than non-sexual trauma.

As I stated previously, I was physically abused as a child. My father was very liberal with the belt and it didn't really matter to him which end he used (that wasn't the only form of physical abuse I encountered from him, just a mild example). I was also beat by my ex-husband. As I mentioned before, I was mugged at gun point and my first thought when being mugged wasn't fear of being shot, it wasn't fear of being beaten, it was, "I hope they don't rape me." That is how my childhood sexual trauma informs my relation to events. For me, the idea of being sexually abused, yet again, is far worse than being stabbed or beaten or shot and I would guess, that other people who have been sexually abused may feel the same way, which is why they think that sexual trauma is so much worse than non-sexual trauma.

Again, it's personal. I respect your opinion on the matter but it seems you aren't trying to see it from those that view sexual trauma as a 10 on your scale. My sexual trauma has left me emotionally paralyzed in a lot of ways--to the point that I'd much rather be stabbed, beaten or shot than raped again.

Sorry, but I couldn't find it in myself to have sympathy for the criminal. I don't support such a gruesome punishment, but I'm sure sexual crimes would greatly decrease if that was in fact the punishment.

Are you really comparing a physical assault to a sexual assault? Wounds heal, but the emotional damage from sexual assault could last a lifetime.

It's part and parcel of 'rape culture'. You should rethink your position.

All I am saying is that a punishment such as this would probably be effective at preventing rape.

. . . just like capital punishment is an effective deterrent against murder. NOT!

I doubt they'd really support cruel and unusual punishment.

At least, that's been my personal experience.

and a lack of power to reduce horrific sexual violence, usually committed against women. I never really see the comments as serious desires to see such retribution, but as visceral reactions to ugly crimes. While it doesn't make such statements right or acceptable, I do understand the feelings that may produce them.

crimes. People respond to such things in a knee-jerk way due to horror and frustration and helplessness. I honestly don't think that many people would actually follow through with this, if given the power to do so.

There are non-sexual things that are heinous. There are heinous things done by women to men. There are heinous things done by leaders to whole populations.

The same kind of quick, visceral reaction I'm talking about in the OP -- whether it's with real intent, or merely verbal "venting" -- is seldom there for subject matter that doesn't push people's sexual issues buttons.

...molested (in some form), or personally know someone who has been molested and know what kind of pain and problems that causes all throughout life...and in both of these cases it becomes personalized because of that experience and the revenge fantasies become more grotesque and explicit.

That's just my pet theory on that.

Your last two paragraphs make a great point. From all the news I've read, especially over the last 15-ish years (and including my time on DU), people won't nearly be as outraged if an adult actually kills a child in comparison to the outrage which comes to the surface if the adult had molested them, but not killed them.

There are probably other things at play which cause this specific type of reaction. I presume that this disparity between reactions is not a new phenomenon, but I really don't know.

Oh, and I think you either unwittingly or knowingly crossed into an area where you will almost certainly be excoriated by an unexplainably large number of respondants. There are some issues which, when brought up here, get a lot of heat. A lot of heat. But the individual respondants don't often shed much light to go along with it.

Again, my pet theory is they have more intimate knowledge of being molested and the life-long trauma that that causes without necessarily letting on.

I'm going to tell you an account that's intentionally written very vaguely about a man I met who was sexually assaulted. It's certainly not the only account I know of, because I've known a number of people who've been molested or raped. I was introduced to this guy once and he left a good impression. Very physically fit, a little younger than me, and very well-read and intelligent. I had spoken to his friends and they universally described him as having great worth as a human being, in their eyes.

What I didn't know what that when he was a little boy, his parents used to drive him around and rent him to strangers in a town you'd never guess would harbor such a thing, so they could do extremely bad, extremely bad things to him, sexually. And I only found that out because one day I got a call from one of his friends that this really awesome guy had, out of the blue, attempted suicide decades after this abuse because the memory of it was too much for him to bear. And not one of the "cry for help" kinds of attempts, either. He was lucky to have survived what he did.

So IMO, there's a lot of things going on in people's heads here that cause them to respond how they do. Sometimes people really open up about why they react as they do...but and for some, reactions can be caused by things sitting at the abyssal layer of an ocean of personhood: A locked and rusted chest rocking in the silt, never fully dealt with.

Know what I'm saying?

PB

It's a self-propogating problem. Victimization begets revenge which creates more victimizers... at some point it becomes difficult to make a distinction between victim and victimizer.

Violent crime, including rape is on the decline. When things are healing, it is not a good time to make drastic changes.

One thing that I do find interesting is the same people cheering for the overturn of convictions due to the work of people like the justice project screaming in blood-lust for the extra-judicial punishment of suspects who have not even been convicted yet.

A civilization worth the name should be civilized even toward its criminals.

just sayin'

we ought to take the HIGH ROAD sabato out with our vigilante fantasies. Even though the prison treatment is inevitable.

your point about the urge to do violence to sexual offenders.

Do you think there simply needs to be more violent, vindictive rage about a wider range of crimes and injustices?

the severity of sex crimes compared to others.

...that are less severe than some other non-sexual crimes?

Or, on a scale of 1-10, are all sex crimes at least a 10, and only go up from there?

for men who grope a woman or expose themselves on the subway.

So, you're constructing a false narrative here.

I have an acquaintance who thinks Sheriff Arpaio's way of running prisons is wonderful. Of course, there is no point in telling her that it's unlikely her brother's little blond ass will end up in one of those jails with all the brown people incarcerated they because they don't have the shiny dollars to hire the fancy lawyers her family can afford.

Yes, posts about prison rape are wrong, and I routinely alert on/vote to hide those.

I don't get your other point. I'm talking about your sixth paragraph. It seems to be that you don't think sexual assault, even of children, is that big of a deal.

...but I do think that there can be things that are worse, yet those things don't push people's buttons in anywhere close to the same way sex-related incidents do.

beat up another guy to the point of hospitalizing him for 2 weeks than they would for a guy grabbing a 17 year old's ass.

And even then, I'm not sure. Regardless of the level of outrage, when it comes to the desire to comment or just let a story slip by, I'm guessing that on DU an ass-grabbing story would stand a better chance of getting a lot more comments.

alcohol is served all the time and "I was drunk" seems to be a perfectly acceptable excuse 99.9% of the time. Worst case is most might get a disorderly conduct ticket or a punch in the face from the woman or her boyfriend or dad.

Or they have cared deeply for a victim. The statistics are astonishing after all. It is a lot easier to have your "buttons pushed" when the subject relates to something you have personally endured.

Although to me is didn't seem like an "assault" when it happened, when I was around 10 at the time, that's definitely how what happened to me would now be classified.

I'm actually glad that no one found out, and that it happened well before the current climate about such things, because I'm afraid that some well-meaning social workers and/or psychiatrists would have taken my lack of distress itself as a sign of great trauma, and wouldn't have been happy they were doing the right thing for me until they'd convinced me I'd been through a trauma -- so the "healing could begin".

and that others should be seen as out of line if they were to try and suggest they had better knowledge of the resultant feelings on the subject than you do? Or what if they were to suggest that your feelings, about the thing you experienced, was wrong?

That is essentially what you've done. When you say that "a" is worse than "b" you are stating what level each person, who experienced either "a" or "b", should be affected.

People will respond to that, naturally.

filthy urges and bring about feminist ascendancy then so be it.

...has to be a 10 or higher on a scale of 1 to 10, just because it involves sex, and even if a young person is involved, and that some things not involving sex could reach a 10, yet still get more of a ho-hum reaction from people when you post stories about them happening.

As I said in another post, something happened to me when I was around 10 years old, and it wasn't a hair-on-fire trauma, and I'm glad the nearly-adult (older teen -- certainly old enough for the "let's try them as an adult!" approach) didn't get found out and caught up in today's frenzy of witch-burning hysteria over such things.

We saw calls for execution or for mandatory life sentences without possibility of parole, and all of these simply assumed the guilt of the accused, as is generally the case.

A designated "sex offender" is considered to deserve any punishment that society deems fitting, no matter how disproportionate or bloodthirsty or Old Testament it might be. This hunger for vengeance seems wildlly out of place in a nominally progressive forum, but good luck to you if you try calling for moderation or even suggesting that we wait until all facts are in.

On some subjects, you need only scratch the surface to see just how regressive people can be.

I hadn't thought particularly about the guilt side of this when posting the OP, but that's an another important point.

The more serious a crime, the more important it is to wait for all of the evidence to be in. In the court of public opinion, however, the more serious the crime, the greater the apparent need to jump to swift judgement and merciless punishment. Merely speculating that the accused might be innocent gets twisted into somehow excusing (even promoting) what has allegedly happened to an apparent victim.

For some subjects, any suggestion that we wait for a verdict is taken as a dismissal of the crime or the seriousness of the crime. On DU2 I was accused outright of being a pedophile because I suggested that the sex offender registry might not be working properly. So there is assumed guilt as well as guilt by association with assumed guilt.

I've seen all manner of acrobatics to justify why this crime or that crime is different and worthy of special punishment, and in the end it all comes down ad hoc moralizing.

....but

What was she wearing?

Did she ruin his football career?

Are you fucking kidding me?

And, if he's convicted, then he should suffer the fullest penalty as prescribed by law.


The OP doesn't appear to dispute this, unless I'm misreading it?

ummmm no.

I wish we could drag people that rape children and babies to death face down on a gravel road actually.

I've seen many threads on DU2 & DU3 calling for summary castration or execution of suspected rapists. That, I believe, is a harsh penalty, because it presupposes guilt without bothering with the inconvenience of a trial.

If someone is found guilty of a crime, then they should face the full penalty of law.

Sandusky should have been road hash. Plenty of people knew we liked to rape little boys.

But numerous psychological studies have shown that we are far less likely to be heroic than we imagine ourselves to be after the fact.

You're also citing a very specific kind of case, in which a person is actually caught in the vile act of raping a child. For those statistically rare cases, I like to think that I would stomp the shit out of the rapist and leave him a bloody smear on the tiles. I would thereafter submit myself to the authorities and accept the consequences.

So that covers us in cases where the attacker is caught in the act. But what about the far more common situation in which the attack is not witnessed? Do we still summarily castrate/torture/execute the alleged attacker? Or do we submit to the rule of law and have the attacker arrested and tried?

In short, how do we determine exactly which acts will merit immediate vigilante justice? And, what do you do once the alleged attacker is castrated/tortured/executed?

But for most of us, it elicits a very strong, instinctive reaction to protect our young from predatory animals. Most species in the animal kingdom, and that includes humans, can be quite vicious when it comes to protecting their babies. Not understanding that basic instinct makes you an anomaly.

You also quite insidiously go from disagreeing with those who lack self control when expressing their desire for exacting some type of revenge, to lessening the severity of child rape itself. Several others have noticed you do this as well and it's fucking creepy as hell. Perhaps you should take your own advice for those who have poor self control, and keep your mouth shut when it comes to comparing the severity of various crimes.

This "no means no" message doesn't mean anything to rapists, who are sociopaths. They do not consider other people's feelings when raping. No person with a normal emotional connection to other human beings could rape.

But prison rape? Yeah, they fear that. Prison rape is mentioned as fearfully as a 10 year sentence. The concept of the "Bubba" with a giant schlong is probably a more terrifying concept to these sickos than a judge and jury. A judge and jury can be confused with plausible innocence, or mishandling of evidence, or flat out with the "she deserved it" nonsense. But Bubba won't be put off by their explanations.

This is a crude observation, and I apologize to any person who might see this as a justification to rape (it isn't), it's just the reality of the mindset of sociopathic rapists.

then sexually abusing a women.

But I understand your point about how can we as a group wish rape on men in retaliation for their raping someone else.

I think that a piece of the thought process is... those men chose to rape.
So its if a simplistic thought process, "so you like rape, so why don't you try it from the position of the victim of rape"
Is a very simple tit-for-tat visceral reaction.

I don't agree with it...but I think I understand it.

"An eye for an eye" may be barbaric and destructive, in the end, but as a visceral emotional reaction it's quite understandable.

that it descends to a level of discourse, 'can you top this' medieval torture method as punishment for this prisoner. That kind of discourse is always going to happen, but most of us on DU are liberals or like to think we are, and there is no constructive point to engaging in that kind of discussion if what we want to do is to improve society.

To the contrary, all it does is bring people down.

So it's understandable, and even liberals feel it, but it's not something in which most of us self-indulge - for lots of reasons.

I was just saying that I understand where it comes from.

Or is no possible beating of a man by a man worse than any rape? Even when the term rape refers to sex between two drunken people with questionable consent, or statutory rape that might be called rape in one state, but not in another?

A women who is raped is blamed for asking for it.
Rape victims can also suffer severe injuries. So rape is not a no-physical-damage activity
The psychological damages of rape are more difficult to overcome than the physical damages of most brawls.

Is it possible that a man could be suffering more from his beating than some woman is suffering from her rape....of course,
But on the whole women have it worse.

much of why we are where we are in current events in the US.

when you began to minimize sexual abuse and tried to make comparisons.


Unless you have walked in someone else's shoes...

I could say that I think that getting stabbed is worse than getting punched, and probably no one's going to get bent out of shape about that comment, even if they disagree with me. And it's certainly possible for some punchings to be worse than some stabbings, especially when you add in how different individuals might differ in their reactions -- the walking in someone else's shoes you're talking about.

Nevertheless, people are likely to be OK that I didn't explicitly cover the difference between being punched so hard your eye socket breaks and accidentally being stabbed by a pin. Add sex into the equation, however, especially add a male perpetrator, and now even the idea that any incident can be compared or ranked in severity with another is taboo, and the only "safe" thing to do is assume it's all as terrible as can be.

I have witnessed stabbings and beating that led to broken eye sockets and rape. And from my experience, things like this are not black or white like you are trying to paint them. And the act of trying to paint them this way IS minimization. Each individual will have an individual reaction to the individual experience they are enduring. Too many variables to make black and white claims like you have.

You could have made your point very well without making any personal comparisons. You could have simply pointed out that there are other types of horrific assaults without the diminishing (not as bad as) of other types.

And that's causing the tooth-gnashing I see elsewhere in the thread.

PB

oversimplified as to be black and white. There is a hell of a lot of grey in individual processing of personal experience.

...and it will be understood that there are nuances and individual situations that could change that, it will be understood that I haven't just stomped my foot down and made a black/white decree that "a" is forever and always worse than "b", no matter the circumstances or individuals involved.

The other poster is exactly right, I'm allowing for shades of gray where people don't want there to be any, that's what upsets people. I'm not engaging in any denial of shades of gray here.

I just don't think they're objectively capable of accepting the concept, when in almost any other context the disparity would be completely obvious and uncontroversial.

I take that back. Maybe they are objectively capable of accepting the concept but the cognitive dissonance produced is so great they drop it like a hot potato and attack you, instead of confronting why they have the reaction in the first place.

BTW, I'm familiar with your reasoning because I see it in law, with aggravated or mitigated aspects of a particular crime, judicial oversight over sentencing, attempting to bring proportionate punishment into play.

PB

Upthread it was suggested by at least one person, and possibly more (I haven't read every comment yet) that fear of prison rape would likely be an effective deterrent to rape. But that kind of thinking partakes of the same fallacy that fuels the notion that capital punishment is an effective deterrent to murder, or that inhumane prison conditions are an effective deterrent to crime in general. The fallacy is the unspoken assumption that persons who commit violent crimes carefully and deliberately contemplate their crimes in advance, making a rational decision to do so only after weighing the perceived "benefits" against the potential risks and consequences of committing the crime. I think that in the overwhelming majority of cases, that is a very dubious assumption. I suspect as a rule, rapists and other violent criminals don't think they'll get caught, and they certainly don't intend to get caught, so they manage to put any thought of what might happen in the event they should get caught out of their heads entirely. So, not only is it unlikely that the prospect of prison rape will deter a rapist, by legitimizing prison rape, even if by merely saying, "oh well," one does, indeed partake of rape culture, whether they realize it or not.