it's not that they get away with it, it's that they expect they'll get away with it because they're taught they'll get away with it. so, perhaps they shouldn't be taught that they'll get away with it?
i'm not saying it's a good idea to shrug it off. i'm pointing out that it's well established that enforcement is not an effective prevention tactic, you need to get at root causes.
you look pretty frustrated. that's all the approach you're using is going to get you.
it's a losing battle; change your tactic.
in the broader scope of things, laci is a product of the failure of neo-liberalism. she's using very right-wing language, and i'm not entirely sure she really realizes it. it's just what she learned at school. i went through this somewhere else. all this stuff about victim rights is a product of the neo-liberal era. but, like everything else from the neo-liberal era, it's run into incredible problems in trying to reverse the decades of research that came before it on ideological rather than empirical grounds.
it's unfortunate to wake up in your late 20s or early 30s and realize everything you've been taught is bullshit. but, it's going to have to happen - and not just for laci, but for a wide cross-section of people her age that come face to face with it.
there may have been a sentence or two about weber and root cause analyses hidden in the back of your textbooks. your profs may have ridiculed it. but i'd really suggest picking up on that.
Samuel
I really don't think you can teach them "they won't get away with it" unless you actually provide a punishment for the act so they have real consequences for the act, and this wont happen unless there is a huge reform of the current system which protects and allows rapists to live free.
deathtokoalas
there's that "thinking" thing again. wrong way to try and interpret the world.
we're not rational creatures. we don't respond to incentives, and we don't respond to force. that is, enforcement has no effect on recidivism rates. it may seem logical to think that if you get "tough on crime" then the criminals will stop, but this has been proven wrong repeatedly. instead, what you get are smarter criminals. it's the most expensive, least effective approach. that's why conservatives love it so much - big contracts, no results.
yet, because the right-wing dominates the educational institutions nowadays and has since the rise of the "new right" in the thatcher-reagan neo-liberal revolution, what's being taught in schools nowadays is the kind of anti-science fundamentalist christianity that laci is articulating - without realizing it. it was presented to her as sociology, so she thinks that's what she's talking about.
but it isn't. it's christianity repackaged as science in this twisted orwellian manner. the sociological equivalent of "intelligent design".
the root of this starts when kids are young - it's the way they're raised. we need to get at the very root of the family unit, not just round people up for behaving the way the system expects them to behave. that is, when you live in a deeply stratified, hierarchical system you cannot be surprised when people treat each other poorly based on where they exist in the hierarchy or thinking that law enforcement is going to somehow abolish the hierarchy. it's only by abolishing the hierarchical system that produces the behaviour that we can expect the behaviour to cease.
again, that's not an argument for the legalization of rape. but the approach that laci (and the right, in general) is taking reduces to treating a corollary of a problem rather than treating the problem itself.
