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Question about rape

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Hayfa View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Hayfa Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10 June 2009 at 8:49am



Edited by Hayfa - 10 June 2009 at 8:51am
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Hayfa Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10 June 2009 at 8:51am

Hi Mystical,

I deal alot with crime... I study it, I teach self-defense etc. And frankly , western secular law is  just as faulty. 
1. There is not always physical proof. The difficulty in prosecuting rape is why so many rapists are not caught. Most often it is a 'he-said'-  she said' situation. 
2. If say someone were to break into my apartment and hold a gun to my head and tell me to submit (*threat of violence is one way to subdue women) and I submit, to save my own life, there may be very little of the 'proof' you say exists. Most women who do submit do so out of threat of greater violence. Even though there is no 'proof' it is still a rape.


3. I do not care about the 'system' of justice that man tries to create / monitor. The reality is that we humans are failings.

4. I do not think you need 4 witnesses in a case of rape.   I will try and find the information.  Also I do not think Shariah law is actually enforced in most places.  And you�d be surprised they do punish men in those countries for rape. And it is not pleasant.

5. Most people who rape are serial rapists. The average rapist in the US, rapes 17 times before being caught. 17!  Now I would better say, in stable Muslim, societies (those not in war) they won't have such cases of rape. The main reason is accessibility.  Rape is a crime of motivation and means. I lived in Pakistan. People are rarely alone.  Not that rapes do not occur. I think it is not the same as the accessibility factor. In mor strict societies, women and men who are not related just do not mix..

6. Having studied crime, there is little justice in this world. Innocent people go to jail. Just see with advent of DNA testing how many people were freed. People are falsely accused all the time. Even in crimes of rape. 

 

Yes it is really unfortunate that people have terrible crime happen to them. It is 100% wrong.  But no society is free from crime. Ultimately on the Day of Judgement we will answer for ourselves.


please escuse the underline, could not get rid of it



Edited by Hayfa - 10 June 2009 at 9:01am
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Hayfa Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10 June 2009 at 9:19am
Although the Law demanded stoning as punishment for the woman caught in adultery Jesus did not demand that this be carried out instead he said to her accusers " Let you who is without sin throw the first stone".  I am wondering what would Mohammad have done in this situation?

There is a fine line between justice and mercy. Do we not want the rapist punished but not the adulterer?  Is is not a case by case? What about the pedophile who destroys children's lives? Do we turn the other cheek?"

You say you want western justice when we have 2 million people on prison, yes as a Christian should you not have mercy?

I read a piece by Cornell West he said Judaism brought law, Jesus brought mercy and Islam brought justice.  I thought it was apt.  We need all.

i saw a horrible crime by this woman kidnapped and tortured by this man and woman. Horrible crimes. Its on a show called Escaped on Discovery Investigation. She escaped and it turns out they  had kidnapped, tortured and killed over 35 women.

Now we all face the balance between mercy and justice. It is a fine line.

You on one post say there is no justice in Shariah law and then say that we should  "love thy enemy" mentality.. Which is fine and deals with matters of the heart. There is a more practical matter of how does society and live and govern.



In fact to accuse a person of zinain Islam you need 4r witnesses.. making it very difficult to make the accusation and ruin peoples' lives.


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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Shasta'sAunt Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10 June 2009 at 4:17pm
http://www.womenmatter.net/fairco_whatstheproblem.htm 

Rape

For women, rape might appear to be an open and shut case; if we do not consent to sex, a rape has been committed. Unfortunately, it is not this simple in the courts. Rape is often very difficult to prove. The lack of consent is one element of proving a rape, but in many states, this is not enough to prove that a rape has occurred.

The common law definition of rape is "sexual intercourse achieved by force or threat of force without consent of the victim". By requiring force or the threat of force, the legal system perpetuates the myth that a rapist is a strange man who jumps from behind the bushes at night. In addition, when there is a force or threat of force requirement, non-physical or non-imminent threats are not enough to prove a rape. As if this does not make proving rape difficult enough, many states also require the proof of "reasonable resistance" on the part of the rape victim.

With the current rules in many jurisdictions, it is difficult for women in an abusive relationship to prove rape because 1) the abuse might be emotional so there might not be physical force or 2) the fear and submission to sex might be due to past violence and not a contemporaneous threat. For example, in State v. Alston, a woman broke off an abusive relationship with her boyfriend. The woman saw her abusive ex-boyfriend some time much later and they had sex. Even though the ex-boyfriend did not physically force the woman to have sex, there was implicit threat of force due to past incidents. A lower court convicted the man but he appealed and a higher court reversed the conviction due to a lack of physical force.

Another complexity with the force or threat of physical force requirement is that courts distinguish between offers and threats. The difference might seem clear, an offer makes you better off and a threat makes you worse off. However, sometimes the difference is murky and two cases, demonstrate this. In Thompson, a higher court reversed the conviction of a high school principal who told a female senior that she would not graduate unless she "slept"� with him. The senior had sex with the principal in order to graduate. According to the higher court, the principal did not threaten the young woman, he offered her something, and that was not sufficient to constitute a rape.

Similarly, in Commonwealth v. Mlinarich, a higher court reversed the conviction of a man who had custody of a teenage girl who had previously been in a juvenile detention facility. The man told the girl that he would return her to the facility if she did not have sex with him. She complied. Even though the man was initially convicted, he appealed and the higher court said that he made the child an offer and did not threaten her. Luckily some states have abolished the threat and reasonable resistance requirements, but they are in the minority.

Spousal rape was unheard of in our legal system until the 1970s. Until then, a husband could not have raped his wife by the definition of the crime. Now, spousal rape is a crime in all fifty states. Shockingly, North Carolina, the last state to abolish spousal rape, did not do so until 1993. In California the legislature has determined that whenever a woman says "no", even if she originally said "yes," the continuation of forced intercourse constitutes rape.

 
"Most rapists are never caught, and conviction rates for those apprehended are notoriously low. According to Department of Justice statistics, 48 percent of accused rapists were released before trial. Of those tried, only 54 percent were sentenced to prison. Even more troubling is that the average sex offender may commit hundreds of crimes in his lifetime, which means that the vast majority of rapes go undetected and unpunished."
 
 
C

In the United States

The English common law served as the model for criminal law in the United States, including rape laws. However, U.S. laws added to the protections against false accusations of rape. For example, many states instituted a special corroboration rule for rape prosecutions. This rule provided that in the absence of corroborating physical evidence (such as semen or bruises) or the testimony of a witness, a rape victim�s testimony was insufficient evidence on which to convict a defendant. As was the case with English law, this requirement assumed that the primary objective of the law was to protect men from false accusations rather than to protect women from rape.

C 1

Changing Attitudes

As women gained greater legal protections under civil rights laws and acquired more political equality, traditional rape laws came under attack. Beginning in the 1960s, members of the women�s movement assailed many of the assumptions on which rape laws were based. For example, they criticized the fact that rape laws were preoccupied with protecting men from false accusations. According to these activists, the laws not only failed to adequately protect women, they often did women harm. Citing research indicating that women who resisted rapists were more likely to incur serious physical injury, reformers called into question the appropriateness of the utmost resistance doctrine.

The identification of rape trauma syndrome also affected attitudes and laws concerning rape. Rape trauma syndrome, a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, is a psychological reaction to rape involving feelings of shock and shame. Victims who experience this syndrome are often reluctant to report a rape. Discovery of rape trauma syndrome undermined the fresh complaint rule, which was based on the assumption that delayed complaints of rape were less reliable.

Reformers also criticized the fairness of the special corroboration rule. They noted that the typical reaction of a victim experiencing rape trauma syndrome is to shower, to change and discard any damaged clothing, and to hide bruises. Consequently, many victims quickly destroy the physical evidence that a prosecution might later require under the corroboration rule.

C 2

Legal Reforms

In the 1970s most states began to change their laws concerning rape. Many states redefined rape and eliminated some of the common law doctrines and their biases against victims. Beginning with Massachusetts in 1968 and Tennessee in 1971, most states have ended the requirement�usually extremely difficult to meet�that a complainant, or alleged rape victim, produce corroborating evidence to the crime. Some states have passed laws enabling males to press charges of sexual assault.

Another important legal reform was the enactment of rape shield laws. Rape shield laws strictly limit the ways in which defense attorneys can question the complainant about her general sexual conduct. Proponents of shield laws argued that such questioning was used in trials, often unfairly, to insinuate that the accuser probably had consented to having sex. The shield laws emphasize the rights of the complainants rather than those of the accused rapists. Some critics argue that the new laws can more easily lead to the conviction of an innocent person.

Following the English model, some U.S. states punished rape as a capital offense. However, a 1977 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States ruled this practice unconstitutional. Today state statutes typically provide for a substantial number of years of imprisonment, including life imprisonment, for persons convicted of rape. In 1997 Montana adopted a law authorizing the death penalty as punishment for a second conviction of rape involving serious bodily injury. Whether this law is constitutional in light of the Supreme Court�s earlier decision has not yet been addressed.

�No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.�
Eleanor Roosevelt
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Shasta'sAunt Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10 June 2009 at 4:22pm
�No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.�
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Shasta'sAunt Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10 June 2009 at 4:30pm

Untested Rape Kits Sit in Cold Storage

By Amy Goodwin, Ms. Magazine. Posted March 27, 2009.


With huge backlogs of evidence untested, rapists who could have been caught remain free.
 
Three new rape victims arrive each day at the Rape Crisis Treatment Center in Santa Monica, Calif., where, besides being given comfort and medical care, victims are offered a forensic examination that could help identify and prosecute their attackers. Seeing the pain of the victims is hard enough, but for the center's director, Gail Abarbanel, one of the worst parts of her job is wondering whether rapes could have been prevented had the evidence so painstakingly collected ever been tested.

All over the country, rape kits are sitting untested in refrigerated storage facilities. A report currently being compiled by Human Rights Watch (HRW) puts the number at over 400,000, and the backlog is particularly pressing in large urban centers like Los Angeles. For Abarbanel, it represents a profound betrayal. "When such an incredible tool as a forensic database is available to us, it is unforgivable not to make use of it," she says. "For every kit that is not tested, the possibility of identifying, apprehending, trying and prosecuting a violent offender is lost."

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/133482/untested_rape_kits_sit_in_cold_storage/


Edited by Shasta'sAunt - 10 June 2009 at 4:46pm
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Shasta'sAunt Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10 June 2009 at 4:43pm
Is Rape Serious?
Published: April 29, 2009

When a woman reports a rape, her body is a crime scene. She is typically asked to undress over a large sheet of white paper to collect hairs or fibers, and then her body is examined with an ultraviolet light, photographed and thoroughly swabbed for the rapist�s DNA.

It�s a grueling and invasive process that can last four to six hours and produces a �rape kit� � which, it turns out, often sits around for months or years, unopened and untested.

Stunningly often, the rape kit isn�t tested at all because it�s not deemed a priority. If it is tested, this happens at such a lackadaisical pace that it may be a year or more before there are results (if expedited, results are technically possible in a week).

So while we have breakthrough DNA technologies to find culprits and exculpate innocent suspects, we aren�t using them properly � and those who work in this field believe the reason is an underlying doubt about the seriousness of some rape cases. In short, this isn�t justice; it�s indifference.

Solomon Moore, a colleague of mine at The Times, last year wrote about a 43-year-old legal secretary who was raped repeatedly in her home in Los Angeles as her son slept in another room. The attacker forced the woman to clean herself in an attempt to destroy the evidence.

Tim Marcia, the detective on the case, thought this meant that the perpetrator was a habitual offender who would strike again. Mr. Marcia rushed the rape kit to the crime lab but was told to expect a delay of more than one year.

So Mr. Marcia personally drove the kit 350 miles to deliver it to the state lab in Sacramento. Even there, the backlog resulted in a four-month delay � but then it produced a �cold hit,� a match in a database of the DNA of previous offenders.

Yet in the months while the rape kit sat on a shelf, the suspect had allegedly struck twice more. Police said he broke into the homes of a pregnant woman and a 17-year-old girl, sexually assaulting each of them.

�The criminal justice system is still ill equipped to deal with rape and not that good at moving rape cases forward,� notes Sarah Tofte, who just wrote a devastating report for Human Rights Watch about the rape-kit backlog. The report found that in Los Angeles County, there were at last count 12,669 rape kits sitting in police storage facilities. More than 450 of these kits had sat around for more than 10 years, and in many cases, the statute of limitations had expired.

There are no good national figures, and one measure of the indifference is that no one even bothers to count the number of rape kits sitting around untested.

Why don�t police departments treat rape kits with urgency? One reason is probably expense � each kit can cost up to $1,500 to test � but there also seems to be a broad distaste for rape cases as murky, ambiguous and difficult to prosecute, particularly when they involve (as they often do) alcohol or acquaintance rape.

�They talk about the victims� credibility in a way that they don�t talk about the credibility of victims of other crimes,� Ms. Tofte said.

Charlie Beck, a deputy police chief of Los Angeles, said that there was no excuse for the failure to test rape kits, but he noted that integrating a new technology into police work is complex and involves a learning curve. Since Human Rights Watch began its investigation, he said, the department had resolved to test rape kits routinely � and as a result, cold hits have doubled.

While the backlog and desultory handling of rape kits are nationwide problems, there is one shining exception: New York City has made a concerted effort over the last decade to test every kit that comes in. The result has been at least 2,000 cold hits in rape cases, and the arrest rate for reported cases of rape in New York City rose from 40 percent to 70 percent, according to Human Rights Watch.

Some Americans used to argue that it was impossible to rape an unwilling woman. Few people say that today, or say publicly that a woman �asked for it� if she wore a short skirt. But the refusal to test rape kits seems a throwback to the same antediluvian skepticism about rape as a traumatic crime.

�If you�ve got stacks of physical evidence of a crime, and you�re not doing everything you can with the evidence, then you must be making a decision that this isn�t a very serious crime,� notes Polly Poskin, executive director of the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

It�s what we might expect in Afghanistan, not in the United States.

Actually it is exactly what we expect in this country and this legal system which still sees women as less than men and the crimes committed against women as less serious than those against men. You can claim that there is justice for women in our civilized western secular environment, but it is a lie. One of the most celebrated "Christian" political figures last year, Sarah Palin, had women paying for their rape kits in Alaska. Yes, if you were a raped woman you had to pay for the rape kit, but if your home was burgled then the state picked up the tab.   
 
There is no equality here. Rape victims are not treated to greater justice here than anywhere else. There is an illusion, but as you can read for yourself, 400,000 rape kits have been sitting untested in warehouses for years. 400,000.  Think about that next time you are condemning other cultures for not treating women the way we do. PUHLEEEEEEEEZE!!!


Edited by Shasta'sAunt - 10 June 2009 at 4:45pm
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Shasta'sAunt Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10 June 2009 at 5:07pm

"Although the Law demanded stoning as punishment for the woman caught in adultery Jesus did not demand that this be carried out instead he said to her accusers " Let you who is without sin throw the first stone".  I am wondering what would Mohammad have done in this situation?"

Jesus did not demand the punishment not because she was not guilty or deserving of punishment, but rather because those who accused her were just as, if not more guilty. It wasn't mercy, it was a lesson to the pharisees and hypocrits.

 
..."The claim that rape victims require four witnesses to seek justice for their case is untrue and a false lie propagated by those who either do not have any knowledge in Islamic law or want to �prove� a so-called weakness in the hadd laws. Circumstantial evidence is sufficient and the judge can invoke his judgment based upon takzir (his own discretion).

An event concerning rape had in fact led towards the Prophet Muhammad (P) punishing a rapist without demanding or even hinting for four witnesses:

�Narrated Wa�il ibn Hujr: �When a woman went out in the time of the Prophet (P) for prayer, a man attacked her and overpowered [raped] her. She shouted and he went off, and when a man came by, she said: That [man] did such and such to me. And when a company of the Emigrants came by, she said: That man did such and such to me. They went and seized the man whom they thought had had intercourse with her and brought him to her.

She said: Yes, this is he. Then they brought him to the Apostle of Allah (P).

When he [the Prophet] was about to pass sentence, the man who [actually] had assaulted her stood up and said: Apostle of Allah, I am the man who did it to her.

He [the Prophet] said to her: Go away, for Allah has forgiven you. But he told the man some good words [Abu Dawud said: "meaning the man who was seized"], and of the man who had had intercourse with her, he said: �Stone him to death.4

It should also be noted that it was related by Ibn Abi Shaybah through T�riq b. Shahab that a woman accused with adultery was taken to Caliph `Umar. The woman pleaded that she was asleep and woke up to find the man over her. `Umar released the woman.5

Based on the above sayings of the Prophet (P) and the events associated with it, the jurist Ibn Qudamah had stated as follows in his book al-Mughn�:

�If a woman becomes pregnant without having a husband or a master, she may not be punished and, in stead, she should be asked about it, if she claimed that she was coerced into it or that she committed adultery under dubious circumstances, or if she simply does not confess adultery then she will not be punished. This is the saying of Abu Han�fah and al-Sh�fi`�, because she may be pregnant as a result of a forceful intercourse or dubious circumstances. Punishment will be abandoned in case suspicion exists. It is well known that a woman could become pregnant without committing the real intercourse. The woman may become pregnant if sperm is manually inserted into her vagina. This would explain how a virgin becomes pregnant.�

We can now see that a testimony of the raped woman suffices in exonerating her from adultery and that Islam recognises the crime of rape and that a raped woman will not be punished for such a crime that was inflicted upon her. .....

�No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.�
Eleanor Roosevelt
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