The Guardian (UK) reports:
A Palestinian man has been convicted of rape after having consensual sex with a woman who had believed him to be a fellow Jew.Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday after the court ruled that he was guilty of rape by deception. According to the complaint filed by the woman with the Jerusalem district court, the two met in downtown Jerusalem in September 2008 where Kashur, an Arab from East Jerusalem, introduced himself as a Jewish bachelor seeking a serious relationship. The two then had consensual sex in a nearby building before Kashur left….
Handing down the verdict, Tzvi Segal, one of three judges on the case, acknowledged that sex had been consensual but said that although not “a classical rape by force,” the woman would not have consented if she had not believed Kashur was Jewish.
The sex therefore was obtained under false pretences, the judges said. “If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated,” they added….
Segal said: “The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price — the sanctity of their bodies and souls. When the very basis of trust between human beings drops, especially when the matters at hand are so intimate, sensitive and fateful, the court is required to stand firmly at the side of the victims — actual and potential — to protect their wellbeing. Otherwise, they will be used, manipulated and misled, while paying only a tolerable and symbolic price.”
Such “fraud in the inducement” would not suffice for a rape conviction under the law of most American states (see, e.g., this case), though it’s an interesting question why it’s a crime to get money by fraud but not to get sex by fraud. There are good answers to that question, I think, but they’re not so obviously right as to keep the question from being interesting.
For some thoughts from last year on a proposal in Massachusetts that might have allowed liability in such a situation, see here. Also, it appears that a few American rape statutes might already criminalize sex procured through false statements. State v. Tizard, 897 S.W.2d 732 (Tenn. Ct. Crim. App. 1994) holds that Tennessee law rejects the distinction between “fraud in the inducement” and “fraud in the fact,” which is what has prevented rape prosecutions in cases such as the Israeli one; the facts of Tizard, though, are rather different — the defendant was lying about the supposed medical reason of the sexual act (there, the defendant’s masturbation of the victim, though the analysis would be the same for intercourse) rather than about the defendant’s identity. And some states generally provide that “assent does not constitute consent if … [i]t is induced by force, duress, or deception” (to quote Colo. Rev. Stats. Ann. § 18-1-505), which would in principle apply to rape cases as well.
If anyone can point me to the written opinion in the case, I’d be much obliged, both so I can blog about it and so I can use it in my Criminal Law class this Fall (I have a unit on fraud in the section on the law of rape). Thanks to Mike Sheridan for the pointer.
UPDATE: Several commenters raise a point that was also made by one of the source cited in the article: “Gideon Levy, a liberal Israeli commentator, was quoted as saying: ‘I would like to raise only one question with the judge. What if this guy had been a Jew who pretended to be a Muslim and had sex with a Muslim woman? Would he have been convicted of rape? The answer is: of course not.’”
It’s certainly possible that a court would have — and still would in the future, even given this decision — acquit this hypothetical Jew-pretending-to-be-a-Muslim defendant. But I’m just not sure that one can categorically assume this, especially in light of the judges’ rhetoric. It seems to me that Jewish judges might well think the lying Jew’s behavior is as deceptive, manipulative, and injurious to “the sanctity of [victims'] bodies and souls” as a lying Muslim’s, and that the deceived Muslim woman should be as protected as a deceived Jewish woman. And this is so even given the undoubted psychological reality that judges, like other people, generally tend to empathize more with people who are like themselves. Despite this reality, judges may still empathize enough with people who are less like themselves.
Now I’m certainly not an expert on Israeli judges’ attitudes, and I’d be happy to hear the views of people who have lived in Israel and have a sense of how the Israeli legal system would deal with this situation. But I’m reluctant to accept the assumptions of the one Israeli commentator who was quoted, at least unless I hear a broader range of people confirming his judgment.
FURTHER UPDATE: Haaretz has more on the underlying legal rule (thanks to Ivan Drago and Ilya Somin for the pointer):
In 2008, the High Court of Justice set a precedent on rape by deception, rejecting an appeal of the rape conviction by Zvi Sleiman, who impersonated a senior official in the Housing Ministry whose wife worked in the National Insurance Institute. Sleiman told women he would get them an apartment and increased NII payments if they would sleep with him.High Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein said a conviction of rape should be imposed any time a “person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.”
Rubinstein said the question was also whether an ordinary person would expect such a woman to have sex with a man without the false identity he created.
In the past, men who misrepresented themselves in this way were convicted of fraud.
One such case was that of Eran Ben-Avraham, who told a woman he was a neurosurgeon after which she had sex with him, and was convicted of three counts of fraud.
Houston Lawyer says:
I’ve always thought that there should be a cause of action for a marriage induced by fraud.
There are many lies told by members of either sex when trying to bed someone. Anyone who has sex with someone she just met does not deserve the benefit of the doubt that she actually believed his lies or would not have had sex with him if he had been truthful.
July 21, 2010, 3:12 pmruufflees says:
I searched the article; the only time the word Muslim appears is in a quoted comment. The article itself says he’s an Arab, with the headline being “Arab guilty of rape after consensual sex with Jew.” Isn’t Arab an ethnicity, such that one could be both Arab and Jewish?
July 21, 2010, 3:12 pmPatent Lawyer says:
though it’s an interesting question why it’s a crime to get money by fraud but not to get sex by fraud.
And to add to what makes it interesting, it’s not a crime to get sex by fraud, but it’s a crime both to get money by fraud and to get sex by money.
What’s the U.S. common law position on whether sex by fraud should be a tort?
July 21, 2010, 3:14 pmwohjr says:
I wonder how this would play into the proposed law moving through Knesset. Would it be the same if you claimed to be orthodox but were in fact reformed?
July 21, 2010, 3:16 pmwohjr says:
@Patent Lawyer:
Maybe intentional infliction of emotional distress?
July 21, 2010, 3:16 pmr2d2 says:
This hardly sounds like the “sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminal who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price” that the judge is trying to protect against.
The judge in the excerpt makes it sound as if but for causation is the only requirement for rape by deception. I’d like to hear more of the court’s reasoning and whether this analysis is commonly applied to other cases (if there are many).
July 21, 2010, 3:17 pmAlessandra says:
It makes me wonder if she had been Arab and he a Jew, the court would have probably just called her an Arab tramp and told her to go home or worse.
July 21, 2010, 3:19 pmAlessandra says:
I totally agree with this here. Where is her responsibility concerning her decisions and behavior?
Wouldn’t this rationale allow the same rape accusation possible for women who have sex with married men, because the latter have lied about being married? Why is it any different?
July 21, 2010, 3:25 pmChris Travers says:
I wonder how evenly this is applied. Is it only to be applied over Jewish/NonJewish lines? If man who is married pretends to be single for the purpose of sleeping with someone will he be thrown in jail for rape by deception? What about lying about one’s income or occupation?
How about falsely saying “I love you” in order to get sex?
I’m curious where the line would be drawn if “would not have consented” means “did not legally consent.”
July 21, 2010, 3:32 pmanomdebus says:
My first thought was to an example of twin brothers where one seduces the other’s girlfriend under the false pretense that he is his brother. An open question is if ethnicity is integral to identity or merely descriptive.
Although it would probably be nice to reduce the number of lies told in the dating process, I agree with Houston Lawyer that criminalizing lies for sex would prove too much.
I have an issue with calling this rape, but would ‘sexual fraud’ be a better term?
July 21, 2010, 3:33 pmRoger the Shrubber says:
Maybe, but lying in the break-up process is absolutely essential.
July 21, 2010, 3:48 pmKamal says:
If the man had claimed he was a Palestinian, and was really a Jew, does anyone here think this would have still been considered rape? If not, why?
The point of this story, despite Eugene’s commentary, is not about lying in order to facilitate sex, it’s about the man not being a Jew.
July 21, 2010, 3:53 pmTVC says:
This is predicated on her assumptions. As such, any lie could lead to any unknown subjective conclusion and subsequent “rape by deception.” It’s just banal ethnic prejudice on par with, ironically or not, Jewish blood libel.
July 21, 2010, 3:54 pmyankee says:
Would you agree that anyone who engaged in a commercial transaction with someone she just met does not deserve the benefit of the doubt that she actually believed his lies or would not have purchased from him if he had been truthful?
Why are his lies her responsibility rather than his?
I’m inclined to think sex by deception shouldn’t be actionable (at least not in general), but I can’t articulate an actual reason why it should be different from contract by deception.
July 21, 2010, 3:56 pmLehuster says:
It takes two to lie – one to lie, and one to listen!
July 21, 2010, 3:59 pmJMS says:
If you want some English cases for variety/comparison, try:
R v Jheeta [2007] EWCA Crim 1699 – D texted girlfriend in guise of police officer threatening her with arrest if she didn’t perform various sexual acts. Convicted for some offences under Sexual Offences Act 1956 for procuring a woman by deceit, but acquitted of rape for those acts which happened after that law had been replaced by the SOA 2003 (without an equivalent offence).
R v Linekar [1995] QB 250 – D slept with prostitute, never intending to pay. No deception as to nature or purpose, and thus not rape.
R v Flattery (1877) 2 QBD 410 – D slept with girl after telling her it was an operation to cure her epilepsy. Guilty – deception as to nature (consent was to penetration, not to sexual intercourse).
R v Williams [1923] 1 KB 340 – D slept with girl after telling her it was to improve her singing (!). Guilty.
R v Devonald [2008] EWCA Crim 527 – D, in order to humiliate his daughter’s ex-boyfriend, impersonated a young woman in order to induce him to perform sexual acts in front of a webcam. Guilty of inducing to engage in a sexual activity without consent – deception as to purpose (humiliation rather than the feigned purpose of gratification).
It’s worth noting that when a person under 13 lies about their age and thereby induces a person to engage in sexual activity with them, that other is guilty of an offence (R v G [2008] UKHL 37), but I don’t think that the liar has ever been charged with an offence (one cannot be a secondary party or incite an offence that exists for one’s own protection – R v Tyrell [1894] 1 QB 710).
An amusing inadvertant deception occurred in the (in)famous case of R v Collins [1973] QB 700, where a naked drunk plasterer climbed up a ladder to look at a woman, and perhaps do more. In the dark, she mistook him for her beau, invited him in, and only realised her mistake during their “activities”. This was not rape, since she consented without him deceiving her at the start and he withdrew once she revoked her consent. Nor was it attempted rape – although one can be convicted of an impossible attempt, he believed she had consented. An attempt to convict him of burglary with intent to rape (burglary in English law means entering as a trespasser with one of a few intentions – no breaking is needed) failed on appeal because he had not made a substantial entry into the building before being invited in.
July 21, 2010, 4:02 pmfalafalafocus says:
July 21, 2010, 4:11 pmAlast says:
Wasn’t Frank Sinatra arrested for this as a young man… and charged with “seduction?”
July 21, 2010, 4:11 pmGromit says:
If lying to get someone into bed is a crime, then most of humanity dies as rapists.
July 21, 2010, 4:12 pmMike says:
I wonder whether you could apply this the other way, for the classic case of “she told me she was 18, officer.”
July 21, 2010, 4:17 pmKamal says:
Because everyone lies. Saying that a lie makes a sexual act non-voluntary is observably false. If the woman was compelled to have sex with anyone who is a Jew, then a case could be made. Otherwise, the ruling here shows that they found it particularly wrong to claim to be a Jew. Let this sink in: the lie was not was at issue (as everyone lies), the fact that he was not a Jew is.
If you can show me a reverse instance of this, in Israel, i’d be amazed beyond words.
July 21, 2010, 4:21 pmMarcopohlo says:
If you lie about yourself so that someone sitting next to you in the cafeterial line will sit down with you and talk to you for the whole lunch hour, have you committed a tort? A crime?
How about if you promise sex to the cab driver but don’t deliver? Is that fraud? What if you just lie about being a basketball star to get a ride home from a stranger?
July 21, 2010, 4:28 pmAlessandra says:
Alessandra: I totally agree with this here. Where is her responsibility concerning her decisions and behavior?
Why are his lies her responsibility rather than his?
I’m inclined to think sex by deception shouldn’t be actionable (at least not in general), but I can’t articulate an actual reason why it should be different from contract by deception.
==============
Because having sex with strangers is completely irresponsible. Any person you spend half an hour talking to in a bar (or “downtown”) is a stranger. Smooth talking or not.
I’m not saying he is entitled to lie, just that she also is accountable for her irresponsible attitudes and behaviors in the personal sphere. Liberals have a destructive culture about personal relationships and sexuality, and this is the result. The idiot goes to have sex with someone she didn’t even take care to know anything about, and then cries rape and blames him.
You go pick up your child at school and there’s a nice chap that strikes a conversation with you for half an hour. Than he says, “Let me take your child right around the corner to buy them some candy and I’ll be right back.” You say, “Sure.”
Blame them if you never saw your child again, would you? I would certainly blame you for being a horribly unconscientious parent, independently of the blame that goes to the guy.
Also reminds me of due diligence in the Madoff scheme. The people who did their investigations, still have their money. Lots of greedy people did not want to verify anything Madoff was telling them, got ripped off. HE is the crook, but these people were totally irresponsible themselves.
July 21, 2010, 4:30 pmbw3tfb123hy says:
This is the most idiotic miscarriage of justice I have ever heard of. It is in blatant anti-Arab racism and anti-male sexism. Would the woman be convicted of rape if she said she was an Arab and the man complained? The police would laugh him out of the police station (unless they decided to arrest him for for sleeping with a Jewish woman).
It is a westernized counter-part to stoning of adulterous women. Israeli law is now the mirror image of Sharia law. In fact, it puts Sharia law in a whole new and more favorable light. If there ever was a deserving candidate for stoning, this story contains such a character.
It is a sad and sorry state civilization has come to when doing something so stupid it has Darwinian consequences, can land another person in jail.
It reminds me of a person who got arrested for drug possession when he complained to the police that someone stole his stash. Only in this case the police really do go after the drug thief.
Oy Vey!
July 21, 2010, 4:33 pmA faceless bureaucrat named Bill says:
An interesting opinion by the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces deals with this and some related issues in a very colorful factual scenario: US v. Traylor, 40 M.J. 248.
July 21, 2010, 4:35 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Wouldn’t it be simpler to take the approach of the Lateran Council (1215), which required Jews and Muslims to wear distinctive clothing to prevent such sexual mistakes? (And yes, I’m presenting this for the snarky bizarreness of it all.)
July 21, 2010, 4:38 pmIvan Drago says:
No, it’s about the ridiculously broad rape-by-deception law.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/jurists-say-arab-s-rape-conviction-sets-dangerous-precedent-1.303109
Note that the defendants in the previous cases were Jewish.
July 21, 2010, 4:40 pmBama 1L says:
The reasoning in this case sounds somewhat like what you see in marriage fraud cases from New York before that state liberalized its divorce laws in 1967.
The story told by these cases was boy meets girl, girl insists she will have nothing to do with man unless he is devoutly religious like she is, and he assures her that he is. They marry. Shortly thereafter, she notices that he doesn’t seem to have any religious sentiment at all and stops attending religious services, observing dietary laws, etc. She can get the annulment if she shows fraud in the inducement. I think every reported case, of which there are maybe half a dozen, concerns a Catholic or Jew and was brought by the wife. These are interesting cases for First Amendment reasons (the court had to be convinced that the girl was herself devout) as well as the sociology. This seems to have been tried a lot by WWII brides and some really got the book thrown at them when judges found them insufficiently sincere.
Regarding rape by fraud, there is some California case someone else may remember where the defendant falsely told the female victim a medical test had revealed she had a disease. Good news: there’s a medicine that is 100% effective! But injecting it with a syringe would be costly and painful. Again, good news: there’s another way that is less costly and painful! Just have sexual intercourse with a male subject who has already been injected, who of course will need to be compensated some lesser amount. She agreed and had sex with the guy, paying him for his lifesaving service. Eventually she caught on.
No rape conviction could stand because the sex was consensual, even if consent was fraudulently obtained. In the context of sex, fraud does not vitiate consent. The court reasoned that what this defendant had done was essentially no different from what goes on at singles bars. Lying to get into someone’s pants is never a crime.
But that was some con!
July 21, 2010, 4:40 pmRoscoe says:
To quote from W.C. Fields, “you can’t cheat an honest man.”
July 21, 2010, 4:42 pmGil Franco says:
The source article on this in Ha’aretz indicates that he is a married man and that he and the “victim” had previously been in contact with each other online. He had portrayed himself as a single Jewish man so the fraud occurered for longer that the one occassion where they met. The article cites other cases where Israeli men have been successfully prosecuted for impersonating public officials, surgeons etc. Interestingly, the conviction was plea bargained down from a more serious rape related charge.
Regarding the reversal of the Jewish and Arab roles, there are a series of cultural realities that make this somewhat implausible including the fact that few young Jews in Israel are fluent enough in Arabic to come off as an Arab. All types of relationships between Arab women and Jewish men are rarer than the other way around because of the possible reaction of the woman’s family. If such a thing occurred, I actually think that they Israeli authorities would take it quite seriously because of the degree of harm suffered by the woman.
July 21, 2010, 4:55 pmfalafalafocus says:
What?
First off, I was not defending the decision, which is an extremely broad approach to rape by fraud (if there is something in my comment that left that impression, please point it out to me so I can avoid that type of error in the future). Instead, I was commenting on your insinuation that the result would be different if we just inverted the religions of the parties.
Second, it was you, not me, who made the insinuation that the result would be different if the religions of the two people were inverted. You have the burden to prove that claim. Can you?
July 21, 2010, 4:55 pmJoseph Slater says:
R v Williams [1923] 1 KB 340 — D slept with girl after telling her it was to improve her singing (!).
“!” indeed. I might add, ???.
July 21, 2010, 4:58 pmKamal says:
I stand corrected. Thanks for the citation.
July 21, 2010, 5:04 pmbw3tfb123hy says:
She is an adult and this isn’t her first time sleeping with a man? This woman is Jewish? She knows what circumcision is?
What exactly is her IQ?
July 21, 2010, 5:05 pm“Rape by deception” in Israel says:
[...] Max Fisher, Atlantic Wire (rounding up reactions); Eugene Volokh (including link to discussion of Massachusetts [...]
July 21, 2010, 5:06 pmJoe says:
She was not forced to have sex against her will so “rape” to me is a bad way to put it. It is a type of fraud, but that still doesn’t make it rape. It’s really inane to use that word; it cheapens it.
It also seems like a selective prosecution to target one particular lie. Loads of people lie to have sex, of both sexes. What’s uniquely special about this person? If he said that he was distraught because someone died or that he really loved her or simply that he was a rich person, would that too be “rape”? A woman very well might not have sex if he was none of the above. I recognize the value of religion in Israel. But, still.
The sex in return for something is a sort of bribe; it still isn’t rape (closer if “sex or I’ll evict you”). But, like quid pro quo sexual harassment, it is something that it appropriately targeted. It is debatable if criminal law is the best place in most cases.
July 21, 2010, 5:09 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
I believe that Muslim men are usually circumsized as well, although it is often done later, and more traumatically. What always amazes me about cases like this (and like the Lateran Council of 1215 requirement) is that if religion is a motivator for your actions, why are you having sex outside of marriage? Or is this one of those weird, “I’m only religious six days a week” problems?
July 21, 2010, 5:10 pmAJK says:
I’m not sure that really speaks to the issue. In your hypothetical, you would surely agree that the stranger should be criminally liable for kidnapping, etc., regardless of the blameworthiness of the parent. So here, the fact that the woman might have been an idiot who made bad decisions and was asking for trouble shouldn’t be a defense for the alleged rapist.
July 21, 2010, 5:12 pmRandall says:
ruufflees says:
I searched the article; the only time the word Muslim appears is in a quoted comment. The article itself says he’s an Arab, with the headline being “Arab guilty of rape after consensual sex with Jew.” Isn’t Arab an ethnicity, such that one could be both Arab and Jewish?
– Yes. There are many of them in both Israel and the United States, a very few left in Iraq and Yemen, though most others (notably in Syria and Lebanon) were expelled after the creation of the State of Israel.
bw3tfb123hy says:
She is an adult and this isn’t her first time sleeping with a man? This woman is Jewish? She knows what circumcision is?
What exactly is her IQ?
— Muslims also circumcize male children. What exactly is yours?
July 21, 2010, 5:18 pmAlessandra says:
Note the year, it was 1923…
July 21, 2010, 5:20 pmMan Lied To Get A Woman Into Bed. In Other News, The Sky Is Blue. « Around The Sphere says:
[...] Eugene Volokh: Such “fraud in the inducement” would not suffice for a rape conviction under the law of most American states (see, e.g., this case), though it’s an interesting question why it’s a crime to get money by fraud but not to get sex by fraud. There are good answers to that question, I think, but they’re not so obviously right as to keep the question from being interesting. [...]
July 21, 2010, 5:21 pmyankee says:
We’re going to have to disagree about that one. There’s nothing irresponsible about having sex with someone you’ve just met; it’s only irresponsible if you don’t use a condom, which is still true even if you’ve known the person for a long time. Routinely having sex with strangers is irresponsible since you greatly increase your risk of disease, but there’s nothing wrong with isolated events.
Frankly, your view on this sounds a lot like “she’s a slut and should be punished for it.”
I agree that “rape” is too strong; this is a species of fraud, not rape. But should it be actionable? I still have yet to think of a convincing reason it should be legal to defraud someone for sex, but illegal to defraud them for money. We wouldn’t accept “people commit fraud for money all the time” (which they do!) as a reason to legalize fraud, so why would we accept it as a reason for sex?
July 21, 2010, 5:27 pmkarrde says:
I presume you mean Arab in descent, but a professing follower of the Jewish religion?
At first, the question didn’t parse because I tend to think of ‘Jewish’ as an ethnicity also…
Bonus question: if someone is described to you has a “German Jew”, are they a German who has adopted the Jewish faith, or from an ethnically Jewish family that has lived in Germany for many generations?
July 21, 2010, 5:30 pmLittle Miss Attila / Joy McCann says:
This is really odd. When I was pursuing my boyfriend (now husband), I posed as a tidy person, to the best of my ability. I straightened my own apartment. I straightened his. I went so far as to half-convince myself that I really was a neat person. I claimed neatness. I tried to live it.
I successfully seduced him by means of this fraud. Later, I married him using the same ruse.
* * *
A few more thought experiments, both of which have been touched on: 1) change the genders, rather than the religions. Have the woman pose as Jewish. I think part of the reason for this conviction is a sort of protective attitude toward the woman. Possibly she is even considered to have been “defiled” by sex with a dirty Arab/dirty goy.
2) Set the same case in Germany during the Third Reich. Now have a Jewish man (partly Jewish, whatever) posing as pureblooded Aryan. Was it still rape?
July 21, 2010, 5:31 pmNG says:
Mike asks what seems to me the most interesting question here. Suppose a 16 year old girl lied to a 19 year old man and said she was 18 and they have sex. If the man testified and was believed that he would not have had sex with her had he known she was 16, couldn’t you have both parties to a non-forcible sex encounter convicted of rape? He for statutory rape (to which his belief she was 18 is not a defense) and her under this rape-by-fraud theory. That certainly seems an odd outcome.
July 21, 2010, 5:31 pmgladetariba says:
though it’s an interesting question why it’s a crime to get money by fraud but not to get sex by fraud.
July 21, 2010, 5:33 pmBecause in love(m sex) who can,lies
Randall says:
I’d also like to note that the huge amount of prurient interest in this quirky but otherwise unremarkable case is offensive and disturbing. Just google “rape by deception” and the first 20 pages are web hits devoted to this one ruling. This poor girl clearly felt violated by what happened. Israel has a law that says you can’t do that sort of thing. The same ruling could have issued in Tennessee, apparently. You may think its a silly law, but there’s no actual indication it was applied incorrectly or unfairly. There are plenty of countries where rape isn’t illegal at all, or where the laws are never enforced and women are abused terribly – some of them, heaven forbid we say it, are Arab countries. Volokh has an interesting post on the legal weirdness of it – that should be the end of the issue.
But the overwhelming global fascination with a Jewish girl getting f*%#ed by an Arab is disturbing.
July 21, 2010, 5:37 pmAlessandra says:
It takes two to tango. They were both irresponsible in their different ways. A married man would have to go through a lot of fraud to deceive a woman who was determined to get to know him before she slept with him. Or if she insisted sex should be within marriage. Fraud could happen, but it’s different than sending a few emails, talk for half an hour, and it’s sex. That’s setting yourself up. And even for other kinds of crimes. And… he said something like, “I”m looking for a serious relationship, now let’s go up to the bedroom.” uh huh.
And I am not a lawyer, but if you hand over your child to the first stranger that walks past, couldn’t you be legally accused of something?
July 21, 2010, 5:38 pmAlessandra says:
There is a scandal in the French media about something like this right now, two celebrity soccer players, one under-age prostitute
July 21, 2010, 5:42 pmMatthew Carberry says:
yankee,
It’s not really the sex per se. Trusting, and voluntarily making yourself vulnerable, as sex uniquely does, to a stranger after only thirty minutes is unwise if not irresponsible.
There’s a difference between having a coffee at a public cafe with someone you just met and locking yourself in a room not your own, nude and at close quarters, with a stranger.
Just statistically you are much more likely to get hurt doing the latter than the former. If she had changed her mind and withdrawn consent, she’s now at a tremendous disadvantage.
There has to be some line between “blaming the victim” and simply recognizing patently stupid choices. If only as a learning opportunity.
July 21, 2010, 5:44 pmNI says:
As someone who once very nearly committed statutory rape because a minor told me he was legal, I have more than just a passing interest in that question. I could have gone to prison for someone else’s lie.
In a sane, rational world, being lied to about someone’s age should be a defense to statutory rape; that’s the only situation I know of in which a person can go to jail for being the victim of a fraud. I’m not sure it’s bad policy to only send people to jail who knew they were committing a crime. However, my second choice would be to prosecute the minor liar as well. At least that way a minor who puts an adult in that situation bears some of the risk.
July 21, 2010, 5:45 pmFredosaurus Rex Friday XIII says:
Makeup and breast implants also deceive men regarding a woman’s genetic quality.
July 21, 2010, 5:51 pmrb1971 says:
1. How you get anything other than oral sex out of such a claim I have no idea.
2. This reminds me of my favorite old Steve Martin bit about singing from your diaphragm. (“I mean, that could take years to learn!”)
July 21, 2010, 5:53 pmAlessandra says:
It is totally irresponsible to have sex with a stranger, it could get you killed, among other things. You also seem to be completely unaware that human beings have an entire emotional sphere to them, and the physical body is only one of the things they are responsible for.
Sex with strangers is obligatorily an act without a context of love, thus it’s loveless sex, thoroughly lacking in this most important aspect of life. In loveless sex with a stranger, there is a ridiculously superficial relationship, lacking in all the important things a committed, monogamous relationship offers, including trust, knowledge of the person, and care for them.
She is completely irresponsible and she is accountable for being irresponsible. Whether the matter involves sex or handing over your child to a stranger, or blindly giving money to the Madoff’s of the world, people who don’t want to know who they are dealing with have their share of blame in whatever happens.
July 21, 2010, 5:55 pmChris Travers says:
Actually, I think the issue is that lies by strangers shouldn’t be grounds for rape. “I’m a neurosurgeon, sleep with me” isn’t rape regardless of whether or not its true. Nor is “I love you” falsely said to entice a longer-standing relationship partner to have sex. There are cases where I think it can be (a doctor telling a woman that it’s the only way to apply a certain medication, for example) but that is a lie about the inherent nature of the act.
July 21, 2010, 6:14 pmBama 1L says:
Wow, seriously? Muslim males are circumcised. It is a religious obligation. Most men in America are circumcised, too, though mostly for hygienic reasons. Just in case you are wondering.
I don’t think that fits the context. Wouldn’t Israelis considered such a person a Mizrahic Jew and fellow Israeli, not an Arab? Israeli readers?
July 21, 2010, 6:23 pmFXKLM says:
So there was no rape because there was no “substantial entry.” I’m sure the poor guy’s friends had a lot of fun with that one.
July 21, 2010, 6:26 pmJohn Herbison says:
I am curious. Was Mr. Kashur circumcised?
July 21, 2010, 6:28 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Arabs can be Christians, too, or of other religions, or of no religion at all. Arab = Muslim simply isn’t true.
July 21, 2010, 6:37 pmAndy Rozell says:
I think that “fraud, duress or force” constitutes grounds for annulment under the Texas Family Code. that’s not quite a cause of action, but it does bring the concept of fraud in the inducement into the field of marriage. From there, you might be able to bootstrap a claim for damages along with the annulment.
This sounds a lot like the old common-law tort of seduction except that usually required a false promise of marriage and, at least originally, could only be brought by the woman’s father.
July 21, 2010, 6:37 pmyankev says:
Arab is ethnicity, but so is Jewish. One cannot be both Arab and Jewish unless one is an Arab who has converted to Judaism — in which case one’s ethnicity would become Jewish.
July 21, 2010, 6:38 pmyankev says:
Read the update:
July 21, 2010, 6:41 pmyankev says:
That’s because you don’t consider the very existence of Israel to be racist offense against humanity. Kamal does.
About Alessandra I have no knowledge.
July 21, 2010, 6:43 pmyankev says:
It would never go to court because of the risk that her family would murder her for having pre-marital sex; the fact that it was a Jew was just an aggravating factor. But if you have any evidence that an Arab raped by a Jew would not be protected by an Israeli court, or that the Jew would not be prosecuted, I’d be interested to hear it and will join you in expressing my outrage to whoever is responsible. On the other hand, Syrian courts have been known to dismiss rape claims brought by Jewish girls against Syrian men.
In Saudi or Jordanian courts it’s not an issue, because those countries do not allow Jews within their borders.
July 21, 2010, 6:48 pmyankev says:
If this man had been Jewish but married and therefore not a serious marriage prospect, does anyone doubt that the court would have reached the same result?
July 21, 2010, 6:49 pmyankev says:
No disagreement with you there.
July 21, 2010, 6:51 pmBama 1L says:
I don’t think it’s always been that simple. In Muhammad’s time, there were tribes of the Arabian peninsula who practiced Judaism but were otherwise much like their pagan neighbors in terms of language and non-religious culture. Weren’t they Jewish Arabs, as opposed to pagan Arabs or Muslim Arabs? If we were talking about, say, Germanic tribes in Europe at the same time, we would unproblematically say there were Christian Germans and pagan Germans.
There used to be substantial Arabic-speaking Jewish communities in the Middle East, really up until about 1967. Weren’t they Arab Jews, as opposed to German Jews or Spanish Jews? (Mirzahim/Ashkenazim/Sephardim)
So it is not crazy that there used to be some Arabs who were Jews and some Jews who were Arabs.
July 21, 2010, 6:53 pmyankev says:
Agreed on all points, but if the Arab is Muslim, wouldn’t he be circumcised?
July 21, 2010, 6:55 pmyankev says:
More likely a fairly typical “I’m not religious but I draw the line at intermarriage” situation. Less common among Jews than it used to be but still far from uncommon.
July 21, 2010, 6:57 pmyankev says:
Most Iraqis are Fari, not Arab. And Jews living in Iraq or Iran are neither. Their ethnicity is Jewish, not Arab and not Farsi. I know Jews who were born in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Morocco. Not one would tell you that they are Arab, or Farsi, or Syrian or Moroccan. And their neighbors in the old country felt the same way about them.
As the late I.B. Singer said in response to seeing himself described as a Polish Nobel Prize Winner, “The Poles did not consider us (the Jews) Poles and neither did we.”
If being Jewish were solely a matter of religious belief and not ethnicity, a lot of my friends and relatives would not be Jewish. This is a difficult concept for most Americans to grasp.
July 21, 2010, 7:02 pmyankev says:
No. If they were Jews, they were not Arabs. They were Mizrachi Jews.
It gets trickier in today’s nation states, where e.g. a Jew who lives in Syria would be described as a Syrian Jew. But ethnically he is Jeiwsh, not Syrian, even though by (second class) citizenship he may be Syrian.
July 21, 2010, 7:09 pmRich Rostrom says:
Several posters have raised the issue of a man pretending to be unmarried in order to seduce a woman. I suspect such a man would be convicted under this Israeli law.
There could be some other weird configurations. Some women have perverse attractions – to gangsters, or to exotic “oppressed” ethnics. A Jewish Israeli might pose as Palestinian to get in the pants of some hyper-leftist Israeli Jewess. Or the plot of Indiscreet (1958; Cary Grant and Ingrid Grant) in which a woman who has affairs only with married men is wooed by a scheming bachelor.
Another issue could be transsexuality. Most people would sympathize with a man who unknowingly became involved with a transsexual. However, there are also “tranny chasers”, who could be defrauded by a born woman.
That of course is dependent on the possibility of a man’s consent to sex being viewed as a potential surrendered good, like a woman’s.
July 21, 2010, 7:51 pmRich Rostrom says:
Yankev: “a Jew who lives in Syria would be described as a Syrian Jew. But ethnically he is Jewish, not Syrian, even though by (second class) citizenship he may be Syrian.”
There is an enclave of about 75,000 “Syrian Jews” in Brooklyn. They are almost exclusively descended from Jewish immigrants from Syria. Since 1935 they have rejected all intermarriage, even with other Jews unless they can show at least three rabbinically certified generations of Jewish ancestry.
July 21, 2010, 8:04 pmAnatid says:
It’s all in the language you use, and the tone with which you present this opinion. A lot of people seem to have a hard time getting their phrasing right so as to walk this line properly. A lot of people have no interest in walking this line, because in their minds, there isn’t so big a distinction.
Alessandra, statistically, the majority of rapes and sexual abuses are committed by acquaintances or even loved ones, not by strangers. Knowing and trusting someone doesn’t protect you from rape.
Since you talk about humans as emotional creatures, then surely you know that the psychosocial and biohormonal (I think I just made myself feel dirty writing those two words) methods by which we come to trust another human being often have very little to do with whether or not that person is trustworthy. About 20% of the population, across a few types of studies, seems to be unreasonably agreeable, compliant, and even gullible.
Not that having sex with total stranger isn’t a bad idea. But, say, three or four dates won’t necessarily give you the information you need to make the kind of decision you’re talking about (the beauty of skilled liars is you rarely notice when you’ve met them, but I assure you, you’ve met them), and us indecent liberals really don’t see anything wrong with two adults casually hooking up on the fourth date.
July 21, 2010, 8:08 pmJohn says:
“Rubinstein said the question was also whether an ordinary person would expect such a woman to have sex with a man without the false identity he created. ”
So if she looks wholesome, its rape but if she dresses skimpy, she had it coming?
July 21, 2010, 8:38 pm*cough* Double-standard *cough*
Bama 1L says:
Yankev, will you please state your definitions of “Jew” and “Arab”? Isn’t a Jew an adherent of Judaism, or descendant of adherents of Judaism? Isn’t an Arab someone who speaks Arabic as mother tongue?
Some of the pre-Islamic Jewish Arabic tribes I mentioned said that they had converted to Judaism (from paganism) and traced their descent through Ishmael. How would they have stopped being Arabs? They certainly thought of themselves as Arabs.
For that matter, did the Khazars stop being Turks when they converted to Judaism?
I think this opposition of Jew to Arab (and everything else) is too much a product of, on the one hand, twentieth-century Arab-Jewish conflict, and on the other, the European notion that the Jew is always a foreigner and therefore only a Jew regardless of other characteristics. We don’t talk about any other ethnic group this way.
July 21, 2010, 9:11 pmBama 1L says:
Could you define “Farsi” as well? Most Iraqis speak Arabic. The CIA World Factbook lists Iraq’s population as 75-80% Arabic.
July 21, 2010, 9:17 pmAlessandra says:
Tell that to all the people who were killed or raped by strangers. “Statistically speaking, what happened to you is not a problem, you see, because it was by a stranger…”
Anatid: Knowing and trusting someone doesn’t protect you from rape.
Good God, the level of absurdity. We have to even argue this? Unless someone is completely mentally disturbed, they will not interact with someone they know is dangerously violent. Knowing someone in the sense of having met them is not the same as knowing more about the person, including information that can help one make sound decisions in protecting oneself.
Anatid: Since you talk about humans as emotional creatures, then surely you know that the psychosocial and biohormonal (I think I just made myself feel dirty writing those two words) methods by which we come to trust another human being often have very little to do with whether or not that person is trustworthy.About 20% of the population, across a few types of studies, seems to be unreasonably agreeable, compliant, and even gullible.
And your point is that they are genetically configured to be like this? Tell me, there is a gullibility gene right next to the homosexuality gene, is it?
Anatid: “But, say, three or four dates won’t necessarily give you the information you need to make the kind of decision you’re talking about (the beauty of skilled liars is you rarely notice when you’ve met them, but I assure you, you’ve met them), and us indecent liberals really don’t see anything wrong with two adults casually hooking up on the fourth date.”
Of course, you don’t. Liberals aren’t capable of having a clue about how much they lack quality in their personal (loveless, trustless, and not all that infrequently phony or exploitative) little hookups.
Anatid: (the beauty of skilled liars is you rarely notice when you’ve met them, but I assure you, you’ve met them)
In terms of dating, that is so true. Cause all women are stupid and gullible, specially when talking to a man who patently lacks quality in his attitudes and behaviors about women, sex, and relationships. uh huh. I would never notice it. It’s so hard.
July 21, 2010, 9:20 pmAnatid says:
Right now you’re implying we should tell all the people who were raped or killed by friends, family members, co-workers, classmates, etc. that they should have known better. Because you should be able to tell who’s a potential rapist just by talking to them.
How many teenagers stay in homes with abusive parents? How many spouses stay in homes with abusive partners, and return to them, over and over again? Do you define all of these people as “completely mentally disturbed?”
For that matter, how do you “know” someone is dangerously violent? Most of the people I’ve known who’ve committed battery (or, for a few people I’ve known, rape or murder) seemed like perfectly charming, well-behaved folks if you were to chat with them for half an hour. Or know them for a decade, if you weren’t the target of their abuse.
Personal tidbit: My parents have been married for thirty years. I was the one who had to tell my father that my mother’s father abused her as a child, because she never once breathed a word of it to him.
How well do you have to know someone before you know them?
Man, it’d be nice if human psychology was as black-and-white as “this is genetic, and this other thing isn’t, and if you have this gene you WILL have this outcome.” I’d be out of a job.
But it’s not. Look up epigenetics, developmental programming, and behavioral programming. None of these things are genetic, but all are imbued from parent to child very early in life and are largely stable lifelong.
(And what is your preoccupation with homosexuality? That has nothing to do with this.)
It’s kinda amazing … in the thread on the woman who strangled her daughter with a scarf, you show incredible insight into the human condition. And then you say stuff like this.
Of course all liberals must be the same! Just like all conservatives are middle-class white gun-toting racist Southern Baptists. Man, it’s fun to play the overgeneralization game. Or maybe we could stop?
As I say in pretty much every thread I post in, human variation is vast. What is true for one human is not true for other humans. For a myriad of genetic, epigenetic, developmental, psychological, social, cultural, and situational reasons, some humans place great emotional weight on sex and others do not. Please give the other six-and-a-half billion humans on this planet the benefit of the doubt that they might not be the same as you.
In terms of life, it’s true. I have no idea why you interpreted this to apply to just women.
To be a convincing liar, all you have to do is believe that you are telling the truth, either partially or wholly. Humans are great at denial. Humans are great at self-deception, and therefore, at deception. The notion that this might extend into dating isn’t a radical one.
July 21, 2010, 9:56 pmFub says:
Poor man’s opera.
July 21, 2010, 10:08 pmRicardo says:
It would be more accurate to call those residents of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza who are not Jews as Middle Eastern (or Eastern Mediterranean) Gentiles. But this gets shortened to “Arab” for practical reasons. I would imagine the Armenian and Greek Orthodox populations of Jerusalem and the West Bank would not call themselves Arab.
Back on topic, the issue here is that the law treats sex more like a commodity than an aspect of social relationships. If I falsely claim to be Jewish or a neurosurgeon and get invited to dinner at someone’s house, I don’t think I’ve committed a crime (unless I impersonate someone — then I suppose that could be trespass). If I get someone to pay me by claiming to be someone I’m not, then that’s fraud.
So the question here is why is sex treated more like giving someone money than inviting them to dinner?
Plus, in fraud, doesn’t a judge or jury need to find that the lie was about a material fact? What constitutes a “material fact” in a sexual relationship and why would we want courts deciding this? Is pretending to have a job when you are unemployed and living with your parents fraud when it comes to sex? What if you say you went to Harvard when you actually went to Boston College?
July 21, 2010, 10:24 pmStrict says:
I think Yankev was trying to say that most Iraqis are Persian ["Farsi" in English usually just refers to the Persian language, not to people or an ethnicity].
That’s wrong.
Yankev is also wrong that all Muslims are circumcised. As a general matter most Muslim males are circumcised, but not all. If I had to guess I’d say 98%? Some Chinese Muslims [Hui, Salar, Uyghur, Utsul etc] don’t do it, but even there most probably do despite government prohibitions. Cham Muslims do it symbolically – not “nick”/”pinprick”/”one drop of blood” symbolically, but completely symbolically.
I think Yankev is also wrong that Arab and Jew are mutually exclusive identities. But I’m not a believer that Jew is an exclusive identity – I believe someone can be an American Jew, or a white Jew, or an Ethiopian Jew [Beta Israel], etc.
[Edit] Yankev is also wrong that Jordan does not allow Jews within its borders. At this moment there are Jewish tourists in Jordan.
July 21, 2010, 10:31 pmrachamim ben ami says:
If HE was Jewish, and SHE Arab, no, he would not have been convicted because he would have been murdered post haste.
Arabs have raped the land, the religion and the culture of Jews for more than 1400 years, is the fact that they have also raped Jews themselves so difficult to understand?
That is the cultural connotation. Luckily for our system in Israel these things did not play a part in the verdict. Legal Precedent involving Jewish on Jewish Fraud did.
July 21, 2010, 10:39 pmOrenWithAnE says:
And yet somehow the vast majority of rape victims have interacted with a person that turned out to be dangerously violent. So either their are mentally disturbed or it is difficult to read someone’s mind and predict what they will do in some hypothetical future.
July 21, 2010, 10:52 pmRicardo says:
This is exactly the problem. Explicitly offering something in exchange for sex and failing to deliver is one thing. I can see the argument for treating that as fraud.
But in this case, the only thing the guy was offering was companionship. It takes a judge to reason that his non-Jewishness was a material fact. If this same reasoning applies to concealing a material fact (as it does in financial transactions), in a country with lots of anti-Semitism, a Jew could be convicted of rape for concealing his Jewish identity from the woman.
That’s why people are fascinated with this case. The reasoning seems to allow for some horribly ugly outcomes if it is applied universally.
July 21, 2010, 11:14 pmAlessandra says:
Or you can continue to insist that everybody is a nitwit without any ability to detect lies, hypocrisy, or manipulation, ever.
“How many teenagers stay in homes with abusive parents?”
Anatid, you know very well that this is a totally different situation than two adults who made another type of choice. Minors are not adults, and they have serious dependency issues.
“How many spouses stay in homes with abusive partners, and return to them, over and over again?Do you define all of these people as “completely mentally disturbed?”For that matter, ”
Some are, some aren’t. If you are living with a dangerously violent person, either you are disturbed yourself, or there are other constraints at play that obstruct your ability to get out of the situation. People who are not shackled by these constraints DO NOT stay.
“how do you “know” someone is dangerously violent?Most of the people I’ve known who’ve committed battery (or, for a few people I’ve known, rape or murder) seemed like perfectly charming, well-behaved folks if you were to chat with them for half an hour.”
For half an hour, that is certainly possible. Unless you have serious issues in getting to know people at a more profound level, that doesn’t mean everyone else is so incapable.
Anatid: “Or know them for a decade, if you weren’t the target of their abuse.”
In this case, the woman was the target of the abuse. If she didn’t have the same stupid attitudes about sex that liberals hail, today she would not have been upset about being “raped.” (or deceived into having sex. I also agree that calling this ‘rape’ banalizes the experiences of women that are really raped.)
Anatid: “Personal tidbit: My parents have been married for thirty years.I was the one who had to tell my father that my mother’s father abused her as a child, because she never once breathed a word of it to him.How well do you have to know someone before you know them?”
If your mother had been trying to abuse your father, or one of her children, how long before he should have caught on?
Anatid: “(And what is your preoccupation with homosexuality?That has nothing to do with this.)”
cross-thread comment, given how many homosexuality fundamentalists comment on this forum
“Of course all liberals must be the same!”
Liberals do have, in general, some across-the-board attitudes and values. Normalizing and beautifying “hook-ups” is a liberal thing. That is irresponsible.
anatid: “In terms of life, it’s true.I have no idea why you interpreted this to apply to just women.”
Because you wrote “you bla bla.” I am a woman.
anatid: “To be a convincing liar, all you have to do is believe that you are telling the truth, either partially or wholly.Humans are great at denial.Humans are great at self-deception, and therefore, at deception.The notion that this might extend into dating isn’t a radical one.”
Humans can be great at denial or at being alert, responsible, savvy, and intuitive.
But it’s true, liberals love to deceive themselves that their views on sex are great. Hookups are an irresponsible, lacking in quality, disrespectful format for relations which include sex. And then, when someone gets hurt or upset, liberals love to deceive themselves that it was all unavoidable, because women are so “gullible.” A social conservative woman in the same situation would not have been gullible or deceived, much less “tricked” into having sex. First, already during their first dates, she would want to know why the man was never free at weekends, and why she couldn’t call his home phone number during weekends or dinner time. Or lots of things along those lines, including why did he say he wanted a serious relationship, when he was immediately proposing they go have loveless sex. A liberal idiot, with irresponsible views about relationships, would not ask any of these and other questions. And then blame the man. Right.
Any woman could have exchanged a few emails on the internet with someone who pretended to be a nice guy, agreed to meet at a public place, and without leaving the meeting, then be kidnapped by a gang. That could happen, but it’s a totally different situation.
July 21, 2010, 11:23 pmAlessandra says:
turned out to be.
Not that the majority of victims knew they were interacting with rapists and chose to continue to put themselves at risk of being raped.
“So either their are mentally disturbed or it is difficult to read someone’s mind and predict what they will do in some hypothetical future.”
In a large percentage of date rape cases, for example, both rapist and raped were too drunk to read even their own minds, much less the other person’s. Another type of behavior that liberals love to glorify (getting drunk and having sex). So yeah, continue making excuses for everything, in order to avoid facing just how destructive and irresponsible liberals are about sex and relationships in many more ways than one.
Oh yes, and whose fault is it? The alcohol bottle cap.
July 21, 2010, 11:38 pmChris Travers says:
I can only guess that he got Iran and Iraq confused :-)
Apparently some people think this is easy to do.
July 21, 2010, 11:46 pmKirk Lazarus says:
You seem to be saying a Jew is an Arab who practises Judaism.
July 21, 2010, 11:52 pmRicardo says:
One of the more notorious pieces of Ba’athist propaganda in Iraq was a pamphlet proclaiming that Allah created three things in the world that He should not have: Persians, flies and Jews.
In Iran, I believe the locals there have similar racist quips about the neighboring Arabs being illiterate, provincial desert folk in contrast to the cultured and cosmopolitan Persians.
July 22, 2010, 12:12 amOrenWithAnE says:
You seem to fail at basic logic. If the majority of rape victims are assaulted by people they are acquainted with then (shockingly) you will find that most rape victims were, in fact, interacting with rapists.
I know this is confusing but bear with me for just a moment. People are both opaque and unpredictable. The upstanding citizen one day is having an affair the next or hiring a male prostitute for his vacation through Europe. Or maybe Argentina, it’s hard to keep them all straight (how’s that for a delicious pun). No one has ever demonstrated any sound manner to distinguish these people prior to their offense. Some are malevolent from the beginning and adept at hiding it, others are genuinely good people that will make errors of judgment or passion. Still others will just snap one day under pressure.
Telling rape victims not to associate with (future)-rapists is like telling the guy at the horse-racing track not to bet on the losing horse.
No, it’s the fault of the party who has sex with the other without or against consent. Agency, free will, that whole deal. No way around that.
July 22, 2010, 12:21 amMihai Martoiu Ticu says:
There are two arguments that might support Gideon Levy’s assertion. Let’s first assume that partisanship in Israel is at least as strong as in the U.S. It seems that background of the judge might be of high importance in cases of sexual harassment: “The probability that the decision would favor the plaintiff was only 16% when the case was heard by an older judge but 45% when heard by a younger judge. The probability that the decision would favor the plaintiff was only 18% when the case was heard by a judge who had been appointed by a Republican president but 46% when the judge had been appointed by a Democrat president.”, Kulik, C. T., Perry, E. L., and Pepper, M. B., “Here Comes the Judge: The Influence of Judge Personal Characteristics on Federal Sexual Harassment Case Outcomes”, Law and Human Behavior 27, 1 (2003), p. 69
That Israeli courts might be very biased in favor of the occupation is suggested by D. Kretzmer in.”The occupation of justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories.” Albany, State University of New York Press, (2002)
July 22, 2010, 12:34 amanonymous says:
Exactly.
July 22, 2010, 12:41 amMatt says:
In 1993, Georgetown’s Mike Seidman, while visiting Harvard Law School, ended a 1L CrimLaw discussion of fraud-procured sex by asking about this hypo: “I love you.” The class laughed uproariously for 5-10 seconds as he stood there smiling, knowing he had killed us. 17 years later, I still remember it. That Israeli judge got it wrong.
July 22, 2010, 1:49 amKen Arromdee says:
That’s like saying that it’s safer to jump in an active volcano than to take a shower because fewer people die in active volcanoes than in showers.
Most rapes are committed by acquaintances because most personal interactions are with acquaintances. This does not mean that an acquaintance is as dangerous as a stranger, it means that if you want to make a comparison, you need to compare the danger per encounter–not the absolute numbers–so as not to be skewed by the fact that we interact with acquaintances a lot more. The way you are doing it is lying with statistics.
July 22, 2010, 2:34 amObserver says:
Kamal wrote: “If you can show me a reverse instance of this, in Israel, i’d be amazed beyond words.”
Prosecution likely depends on the woman bringing a complaint.
July 22, 2010, 3:03 amObserver says:
bw wrote: “Israeli law is now the mirror image of Sharia law.”
I don’t remember reading about his being stoned. You must have an agenda. I also point you to the poster who gave equivalent UK cases, above.
In fact, Israel’s Criminal Code Paragraph 345(a)(2) that defines rape says:
הבועל אשה –
בהסכמת האשה, שהושגה במרמה לגבי מיהות העושה או מהות המעשה;
“A male who has sex with a woman with her consent, which was elicited with deceit about the essence of the perpetrator or essence of the act”.
Thus the judge had no choice about the matter as it clearly fell under the statute; he deceived her as to marriage status (he was married) and as to religion, both part of the “essence” of a relationship. Racism may not be involved at all.
I suppose it will be appealed in any case.
July 22, 2010, 3:12 amObserver says:
Bama wrote: “There used to be substantial Arabic-speaking Jewish communities in the Middle East, really up until about 1967. Weren’t they Arab Jews, as opposed to German Jews or Spanish Jews? (Mirzahim/Ashkenazim/Sephardim)”
Most Sephardim and Mizrahim reject the concept of “Arab Jews.” They are confirmed in their rejection by the criteria of language, values, culture, history, and genetics. They are non-Arab Semites. For example, a number of genetic studies have found Sephardim, Mizrahim, and Ashkenazim closest first to each other, and only after that similar to Palestinians, Syrians, and Kurds.
Q.v. Druze and Kabyles.
July 22, 2010, 3:24 amObserver says:
Mihai wrote: “That Israeli courts might be very biased in favor of the occupation is suggested by D. Kretzmer”
The case description said nothing about the territories or the occupation. It is quite possible both indidviduals were Israeli citizens/residents.
July 22, 2010, 3:32 amAlessandra says:
That’s not the only lying going on. The fallacy in their argument is: “just because humans can’t know everything there is to know, they will always know nothing.” “Just because humans can’t predict every action, they can never foresee or prevent anything.”
hah.
The concept of responsibility or negligence in such a case, then obviously disappears for the woman, because liberals must normalize their harmful personal relationship attitudes in the name of freedom. And now, ironically enough, to further their “argument,” women are constructed as almost retarded, completely incapable of analyzing if a certain course of action would put them at risk for a variety of harmful consequences.
July 22, 2010, 4:26 amAlessandra says:
Let’s just throw out the disingenuous propaganda and throw in some more honest information for a second.
Among female rape victims, more than 60% are under age 18. 22% of females raped are under the age of 12 years. These minors did not choose to go have sex with a stranger some place downtown. Usually, these are cases of assault and child abuse, in the sense that the child is trapped in a situation where they had no choice to be there, exactly because they are minors. Furthermore, they did not take any course of action to put themselves at risk, quite on the contrary.
Furthermore, 83% of those raped are under the age of 25 years old. If women were all clueless and unable to analyze risk, as you claim, the rape stats would be even for all ages. Minors and young people are often forced to live and interact with violent people. The more choice a woman has on selecting who she interacts with, the more she can protect herself.
There is a difference in taking actions where you blatantly put yourself at risk, and being caught up in a situation where you did nothing in that regard.
As a liberal, shockingly, you can’t grasp the difference.
July 22, 2010, 4:48 amAlessandra says:
Ken Arromdee says:
Anatid: Alessandra, statistically, the majority of rapes and sexual abuses are committed by acquaintances or even loved ones, not by strangers.
That’s like saying that it’s safer to jump in an active volcano than to take a shower because fewer people die in active volcanoes than in showers.
Most rapes are committed by acquaintances because most personal interactions are with acquaintances. This does not mean that an acquaintance is as dangerous as a stranger, it means that if you want to make a comparison, you need to compare the danger per encounter–not the absolute numbers–so as not to be skewed by the fact that we interact with acquaintances a lot more. The way you are doing it is lying with statistics.
July 22, 2010, 5:05 am=============
Or like saying to children that they should go talk to strangers, because “statistics show that children are safer with strangers than with people they know, since more rapes are committed by acquaintances.”
Alessandra says:
I am very sure that this is what you would tell young women, especially the date raped ones. Got drunk and raped? It’s that losing horse thing. Go out, get drunk and see if you get raped again. Try it over and over again, no matter how many times you get raped. Because there is nothing you can do to figure out you might be doing something wrong here. Not as far as the twisted mind of a liberal goes anyways.
July 22, 2010, 5:16 amDavid Schwartz says:
The fallacy is in thinking that placing some blame on the victim in any way diminishes the perpetrator’s. This is easier to see with an example that’s not emotionally charged.
Say you leave a contractor working on your house when you go to work. You warn him that you live in a high-theft area and it’s important that he lock the door and slide the keys underneath when he’s done. He leaves the house unlocked and you get robbed.
We can certainly blame the contractor. Leaving the house unlocked was a stupid thing to do, he knowingly put you at risk of being robbed, and he is responsible for your damages.
However, this in no way diminishes the burglar’s responsibility. And he certainly cannot say “don’t blame me, it was the contractor’s fault”.
Leaving the door unlocked is idiotic and makes you in part responsible for the robbery. However, this in no way diminishes the burglar’s responsibility. There is simply more blame to go around in the case where multiple parties are at fault. Same thing here.
July 22, 2010, 6:02 amAnatid says:
Alessandra. Calm down. I know you’re a smart person, and right now you’ve gone way too far. Take a deep breath, try to work past whatever personal experiences you’ve had that are clearly fueling this blind rage, and maybe we can talk more tomorrow after you’ve gotten some rest.
I’d really like to continue this conversation, if you’re able to interact.
July 22, 2010, 6:29 amDavid M. Nieporent says:
Good point! Because, clearly, Israeli judges are bound by what’s taught in first year crim law classes in another country!
July 22, 2010, 8:18 amUrsus Maritimus says:
“I’m not religious but I draw the line at intermarriage”
“Thats ok honey, I’m just looking for a one night stand!”
July 22, 2010, 9:21 amyankev says:
And if you said they were Syrians, or that they had more in common with Syrians than with other Jews, what would their reaction be?
Thank you for illustrating my point.
July 22, 2010, 9:32 amOrenWithAnE says:
Either that or rapists have a strong preference for younger and more attractive victims.
This assumes that the risk is foreseeable.
I don’t know how you concluded that this is what I would advise, so I’m responding only to categorically deny that this is at all what I said and give you a chance to try again at reading comprehension.
July 22, 2010, 10:07 amDavid Schwartz says:
So the legal rule is whether or not the deception constitutes “critical matters to a reasonable woman”? So the court found that a reasonable woman would consider the religion of a potential sexual partner to be critical?
This seems to fail the giggle test. Sure someone might care about the religion of someone they are marrying, but why would they care about the religion of someone they’re sleeping with on the first date? That’s like arguing that how much the CEO of McDonald’s gets paid is critical to my decision to work there as a cashier.
July 22, 2010, 10:26 amyankev says:
No. My definition of Jew is the same as that applied by Jewish law. We believe it was given to Moses by G-d at Sinai. Whether or not you accept that belief, it can be documented that the definition goes back at least 2600 years, well before the Arab-Israeli conflict and European anti-Semitism, which you mistakenly posit as being at the root of the question. Very simply, a Jew is someone who was born to a Jewish mother (which accounts for Jews who do not adhere to the Jewish religion, and whose family may not have gone generations without adherents to the Jewish religion) or someone who validly converts to Judaism in accordance with Jewish law.
No, ethnically speaking, an Arab is soemone descended from the tribes that originally inhabited the Arabian peninsula. Egyptians and (I believe) Berbers both speak Arabic as a mother tongue, but neither group is ethnically Arab. If you visit Dearborn, you can meet quite a few Arab Americans who speak English as their mother tongue. They are American citizens, but their ethnicity is Arab.
By becoming Jews.
No, they certainly thought of themselves as Jews. See the Rambam’s letter to a community of converts (sorry, I forget exactly where) in North Africa or the middle east, reassuring them that they are every bit as Jewish as someone descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (for your convenience, I am using the Greek translations of the names of my forefathers, rather than their actual names).
Yes. Does a Canadian stop being a Canadian when he is naturalised as an American?
I’m sure you do, but you are mistaken.
That is because Jews are the only ethnic group whom it is possible to join voluntarily. The closest parallel I am aware of is various indigenous North American peoples such as the Lakota or the Cheyenne who allowed others to join their people as adopted members.
July 22, 2010, 10:31 amyankev says:
My mistake, maybe because the few non-Jewish Iraqis I met were quite vehement that they were Farsi (ethnically Persian) rather than Arab. If you referred to them as Arab, they corrected you immediately.
July 22, 2010, 10:33 amyankev says:
You are correct; I had forgotten that Jordan finally signed a peace treaty allowing Jews to set foot in that country. They are still not permitted to live or own property there AFAIK.
July 22, 2010, 10:36 amyankev says:
Sorry that you so misread what I wrote. I don’t even know where to begin unscrambling that one for you.
July 22, 2010, 10:38 amChris Travers says:
I don’t have close knowledge of this policy so I am asking. Did the old policy ban all Jews from visiting Jordan or only Israeli Jews? If an American or European wanted to visit Jordan, would he/she be asked about Jewish ancestry or identity? What about Iranian Jews?
July 22, 2010, 10:39 amyankev says:
Yes. One of the many dangers of an activist court. The same court has also dictated religious standards about which they have not the slightest qualification to rule, and have threatened to jail Rabbis (and HAVE jailed religious parents) for failing to follow the court’s perversion of Jewish religious standards.
For Kamal and all those falsely crying ‘racism’ instead of ‘judicail overreaching’, you cannot point to a single instance of an Israeli secular court trying to dictate what ministeres, imams, mullahs or priests can and cannot, or must and must not, teach.
July 22, 2010, 10:43 amDave N. says:
Does anyone know the Hebrew for “Caveat Emptor”?
July 22, 2010, 10:44 amMenachem Mendel says:
The Israeli Court Director just put out a statement saying that the court was only interpreting the law, a law, I would add, that has been on the books for decades. In the Israeli Penal Code (par. 345), one of the definitions of rape is when the act occurs “with the woman’s consent, that was achieved fraudulently with relation to the personal characteristics of the actor or the essence of the act.” This is my translation, so the legalize may be wrong. The original can be found here. For Hebrew speakers, see this blog post. Court opinions are usually published within a few days here, but I don’t think that this one has been posted.
July 22, 2010, 11:07 amyankev says:
All. Deborah Lipstadt, an American Jew, wrote an intersting account of entering Jordan before 1967 to visit the Western Wall; she had to pose as a Christian to do so.
July 22, 2010, 11:32 amMr. Comet says:
Yankev-
I think the question of who qualifies as Jewish (race wise) is an interesting one. Do you believe in the halakha position of matrilineal decent or the more liberal position that children born to a Jewish father and Gentile mother be considered Jewish? Also I read an article a while back that it is very hard for converts to Judaism ,who don’t have matrilineal Jewish heritage, to be classified as Jews by the Israeli government.
The case is pretty ridiculous though, I mean the Defendant claims the only lies he told were that his name was Dudu (colloquial in Israel as a Jewish name for David). I have a Jewish friend whose last name is often used by many Arabs, I guess he would be prosecuted in Israel if he ever told Arab ladies only his last name…
July 22, 2010, 11:54 amyankee says:
I believe this is because the Orthodox have control over legally recognized conversions in Israel. Reform or even Conservative conversions are not good enough for the Israeli government, and unsurprisingly the Orthodox have more rigorous requirements.
July 22, 2010, 11:58 amOrenWithAnE says:
Yes and no. The SCOI has ruled that, at least for the purpose of registration by the Interior Ministry, the government must recognize all converts. There is a similar amendment to the Law of Return and accompanying Supreme Court case.
Oddly, the LoR allows for many categories of olim that are not recognized as Jewish by the Rabbinate — leading to the odd situation that an individual is entitled to citizenship but not to be married in Israel. Of course, Cyprus is a short boat ride away and Cypriot marriages are recognized so Israelis prefer to do that instead of causing undue friction.
July 22, 2010, 12:11 pmOrenWithAnE says:
I should add that, within Israel, only conversions by the Rabbinate are accepted.
July 22, 2010, 12:12 pmLehuster says:
LOL, she’s been pwning your ass throughout this whole thread, with tremendous logic and common sense, and the best you can do is dismiss her arguments as “blind rage”? How pathetic. If the conversation continues, you’ll have to do better than that, but somehow I doubt you’ll be able to.
July 22, 2010, 12:15 pmMatthew Carberry says:
That’s hardly regional. =) Though in the West we’ve gotten a little less stabby about it, at least lately… mostly…
The British Isles are composed of four races of man:
July 22, 2010, 12:22 pm. . . the Scottish, who keep the Sabbath–and everything else they can get their hands on.
. . . the Welsh, who pray on their knees–and on their neighbours.
. . . the Irish, who don’t know what they want, but are willing to fight for it anyway.
. . . and the English, who consider themselves a race of self-made men, thereby relieving the Almighty of a terrible burden.
tom952 says:
What world does this guy come from? Perhaps he thinks his wife let him in because of the virtue of his C.V.
Women do not consent to sex based on a rational consideration of representations made by prospective partners; when they are in the mood, so to speak, they find a man to seduce them. A standard that required critical vetting of precoupling representations would drastically lower the birth rate.
July 22, 2010, 12:27 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
This situation is why many Israelis objected to the removal of ethnicity from the national ID card a decade ago. Either the movement to remove it succeeded (of all people, Ariel Sharon supported it), or the victim in this case was too drunk or horny to check it.
July 22, 2010, 12:28 pmBama 1L says:
Thanks for your long and thoughtful answers.
Your point that I quote is, to me, the most interesting one. People who study historical ethnography say that a great number of ethnic groups at least used to be this way; in, say, fifth-century Europe it was possible to become a Goth or a Frank or whatever. (This is the ethnogenesis school currently very influential in late antique studies.) We also see this in contemporary societies we would describe as tribal, like the American Indians you indicate as well as cultures of Africa, New Guinea, etc. You join up with some people and fight alongside with them and adopt their customs and pretty soon they consider you one of them and even incorporate you and your family into their myth of origin. So maybe Jews are not so much an exception but rather the only ethnic group we actually encounter in industrialized society that follows some vestige of the more historic pattern.
Talking about modern notions of national citizenship doesn’t really help; really, it clouds the issue. This is particularly true of non-ethnic states to which allegiance is solely political; e.g., the United States and Canada. (Also, what about dual citizenship?)
With regard to Arabicity, we sometimes speak of the Arabization of the Middle East, Egypt, and North Africa, much as we speak of earlier Hellenization or Romanization (or Persification or Sinification elsewhere). This was a process complementary to Islamization, inasmuch as it affected people who never adopted Islam but did adopt the Arabic language and some aspects of Arabic culture. Now it is not controversial to describe a Christian from the Middle East as an Arab Christian even though, most likely, none of that person’s ancestors came from the Arabian peninsula. The same would be true of Jews in the area. So maybe “Arabized Jews”? E.g., what makes the Mizrahim Mizrahim and not Sephardim, Askhenazim, etc. if not the differing influences of their surrounding cultures?
I also note that, when the flag of Arab Nationalism (and Pan-Arabism) flew high and was directed toward positive goals (removal of colonial power, modernization, development), there were a few Jews associated with the movement, and of course Christians were very prominent. It is a sad legacy of history that Arab Nationalism changed into a tool of authoritarian governments and was replaced in the popular mind by various forms of Islamism and the worst kinds of anti-Semitism.
July 22, 2010, 12:34 pmhazemyth says:
Eugene Volokh:
I generally agree with Prof. Volokh’s skepticism but I think he’s putting the point a little too abstractly. It’s not a question of general principles but of specific, culturally received stereotypes. Certainly, in America, we had a very explicit imaginary of rapacious black men and virginal white women. I have read of a case in which some Israelis on the extreme right justified homicide as ‘self defense’ when they killed their daughters (admittedly) Palestinian suitor. I realize it’s not quite fair to submit this sole and rather salacious anecdote but it came to mind. I’m not sure how pervasive similar (if less violent) biases regarding Israeli/Palestinian sexuality might be.
Of course, the qualifiers here are key and people’s interpretations probably can’t help but be informed by ethnic tension in Israel. Is ethnicity a critical matter from a reasonable perspective?
July 22, 2010, 12:38 pmhazemyth says:
Also, it’s interesting that the prior ruling generally assumed the gender of the victim to be a woman. Another way that stereotypes may be in play.
July 22, 2010, 12:40 pmMatthew Carberry says:
Oren,
The statistics themselves make the risk foreseeable.
If most rapes involve acquaintances (which in the studies include people who have been introduced, even once, but are not necessarily “known” to the person in any real sense or over any real time) and involve alcohol to excess and further almost always occur after the victim and rapist have sequestered themselves (voluntarily or drunkenly) away from public view (all true) then “date rape” is a foreseeable risk.
It can be avoided in the majority of cases by not getting drunk and sequestering oneself out of public view with someone you don’t know very well. Further, few date rapes, if one examines the literature, are “blitz attacks”, they usually involve inappropriate lead-up behavior that if one is not drunk can be recognized in time to respond, most effectively simply by returning to a public area.
Its simple sociology and human behavior, not rocket science.
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/bonding_process.html
July 22, 2010, 12:51 pmMatt says:
Yankev, you missed my point. The 1L class argument is persuasive, not controlling.
The point is that courts are not well equipped to resolve questionss of what statements are sufficiently culpable to warrant criminal sanction. Except, if I remember right, at least one has held that a lie that has the same effect as a threat of force should be rape. (Very weird facts.)
In an ordinary fraud case in the USA, the government usually must prove the statement was knowingly false, material, and made with intent to defraud. Think about what the trial look like for a defendant (man or a woman) was charged with procuring sex through lies like “I love you,” “I am not in a relationship” (status), or “I’m a virgin” (status).
It’s also worth wondering how this Israeli decision might interact with the the religious bill under consideration by the Kenneset. What if only the super-Orthodox rabbis can define who’s a Jew and whether conversions are valid? What would a trial look like in a case with an accuser who only agreed to sex after the defendant said he/she was Jewish, and where each of the defendant’s grandparents was indeed Jewish … except the maternal grandmother?
That trial would look like a circus.
July 22, 2010, 1:15 pmAlessandra says:
Therefore “proving” that the comparison of a six-year-old rape victim who did not choose to go on a hook-up date to an adult woman who did is a completely bogus comparison. The same for using that comparison to “prove” the claim that women cannot foresee or analyze risk or take preventive measures about rape because “most rape victims know their perpetrators.”
If rapists have a preference for minors, it further shows your use of rape stats is hogwash, since minors are exactly at a much more disadvantaged stage for risk assessment or choice over their actions than adult women. They are also much less capable of defending themselves or suing perpetrators, or selecting who they interact with, which obviously is a major factor for being targeted for crimes. After ignoring all these variables, you claim that adult women cannot foresee any rape risk. So logical.
Thus you already excluded all the women who did foresee risk and who chose not to put themselves at risk in their dating behavior from your resulting victim group to make your great bogus claim.
You threw out numbers about victims who weren’t even on dates, then claimed that shows adult women cannot prevent rape in any way by their decisions on how to date or who to date. Right.
However, if you compare the number of women who did not choose to go have sex with a stranger to those who did, as in the Israeli case, the result for any claim of identity rape is zero for the first group, so total prevention based on risk analysis (and just plain, good attitudes about sex).
If you compare women who have reckless and risky attitudes about dating to the ones who don’t, the rape results also differ greatly. The emotional problems they complain of resulting from hook-up behavior as well.
July 22, 2010, 1:36 pmChris Travers says:
Historically “ethnicity” was defined by language and customs. If you learn the language and customs well, you can join. If not, no luck. I think that’s a normal human pattern.
July 22, 2010, 1:40 pmAlessandra says:
;-)
July 22, 2010, 1:47 pmChris Travers says:
I’d add that there is simply no historical basis for racism allegations against the Israeli court, though overreach is so bad that the court gets ignored way more often than it should. This is ESPECIALLY true in rulings which vindicate legal rights (perceived or real on the part of the court) of Arab-Israelis.
July 22, 2010, 1:47 pmyankev says:
Please don’t think that I defend the court’s decision in this case. If I gave the impression that I do, the impression was unintended. I do take objection to the automatic assumption that the court’s decision was racist or that a similar ruling would not have been made had circumstances been reversed. The Israeli court system has quite a few flaws but a favoritism for Jewish litigants against non-Jews is not one of them. (A favoritism for Christian and non-religious Jewish litigants over religious Jews, on the other hand, is.)
Exactly. Btw, did you see the post here a few weeks ago (by DB? EV?) about DNA studies of Eurponean and Spehardi Jews? The groups were much more closely linked genetically to one another than either was to any other group, including the non-Jewish populations they lived among.
Yes. That is the Jewish standard. Any other standard was adopted from non-Jewish religions or from declared enemies of the Jews — e.g. the Nazi definition that a Jew was anyone with a Jewish great grandparent (maternal or paternal) or the Stalinist definition of anyone with a Jewish parent.
That’s not quite the position of the Reform movement, which says that anyone with one Jewish parent is Jewish if that person has gone through a confirmation, bar mitzvah, or similar ceremony. The Reform position is adopted from non-Jewish sources and its adoption was opposed even by some of the faculty of HUC, the Reform rabbinic seminary. The Reform test excludes some who are Jewish according to Halacha (authentic Jewish law based on and embodied in the Torah) and includes others who are not. It was purely a political move, intended to bolster Reform’s declining membership.
First, all converts lack a matrilinel heritage or there would be no reason for them to convert; they would already be Jewish. The problem comes about for several reasons, including converts who are converted under Conservative auspices (who do not demand the same commitment to Jewish law that halacha does, e.g. they would convert someone who admits that he does not plan to stop driving on the Sabbath or eating sturgeon, because the Conservative movement mistakenly sees nothing wrong with either action), or the Reform movement, who require even less by way of commitment (they will covert someone who admits to not believing that the Torah was given by G-d at Sinai to the Jewish people) and who also do not require circumcision (for male converts) or immersion (which both halacha and Conservative Judaism require of all converts). The problem is compounded because for a variety of reasons there are people who want to convert for convenience, whether for purposes of marrying a non-religious Jew or otherwise, and who have no intention of observing Jewish law after conversion. Efforts to screen these people out can have unfortunate consequences for sincere converts as well.
No argument from me there.
July 22, 2010, 1:57 pmWell, he sure stepped in it that time. Which I suppose could even be short for Daoud as well as for Dovid, especially if he had Jewish or Arab friends with a sense of humor.yankev says:
Shades of R. Krumb’s Fritz the Kat –”Ever made it with an aardavark? It’s a wonderful opportunity for you; we’re endangered, you know.”
July 22, 2010, 1:59 pmAlessandra says:
I don’t think anyone is claiming the guy was right or blameless in doing what he did.
However, your analogy is not really fine-tuned, because in this case, if the woman hadn’t gone somewhere to have sex with a stranger, there would be no identity rapist.
I would be the first to say it would be nice if all the men who had even attempted to lie about themselves in order to get sex got some kind of a reprimand. Might teach them to be a little more honest, don’t you think?
Why is lying about his ethnicity different than the example cited about the guy lying that “he loved her?” The emotional harm and distress is even greater in the second example, unless we consider the woman here is a rabid racist (which she seems to be by the whole suit anyways).
July 22, 2010, 2:13 pmyankev says:
I should also mention that the Reform movement, who are the only ones who recognize patrilineal descent (and then only if the child has undergone a ceremony), as one of the central tenets of their belief, deny that being Jewish is anything other than a religious affiliation. Very early in their movement they jettisoned the entire belief in a Jewish ethnicity or nationhood.
July 22, 2010, 2:34 pmOrenWithAnE says:
Or the Knesset in 1970. Enemies of the Jews indeed.
July 22, 2010, 2:36 pmChris Travers says:
Anyway… I think the issue with rape is a vagueness thing. It’s one thing if someone actively resists or says “I don’t consent” or is rendered physically incapable of such things, but when you start saying would not have consented means did not consent, then there’s simply no line that can be drawn short of complete celibacy which keeps someone safe from prosecution.
July 22, 2010, 2:46 pmAlessandra says:
Oren: “Telling rape victims not to associate with (future)-rapists is like telling the guy at the horse-racing track not to bet on the losing horse. ”
Oren: “so I’m responding only to categorically deny that this is at all what I said and give you a chance to try again at reading comprehension.”
Maybe you could try reading your own comments sometime.
July 22, 2010, 3:13 pmDr. Evil says:
Quite a few comments here, but all seem to miss one important legal point. The court decision was based on a plea bargain between the state prosecution and the defence lawyers. The court approved the deal, as they tend to do when there is a plea bargain.
So, the discussion regarding the laws allowing to convict people who lie to get sex is meaningful. The discussion regarding possible prejudices and biases of the judge is not. (At least in this specific case.)
July 22, 2010, 3:18 pmOrenWithAnE says:
You have successfully quoted what I said but you remain in error about what you think I said. It is nigh on impossible to have a discussion with someone until they can accurately apprehend the point you are trying to make.
(1) It is difficult and unreliable to determine, a priori, who will be a rapist in the future. Both personal traits (which can be opaque) and circumstances (which are unpredictable) will factor into this. This is the origin of the ‘winning horse’ comment — that anyone that claims to be able to predict human behavior is either selling bogus goods or wasting an absolutely invaluable skill chatting on the internet.
(2) Rapists prefer people they know because they have far more opportunity to victimize them.
(2A) Rapists prefer younger victims because the latter are both more attractive and less able to resist/fight-back.
(3) My “advice to women” (note that I hadn’t given any advice to women prior to this posting, so I don’t know where you got the purported advice you claim I gave above but has nothing to do with what I wrote) is therefore pretty bland: you don’t know who will attempt to rape you so be vigilant all the time. Drink responsibly so that you can maintain that vigilance. Go out with a trust wingwoman. Carry mace as a last resort.
(4) The idea that because you cannot predict in advance who is prone to violence against women you should therefore just resign yourself to that violence is not only absurd, it is non sequitor.
You might as well write that since you cannot predict when there are going to be house-fires we should all just sit down and get burned. This is why we have smoke detectors, exits, structural requirements and fire departments — so that we can respond effectively.
July 22, 2010, 5:07 pmyankev says:
The Knesset adopted a definition as to who was eligible for citizenship under Law of Return. (The Father Daniel case some years earlier already adopted a non-halachic standard for Law of Return, ruling some Jews (those who had become meshumadim) ineligible.) Did the Knesseth purport to adopt a new definition of who is Jewish? Those are two very different things. Did they simply broaden the definition of conversion? That’s different as well.
And if they did adopt a different definition of who is Jewish, other than one born to a Jewish mother or properly converted, then yes, it was borrowed from enemies of the Jews. If it was an expansion over what constitutes valid conversion (as e.g. Conservative Judaism does), that is a separate issue.
July 22, 2010, 5:20 pmptt says:
Perhaps the man should have been sentenced to a time equal to that between his meeting the woman and her uh… surrender.
July 22, 2010, 5:23 pmOrenWithAnE says:
Indeed. There is even a third matter to distinguish here which is that the definition of who is Jewish need to be uniform between religious and secular contexts. In the former instance, I defer to the various religious bodies to decide how they see fit.
In the latter instance, however, the Miller precedent governs.
July 22, 2010, 6:28 pmAnatid says:
Thank you, Oren, for elucidating my point better than I could.
Look, nearly everything about human nature exists in shades of grey, and therefore predictions can be at best probabilistic. Most people have pretty good intuition, and most of the time most of their predictions will be correct. Every once in awhile, they’ll get a false positive or a false negative, and depending on the nature of the person they’re interacting with, this might or might not be dispelled by years of acquaintance.
You will never be right 100% of the time. Even when you run fMRI and microexpression recognition software, both under rigorously controlled circumstances, you can’t get lie detection accuracy above ~99%. And when the liar is lying to himself as well as to you, the accuracy rate goes through the floor. Although our heuristic systems are actually quite sensitive, and the nonlogical feeling of getting “the creeps” is usually quite accurate, it’s also got its failure rate. Even if only because all humans are not identical, so someone with unusual expressions and behaviors might be perceived incorrectly.
If the initial judgment of a person fails, or if subsequent adjustments to that judgment also prove insufficient, then respond appropriately. Strong, confident, assertive women have very little to fear. They don’t need to sequester themselves from the world to keep themselves safe, as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of women who engage in regular, casual sex without getting raped or experiencing any emotional damage. (Sorry for the stereotype, hazemyth, but 98% of rape victims are female. Although maybe because of the stereotype, PTSD rates are even higher among male rape victims than among female rape victims, due to lack of social support. It’s a tough world.)
Let’s say there are five overlapping categories:
(I’m going to use “they” instead of “you” here as the nonspecific singular third-person pronoun. Using “one” seems too formal for commenting and using “you” apparently was the source of angry misunderstanding upthread.)
1. People who did not get to control their social situation. This most definitely includes children who cannot leave a nasty domestic situation (upthread I said teens, not children, specifically because teens in dire enough situations can and often do run away from abusive homes). This could ostensibly also include people who are forced into contact with others while attending work or school.
2. People who make bad decisions that reduce their control of a social situation. This includes people who drink to incapacitation and then go somewhere alone with a near-total stranger.
3. People who guess wrong. Sometimes they’ll think someone is a creeper when the person is actually fine. Sometimes they’ll think someone has honorable intentions when the the person actually has more malicious intent. No matter how finely-tuned their intuitions may be, sometimes they’ll be wrong simply because people often give off misleading vibes. It happens.
4. The 20% of people whose attachment type predisposes them to victimhood. These are the ones who are overly passive, overly trusting. They won’t notice creeper vibes, or they won’t know how to respond properly if they do. They won’t assert themselves against an aggressor and won’t feel empowered to leave. They will often fall silent instead of saying “No.” They tend to unknowingly create situations that leave them vulnerable to exploitation – although, of course, unless they are with someone exploitative, exploitation will not occur.
5. People who re-evaluate after the fact and come to a different conclusion. This is where rape by fraud comes into the picture. What causes someone to re-evaluate? Quite simply, being in a different state of mind. Drunk versus sober, lonely versus interconnected, horny versus satiated, angry versus sad versus content … all of these these affect our perception, our judgment, our decisionmaking, our experience of reality and of ourselves. To use an extreme example, if you (nonspecific third person “you”) inject someone with oxytocin, the hormone of trust, they will serenely give away a hundred dollars to a stranger, confident that they’ll give it back and that nothing will go wrong.
We wouldn’t hold an oxytocin-injectee responsible for their decisions. What criteria should we use to decide which altered states are acceptable and which are not? And what the heck are we supposed to do with the unlucky 20% whose only real failing was to be raised by the wrong parents?
It takes a collision of factors for a rape to occur. Someone who drinks to excess but does not go anywhere alone with another person is unlikely to be raped. Someone who is a poor judge of character who hooks up with a near-total stranger but remains sober and assertive is unlikely to be raped. Someone who drinks to excess, is passive, and goes somewhere alone with a non-rapist is unlikely to be raped.
Personally, I’m still unclear on the exact reasons fueling rape convictions. It’s not based solely on the level of trauma the victim experiences, as individual variation is great. Non-rape sexual abuse (or simple ambiguous sexual situations) can still be highly traumatic, especially for that 20%. Some individuals will be more traumatized by identical events than others. But contraversely, intent of the aggressor doesn’t seem to be the key feature either – the deluded or mislead aggressor who legitimately does not realize that his object of interest has not offered consent, whether due to intoxication or lack of firm rejection or outright delusion, can still be convicted for rape.
How could we possible reduce this topic to black-and-white declarations? It’s vastly complicated.
July 22, 2010, 7:49 pmBob says:
The concept of rape by fraud must be provocative to those who proclaim that rape is all about violence and domination, not sexual pleasure.
July 22, 2010, 8:03 pmyankev says:
I just googled the 1970 amendment to the Law of Return. It is highly misleading at best to say that the amendment altered — or purported to alter — the definition of who is a Jew. The amendment extended the right of return to certain non-Jewish relatives of a Jew, Per Wikipedia,
The Knesseth in fact recognized that those relatives are NOT Jews; otherwise, they would have qualified in their own right.
As to your snarky dismissal of my observation that other definitions of who is Jewish derive from enemies of the Jews, Wikipedia notes that the expanded eligibility was intended to grant sanctuary to any — Jewish or not (my interpolation) — who would have been persecuted as a Jew under the Nurenberg laws. I rest my case.
July 22, 2010, 9:12 pmChris Travers says:
That may depend on state legal definitions of rape. If inebriation is enough to void consent as it is in, I think, California, there’s no reason to think there’s a substantial gender gap.
One key element of the law though needs to be that there are reasonably clear boundaries which one can stay on the right side of and not be prosecuted. The problem with saying that rape-by-deception or even inebriation abates consent is that it makes any and all sexual activity potentially criminal.
IMO that is a major problem. I’d HOPE there are greater scienter/mens rea requirements than that in US law. Otherwise I think the courts would have to throw rape statutes out as void for vagueness.
July 23, 2010, 12:17 amAlessandra says:
And there is your major bogus claim right there. Analyzing, evaluating, and predicting risk of human behavior are all possible and quite real competencies that humans can have. Which is one reason why we have terms like “reckless,” “negligent,” and “irresponsible” applied to attitudes and behaviors in how people assess and interact with others. Personal traits can vary as to how opaque they are. In a great number of situations, they are not completely opaque. And there are an endless number of circumstances and situations which are quite predictable. Risk analysis is based on accessible information in a million of these situations.
You are just repeating your ludicrous claim that since humans “can’t predict every crime, they can basically never predict neither risk, nor crimes.” Furthermore, you are repeating the most ridiculous claim that humans are incapable of knowing others in various degrees, and consequently, according to your lunacy, real knowledge about others is either 1) impossible, or 2) completely useless in life.
And what do you offer as proof for your claim that women are all basically retarded and incapable of assessing personal risk? If there were more 10 yr olds raped than 40 yr olds, than “it proves that adult women cannot assess any risk of rape.” Exactly how you arrived at such a loony conclusion through that particular statistics comparison is not particularly detailed in your comments. Or “if rapists prefer minors, than it proves that adult women cannot assess any risk of rape.” The logic of a lunatic.
(2) Rapists prefer people they know because they have far more opportunity to victimize them.
I don’t see how this proves that women are basically incapable of assessing risk in any situation.
As a side remark, adult men usually know many more women than minors. Thus if rapists simply preferred “people they knew” as a target choice, they would rape a lot more adult women. They don’t.
(2A) Rapists prefer younger victims because the latter are both more attractive and less able to resist/fight-back.
I don’t see how this proves that women are basically incapable of assessing risk in any situation.
The fact that younger victims are less able to resist or fight does not in any way show that women are incapable of getting to know people, nor assessing or predicting risk in personal situations. Another bogus red-herring argument.
(3) My “advice to women” (note that I hadn’t given any advice to women prior to this posting, so I don’t know where you got the purported advice you claim I gave above but has nothing to do with what I wrote) is therefore pretty bland: you don’t know who will attempt to rape you so be vigilant all the time. Drink responsibly so that you can maintain that vigilance. Go out with a trust wingwoman. Carry mace as a last resort.
Oh sure, you weren’t giving advice. You just said that it was stupid to tell women they aren’t completely retarded. Quite directly though, you are telling women that they ARE NOT able to have knowledge about others, to asses risk, and to make prevention-related choices, because according to you, adult women are incapable of all of the above. And the grand basis for such an idiotic reasoning is a couple of lunatic statistical comparisons and two red herrings. Nice.
(4) The idea that because you cannot predict in advance who is prone to violence against women you should therefore just resign yourself to that violence is not only absurd, it is non sequitor.
That is so right. We are all stupid. We cannot predict in advance any kind of human behavior, including violent ones. And we cannot predict any high-risk situation in any context. It takes a lot of intelligence to presume this, but some people manage it.
If a 22-year-old decided to marry, what would you give as a gift? A 24/7 SWAT team? As you say, women are too stupid to know anything about men, so they are always at risk of rape. We can’t leave a young woman alone with a man in a house in that case, can we?
July 23, 2010, 12:21 amErik says:
Probably not. They would likely see fraud and deception as a form of psychological domination. The rapist who tricked the victim believing himself to be better, smarter, etc…
July 23, 2010, 12:27 amAnatid says:
To paraphrase, Alessandra, your argument seems to be:
“You say that people cannot always tell with complete certainty whether a person is a rapist, therefore you are saying that women are idiots who can never make a single correct judgment about anymore.”
It sure is easy to take a probabilistic, shades-of-grey claim, turn it into something black-and-white, and denounce the black-and-white as wrong. Do you have any arguments that actually acknowledge the existence of grey areas? Do you live in some fantasy world where ambiguous situations are nonexistent? Do you believe that you (personal, direct second-person pronoun) can tell, 100% of the time, when you are being lied to, as opposed to perhaps 99.5% of the time? Has anyone lied to you successfully ever?
July 23, 2010, 1:01 amAlessandra says:
Anatid:
Strong, confident, assertive women have very little to fear.
============
You’ve just contradicted Oren who says all young women should feel fear all the time, because they are too stupid to predict any risks in life.
anatid:
July 23, 2010, 1:12 amThey don’t need to sequester themselves from the world to keep themselves safe, as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of women who engage in regular, casual sex without getting raped or experiencing any emotional damage.
==============
Did you forget to mention how many other women get drunk and raped or just plain raped in hook-ups? Or are you suggesting date rape victims are weak? And did you decide not to mention how many women engage in loveless hook-ups who display a myriad of damaging emotional consequences for a particular reason? Are you forgetting how many men display harmful attitudes about relationships who frequently engage in hook-ups?
Anatid says:
Can you please quote where he said that? I did not see that anywhere. I read where Oren said young women should exercise caution where appropriate, which seems reasonable to me.
Grey. Not black and white.
As the commentators of VC have gone to great lengths to point out in prior threads on this topic, the rate of rape is low. A majority of people, male or female, who engage in hookups are not damaged by the experience.
Some people will have problems. Some people will have severe problems. Most people will have no problems. There are a thousand shades of grey. I don’t see very much black or white in this situation, sorry, so using extreme terminology really isn’t appropriate.
So you don’t like the idea of people having casual sex because they might get hurt. Might, not will – unless, to use your kind of language, you think all women are delicate flowers who can’t control their own emotions and make proper decisions. What do you propose? This thread is on criminal law. As I have mentioned before, we cannot prosecute people just because they hurt someone else’s feelings – there must be demonstrable rape before we’ll send someone to jail. Do you condone legislation that would criminalize casual sex?
(Also, outta curiosity, you’ve said liberals are idiots who can’t make good decisions. And you got offended by the notion that women are idiots who can’t make good decisions. Did you know that there are women liberals?)
July 23, 2010, 1:27 amAlessandra says:
The claim made by Oren was pretty black and white. Apparently you aren’t making the same claim, in fact, in your long post, that was my impression. July 22, 2010, 7:49 pm
However the case that originated this discussion is quite black and white about prevention. About as black and white as you can get, in fact. A man professes he wants a serious relationship and then he says let’s go up to have sex, right on their first meeting. It is exactly because you endorse irresponsible, loveless hook-ups that you don’t see the risk involved, nor the blatant contradiction in his discourse.
Men who don’t have warped objectives about relationships don’t propose having loveless sex with women and don’t act this way. Since women know that men can often lie about their true feelings in order to get sex, unless you are completely disturbed or irresponsible as a woman, you won’t take the risk of having sex before getting some evidence of the truthfulness of what the guy is professing or of knowing more about him. You mentioned way up thread that you cannot get much information in 3 or 4 dates. That is completely true. Thus you are reckless and irresponsible and engage in risky behavior by engaging in hook-ups. If you are a man, this doesn’t put you at a much greater risk of rape, but for a woman, that’s certainly not true.
Moreover, in either case, the attitudes the uphold the very idea of having loveless sex are disrespectful to both people involved. This is why there is a significant number of women who engage in such behavior while in denial that it’s fine with them (that’s what their culture and peers tell them they should think), but in reality they are really feeling exploited because what they wanted is a full, respectful, loving, long-term relationship. And they are certainly not getting it. On the man’s side, plenty of them have been quite conditioned to see women as something to be sexually exploited and certainly don’t care about the feelings of the women they have sex with. That seems to be the attitude with a growing number of women as well.
And while I certainly agree that people can deceive themselves or misjudge others, even while having the best of intentions and attitudes, this is simply not the problem here. The issue here is this endorsement of reckless hook-up behavior first and foremost, and using this endorsement to excuse how irresponsible this woman was.
July 23, 2010, 2:22 amAnatid says:
Look, there do exist women who are capable of one-night stands without getting hurt. They exist. They’re not just hurt people in denial. If you don’t think that they exist, not even a single one, anywhere on this planet of six billion people, then I don’t know what else I can say to you.
Of course there is risk. Of course there is need for caution. In this specific case, the woman’s behavior was quite irresponsible, considering her intentions. But you weren’t arguing black-and-white for just her case, although I’m glad we’re kinda back on-topic. You were arguing black-and-white for the whole world.
Life is all about taking risks. We risk our lives every time we step behind the wheel or a car, step out of our front door, get in the shower, or lie down to sleep. It’s up to each individual to decide where they, personally, want to draw the line of acceptable risk. Because of individual variation, some people can get away with taking more risks than others without getting hurt. Because of individual variation, some people are more badly hurt than others when a risk taken proves damaging. We can only try to come up with as best a set of social rules as we can to simultaneously provide safety and permit freedom.
Just like all liberals aren’t foaming dipshits (although some are), and all conservatives aren’t racist Baptists (although some are), and all women aren’t foolish and fragile (although some are, don’t get pissed off, some men are too) … not all people need love in order to have a healthy sexual interaction. That’s just the nature of human variation. We’re all over the map.
Takes all kinds.
July 23, 2010, 3:08 amYisrael Medad says:
a. to Ruuffless: an Arab can be a Christian or Muslim but today’s Arabs refuse to be Jews.
b. if you really want a look into the Israeli liberal/progressive mindset, weirder than Gideon Levy’s pure conjecture, try the thesis at Hebrew U claiming that Jewish men, that is soldiers, discriminated against Arab women by not raping them. Here.
July 23, 2010, 10:00 amYawn says:
This is the same stupid “logic” advanced by those idiot parents who let their teenage daughter sail around the world solo. If you’re not sailing alone in the Indian Ocean, the risk of drowning alone in the Indian Ocean is ZERO. If you don’t get drunk and involve yourself in hookups with strangers, your risk of being murdered or raped is not zero, but it is significantly less than if you do. It is certainly possible to die accidentally even if you don’t do anything to increase the risks to yourself, but it is preposterous to argue that this means you should not seek, as a matter of deliberate personal policy, to minimize the risks to yourself (which is what sane people call “acting responsibly”).
Life is not about taking stupid, unnecessary risks. We are required to drive, take showers, and sleep. We are not required to get drunk or hook up with strangers.
July 23, 2010, 11:18 amOrenWithAnE says:
With the intent that they move to Israel and become Jewish. It’s not just a right given out to random people without any reason.
Alessandra, your unique and unprecedented talent at detecting crime before it happens are utterly wasted on blog comments. You really ought to become a detective immediately and start solving crimes before they happen. For the good of the city! Go!
July 23, 2010, 1:26 pmChris Travers says:
At that point, couldn’t all sex be about domination and not pleasure? I mean, doesn’t that stretch the case beyond where the argument’s defensible?
July 23, 2010, 1:31 pmChris Travers says:
I think your fallacy here is to assert that people who don’t share your values are warped. Sometimes men and women who are not looking for a serious relationship are still looking for sexual release. I am going to ask: Is there anything wrong with that? Or do you think that everyone should be looking for a serious relationship all the time?
Who decides what risks are stupid? I reserve to make these decisions for myself and expect others to do the same. I’ve never been much into hookups, but I’ve known both men and women who were. That’s their path. It’s not mine.
Personally I think you have a point about letting a teenager sail around the world solo. It’s probably not a good idea to sail around the world solo unless you have put in a lot of training and are comfortable with the risks. One role of a parent is to try to assess risks and help a teenager balance them. That doesn’t mean no unnecessary risks, but it does mean some dialog about them.
By your logic, when my son’s a teenager, it would be irresponsible of me, if I’ve put in a lot of time training, to try to sail around the world with him. I just don’t buy that. That’s like the people who say I shouldn’t walk with him (he’s currently 6) in the hills because there are cougars, coyotes, and rattlesnakes up there.
July 23, 2010, 1:42 pmYawn says:
One can judge easily enough by outcomes.
And judging by outcomes, this is a stupid risk to take — not merely the prospect of murder or rape, but STDs, emotional damage, inability to have fulfilling relationships after a series of hookups, etc.
The fact that people are free to take stupid risks does not mean we should cringe from labeling them as such. I cannot stop you from putting a canvas bag over your head and running out into the interstate, if that’s “your path”, but I, at least, have the courage both to decide that this risk is stupid and to tell you that I think it is so.
Eh, don’t come crying to me when you drown or get abducted by pirates.
One often hears of experts in sports like kayaking, mountain climbing, scuba, and skiing who die. I would not stop these people from indulging in these activities if it were in my power to do so — and their risk of death is certainly less than that of an amateur — but still I think they are stupid.
You walking with him, and him walking by himself, are entirely different cases.
July 23, 2010, 2:47 pmHerb Spencer says:
For those chagrined by what to call this crime, it already has a name, and one that doth dare to speak its name: larceny by trick.
July 23, 2010, 4:57 pmChris Travers says:
Emotional damage, etc… Seems like it’s a stupid and unnecessary risk to let oneself fall in love too. Personally, I’d rather confine the dialog to objective risks. If you live in most of the US, risks of STD’s when proper protective measures are used, is quite low (note that the most common STD in the US is spread by unprotected sex). So where do you draw the line?
Certainly if I drown, your first on my list of haunting victims.
Sure, and one often hears of airplanes that crash. It doesn’t mean it’s not safe to get on an airplane. (Current worldwide statistics for US/EU/Canadian manufactured aircraft are one serious incident per 10M departures, half of which involve some fatality, of which most of those are accidents with ground crews.) I think you have to go by hard statistics, not anecdotes when judging by evidence.
So… Hard evidence/statistics time. Where do you draw the line as to danger when judging by results?
July 23, 2010, 5:04 pmChris Travers says:
My point here is that you can make a case that pretty much everything involves a stupid, unnecessary risk. Unless you establish hard criteria for defining this, then I don’t see any reason to take that point seriously.
July 23, 2010, 5:07 pmnonick says:
I think the main reason it is different is rape is a serious consequence where people can go to jail for 20-30 years. I don’t think it is proportional to send someone to jail for 20-30 years of their life for “sex by deception.” However, it should be an actionable tort..I see no problem with that.
July 23, 2010, 5:11 pmChris Travers says:
Vagueness problems. The issue here is that rape is a criminal issue. Thus it’s important to draw clear lines.
In the US, there are cases where rape by deception can be prosecuted, at least as to where deception as to the nature of what was consented to is made. For example, I would think if a doctor told a patient it was medically necessary for her to have sex with him and on that basis she consented, that might be. In other words rape-by-deception is limited to deception as to the nature of the act.
But people tell eachother lies in relationships all the time from “no, that dress doesn’t make you look fat” to various pick-up lines. It’s practically expected at some points. If you say lies that would have made a difference in her consent are always grounds for a rape charge, then you put everyone on notice everywhere (man and woman) that sex is always potentially criminal.
Furthermore, what if the lie was “I love you?” Do you expect that a court will REALLY inquire as to whether the defendant REALLY loved the “victim?”
I don’t even think it should be an actionable tort. That sort of thing will benefit nobody but lawyers.
However, this is actually similar to the commercial transaction bit. If I sell you, let’s say, a designer necklace for your wife for $10k and I lie about my occupation, my business, and where I bought it (but I did legally obtain it), but I tell you the truth about the nature of what exactly I am selling, I doubt that would be actionable. Why would sex be different?
July 23, 2010, 5:44 pmJohn Herbison says:
Interesting. Except that larceny, larceny by trick, and embezzlement involve taking another’s personal property from the owner’s possession, without the owner’s consent, with the intent to deprive the owner permanently of the property.
Of what property was the prosecutrix deprived? She remains free to put out for whomever she chooses to put out for.
July 23, 2010, 5:45 pmSeamus says:
Dan Savage, in his typically off-color way, suggests a caveat emptor approach to situations like this.
By the way, leaving aside what the court would have said if this had been a Jew pretending to be an Arab to get laid, let’s consider what we might think of a legal rule that makes someone criminally liable for “rape by deception” if a dude falsely claims to be white, and only after he’s gotten what he wanted does the woman find out that the dude is actually black (under the one-drop rule) and is merely passing for white, and she would never had hit the hay with him if she’d known that fact? Is everybody OK with that?
July 23, 2010, 6:53 pmyankee says:
As a feminist, I hang out on feminist blogs, and you’ve described the reaction of those types perfectly. Since I haven’t bought enough kool-aid to believe rape is “all” about violence and domination (universal claims about the motivations of human behavior are stupid) I have no problem with the concept of rape by fraud. “Rape” seems like too strong a term for most of these cases, but I have yet to see a really persuasive reason why obtaining money by fraud should subject you to liability but obtaining sex by fraud shouldn’t.
July 23, 2010, 8:03 pmChris Travers says:
I think you have to be careful about defining fraud here.
Suppose I sell you, I dunno, a rare first edition of an important book. I’ve obtained the book legally and the book itself is exactly as I describe it to you. However, suppose I know you won’t buy from a Norse Neopagan like myself so I pass myself off as, say, Jewish. I lie about where I bought the book to protect my sources. You pay me for the book and later find out I am not who you thought but the book is exactly as you thought. Is that fraud?
If not, why would sex be different?
July 23, 2010, 8:31 pmChris Travers says:
Yankee: In other words, how would you define whether a lie is material to the sexual consent or not?
All US legal codes I’ve looked into here (not very many but more than one) limit rape-by-deception to points about the essential nature of the act. I have no problem with rape-by-fraud where the essential nature of the act is the subject of deception, but what of this case? I don’t think there was any question as to the essential nature of the act and whether consent was given there.
July 23, 2010, 8:39 pmRelieved says:
As a 1L I always had to look up the difference between fraud in the factum and fraud in inducement.
July 23, 2010, 9:08 pmAnatid says:
Thank you for cutting out the following sentence from my quote, which is that we should let each individual adult decide for himself or herself what is an acceptable level of risk to carry.
I know a person who is so terrified of date-rape that she refuses to engage in any social interaction whatsoever with any man who has ever shown the slightest flirtatious behavior towards her. Sure, she’s playing it safe, but she’s missing out on a lot of opportunities for regular friendship. She’s decided that’s where she wants to draw the line. Other people will draw it elsewhere.
This isn’t how statistics work – although, probabilistically, we can make predictions for the percentage of outcomes within a population, the extent to which we can predict the outcomes for a single individual using population statistics is rather poor.
I have another friend whose outcomes have been golden. She isn’t looking for a serious relationship right now, just sexual release, and will go on a few dates with prospective men to see if they’ve got potential (ironically, they keep seeking serious relationships, to no end of frustration for her). The keepers, she takes home. She’s a confident young woman with a black belt in karate, she takes all the necessary precautions against STDs and pregnancy, she’s been doing this for years, and she hasn’t once had the glimmering of a physical, social, or emotional problem.
If the previous friend I mentioned tried this, she’d probably pick the wrong guy, get abused, and be traumatized by the experience.
But everyone is different.
Everyone has to choose for themselves.
Everyone gets to choose for themselves.
Why do we have to judge?
July 23, 2010, 9:25 pmJohn Herbison says:
Why do we have to judge?
Perhaps there are those who take pleasure or comfort in having someone to look down upon. (This group of kvetchers often includes religiously fundamentalist grouches.)
As then-Senator Lyndon Johnson explained in 1960 about why opposition to desegregation was of outsize importance to white southerners, “[G]ive [a white man] somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Losers who are none too thrilled about their lot in life may vent frustration by bashing liberals, or gays, or immigrants, or sex-positive females.
And, I suspect, for at least one of the commenters on this thread, flaunting an abrasive personality is a highly effective method of birth control.
July 23, 2010, 9:56 pmChris Travers says:
Esp. when cloaked in anonymity…..
July 24, 2010, 12:33 amAlessandra says:
I knew this was coming. Not as a detective, but I could do a lot more as head of “Family and Protective Services” or at a foundation that works to diminish sexual violence.
As for you, the day they came up with a government agency to endorse reckless behavior then sit and watch the result, you’d be great at the top. You’re doing great at it is in that (hopefully) small sphere of yours…
July 24, 2010, 3:32 amAlessandra says:
Nice false reversal accusation.
You’re the one that omits all cases of damaging hook-ups while talking about hook-up behavior and when I remind you of the issue, I’m the one who is saying that ALL hook-ups entail rape or emotional denial about the context of the hook-up.
July 24, 2010, 3:42 amAnatid says:
Please quote where I made the absolute overgeneralization that no hook-ups are ever damaging. I quite vividly recall where I said that some hook-ups are not damaging, and that they have the potential to be nondamaging, and even that most hook-ups are nondamaging. A claim that some hook-ups are not damaging does not in any way indicate the presence or absence of damage in the rest of hook-ups. I do not recall where I made an absolute claim on this topic.
Absolute claims generally aren’t my style.
July 24, 2010, 3:47 amAlessandra says:
And what greater declaration of an utterly irresponsible mindset than that above? Emotional damage destroys people, life, and society. I find the level of negligence concerning dealing with emotional damaging attitudes and behaviors in society surreal.
Just as you should take proper protective measures for the physical, so you must take it for the psychological and emotional sphere. And if society were minimally concerned with the latter, we wouldn’t see so much needless damage in the emotional sphere as it is.
You can be as reckless about relationships as you can be about your body’s health.
About your falling in love as a risk. Sure, any relationship is full of risks. However, people can navigate their “falling in love” process in a million different ways. Most sane adults, who aren’t just taking cheap shots at other commenters here, know that maturity and experience and decision-making along the relationship development can increase enormously or decrease enormously how much hurt one can get or how successful the relationship will be. There are people who send a million signs they are out to hurt others emotionally and yet, for many reasons that Anatid has mentioned in one of his posts, plus many others, those signs can be ignored or not even consciously processed. Should we sit back and watch and say it is all inevitable? Is it inevitable that society manufactures millions violent and exploitative individuals?
That’s where we disagree.
July 24, 2010, 4:01 amAnatid says:
But … when I reread your posts in this thread, I found over half a dozen blanket statements vilifying liberals. You called us “ridiculous” and “twisted” and “incapable.”
Dunno, that seems kinda cheap. What exactly were you expecting, when you crossed that line?
Of course not. Population statistics do not apply to individuals. That said, many individuals have so many probabilistic factors weighing against them, a negative outcome is nearly-inevitable.
But saying so won’t fix the problem. We need to help these folks become empowered so they can change their outcomes, not hedge them into deterministic boxes, no matter how deterministic the data may seem. In fact, having even one person in your life who believes in you and supports you (nonspecific impersonal “you”) is one of the most important factors in determining whether a disadvantaged individual can overcome their background.
Oh, absolutely. Every culture has them. Especially if you take the broader view of violence and call it abuse – for example, women and men actually commit roughly equal levels of abuse, if you measure emotional abuse as well as physical abuse. That women are more likely (THIS IS NOT AN ABSOLUTE CLAIM, ONLY PROBABILISTIC) to commit emotional abuse and that men are more likely to commit physical abuse doesn’t change the fact that horrible people can show up anywhere.
July 24, 2010, 4:13 amAlessandra says:
“Strong, confident, assertive women have very little to fear. They don’t need to sequester themselves from the world to keep themselves safe, as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of women who engage in regular, casual sex without getting raped or experiencing any emotional damage.”
Implied above. You talk about the women who do not get raped and what else? Nothing else. Not a single mention about the ones who do get raped. Not a single mention about the ones who have some negative emotional outcome from the hook-up behavior.
Secondly, consider this for the US college-age population:
• 33% of men said they would date-rape someone if it could go undetected.
• 57% of those raped happened while on dates
• The Florida Institute of Technology reports that one in four college men admit to the use of sexual aggression with women
• an alarmingly nine out of ten date rapes go unreported.
• 44% of women who were date-raped have considered suicide.
Such trivial damage…
Dangerous liaisons: Date rape soaring among teens
The prevalence of date rape and other sexual assaults prompted the American Academy of Pediatrics to issue updated guidelines for pediatricians.
Citing statistics showing adolescents have the nation’s highest rate of rape, the academy said doctors should ask patients at regular checkups if they’ve ever been sexually assaulted.
Counselors say most girls are too ashamed to report a date assault as a crime.
“What I see is a lot of young girls, 14-, 15-, 16-year-olds, who were raped but they don’t call for help because they were under the influence,” says Marino Carbonell, director of the adolescent drug-treatment program at South Miami Hospital.
=======
Nice culture you have going there, liberals.
July 24, 2010, 4:27 amAlessandra says:
What line did I cross? If someone is advocating reckless and violent behavior, I’m supposed to think that the particular attitude or the encompassing culture is healthy?
Ridiculous and twisted it is. And incapable of a minimally responsible attitude they are.
July 24, 2010, 4:32 amAnatid says:
Uh, I mentioned someone upthread, I don’t know if you noticed.
My argument has been that there is a spectrum of outcomes that casual sex can have, which includes healthy casual sex, in response to your argument that casual sex is damaging. Since you took one extreme position, which I did not wholly agree with, I took the opposite, albeit with moderation. That’s the way debates work. I in no way intended to imply that casual sex does not have potential consequences, nor that millions of people have not experienced these consequences, nor that these consequences don’t have catastrophic lifelong effects.
I’m aware of the statistics. Since you obviously haven’t seen any of my posts in other threads on VC regarding this topic, you also haven’t seen the number of times I’ve posted similar statistics, only to be shouted down by the predominantly-male VC commentary that such data are inaccurately gathered and far too generous. I believe those numbers. You’re preaching to the choir.
You also haven’t seen that my area of emphasis is the intergenerational transmission of stress disorders and abusive/exploitative behavior, including the factors that predispose one to become a predator or a victim, especially with a regard to sexual exploitation …
You don’t have to convince me of these things, and good lord, you don’t need to get self-righteous about it. My argument is simply one of human variation.
It is flat-out a fact that some people are able to engage in reckless behavior their entire lives without ever experiencing consequences. It is further a fact that “reckless” will mean different things for different people, simply because some individuals are at greater risk for exploitation than others. I am asking you to consider these facts when you (direct, personal “you”) form your opinions.
Was that really necessary? Did that contribute to the conversation? Do you feel better now?
July 24, 2010, 4:48 amAlessandra says:
Alessandra:
Nice culture you have going there, liberals.
Was that really necessary? Did that contribute to the conversation? Do you feel better now?
==================
Some of Anatid’s little previous gems:
I think I just made myself feel dirty writing those two words
and us indecent liberals
Alessandra. Calm down. I know you’re a smart person, and right now you’ve gone way too far. Take a deep breath, try to work past whatever personal experiences you’ve had that are clearly fueling this blind rage, and maybe we can talk more tomorrow after you’ve gotten some rest. I’d really like to continue this conversation, if you’re able to interact.
=================
Missing a mirror at home, Anatid?
It seems your comfort level in discussing some issues isn’t doing too well.
And what issue is it? The way liberals endorse and promote irresponsible, harmful, and violent attitudes and behaviors in society.
July 24, 2010, 10:25 amAlessandra says:
Chris Travers says:
John Herbison: And, I suspect, for at least one of the commenters on this thread, flaunting an abrasive personality is a highly effective method of birth control.
Esp. when cloaked in anonymity…..
July 24, 2010, 10:31 am================
It’s interesting to note that the complaints about anonymity only come up when the anonymous commenter is clearly exposing how much liberals endorse and promote seriously reckless and damaging attitudes and behaviors in society.
Alessandra says:
Given that there is a lot of exploitation, harm, and violence in such groups, concerning sexual or personal relations, what you call “bashing” is nothing other than speaking about these problems and holding people accountable.
Just about every time you make one of your endless cheap shots, that’s the subject at hand. Apparently, bringing these issues to light makes you very upset.
Touché.
July 24, 2010, 10:51 amAlessandra says:
People who think they should exploit or rape others don’t share my values and they are warped. There’s no fallacy in that.
You misconstrued your own counter-argument hook, by distorting what I said:
“Men who don’t have warped objectives about relationships don’t propose having loveless sex with women and don’t act this way”
If you have respect for someone, you will not try to deceive them in having sex with you, nor will you rape them. This is the case at hand.
About loveless sex, very briefly, here’s what I think. I believe the place of sex is in a committed relationship, as part of a much fuller and healthier exchange.
What happens when you sever the relationship and emotional sphere from sex? You necessarily create situations of physical intimacy with stunted emotional and relational dynamics. So, yes, there is a lot that is wrong right there. Secondly, you (directly or indirectly) tacitly endorse and promote disrespectful or exploitative or violent attitudes about sex and relationships in the name of sexual or individual freedom. Horribly wrong right there.
Should people be looking for a serious relationship all the time? What do you mean by that? I think that humans should get involved in serious relationships as a basis for life. That is the purpose of life: being a serious partner, a serious parent, serious at your profession. It doesn’t mean that you cannot spend some time on your own. It doesn’t mean you should be forced to start a serious relationship with others (which would negate the very idea of a respectful relationship in the first place).
“Sometimes men and women who are not looking for a serious relationship are still looking for sexual release”
For all the reasons explained above, I think this is problematic. Furthermore, when you look at the liberal discourse on loveless sex, it usually frames all loveless sex as inane and harmless or healthy, which it clearly isn’t. The discourse also promotes loveless sex as an appropriate and desired format for sex, despite all the profound harmful attitudes that are the cornerstone for loveless sex every time someone gets hurt. Another serious problem. On an emotional level, if you are not in a relationship with the sexual partner, you are basically having the same level of depth of feelings as you would with a plastic doll, only slightly more animated. Or having sex with a sheep, only the body form is a bit more similar to your own. They all provide sexual release. So the human other becomes nothing more than a slightly more animated plastic doll; a necessary objectification of the other which is required for loveless sex. And this in the cases where the relational and emotional attitude isn’t one of domination, exploitation or violence.
Starting a serious relationship, and certainly developing it, requires a lot of healthy and responsible attitudes.
None of these are required for loveless sex. There is a significant number of people in society who are clearly unable to develop a serious, respectful relationship, and society is much in denial about the problem itself, or what it should do to lessen the problem. Telling such people that loveless sex is fine, when they often interpret that to continue in denial about their own problems is irresponsible.
July 24, 2010, 10:54 amChris Travers says:
There’s a big difference between those two cases. Is it a warped relationship objective to have a one-night stand where one is open about it? Is that loveless sex with women? Certainly it’s not deceit.
But deceit in general is common early in relationships anyway and has always been. People are very careful about image control.
Unfortunately, nearly all of your “clear” harms are quite subjective. It’s a mistake to assume that because you would find yourself subjectively harmed that everyone else would too. There are STD issues, pregnancy issues, etc. all of which are objective harms, and most of which can be largely prevented by using a condom (not all STD’s of course, but the most common STDs can be prevented in this way).
But emotional harm…. That’s too subjective for my taste. It’s not fundamentally different to my mind than the politically correct concern about worrying about offending the wrong group. And in fact that’s entirely what’s wrong with rape-by-deception laws beyond the boundary of the nature of the act as a whole because they fundamentally suggest that would not have consented if had known is equivalent to did not consent. It criminalizes emotional harm rather than specific actions.
It’s funny….. I think you are one of two people on this board to call me a liberal.
July 24, 2010, 12:54 pmChris Travers says:
The problem here is that not all people are emotionally the same. I know it’s common for liberals and conservatives both to assume that a person is a person except for differences that don’t really matter anyway, but that’s not really true. People come in different innate temperaments, have different cultural systems to back that up, etc.
So what I’m asking for are not hypothetical harms (destroying people, life, society), but real statistics to show that those harms are manifested in this way. We can speculate all day and night about what’s harmful and not, but actual data would go a long ways towards furthering a real discussion. That’s why I don’t want to look at subjective harms.
Furthermore this sort of thing is not confined to our time. In medieval Ireland, for example (very much a Catholic place), marriage law recognized a marriage-and-divorce-package all wrapped up into one for one-night stands (the marriage-and-divorce was necessary for child support possibilities), although I suspect this may have been a pagan relic.
For some people I have known (both men and women), one way of navigating the space between serious relationships and being ready to fall in love is to engage in casual sex.
There’s no doubt about that. However, simple boxes don’t address that issue. The real solution, in my mind, is that of using religion for what it’s there for (to provide stories that are templates for how to live our lives), and that’s why I’m a Norse neopagan.
Sigh…. Statistics show that crime rates at least in the US have been generally dropping for some time. I suppose that’d be evidence that society is manufacturing fewer violent and exploitative people than it used to per million of us or so. But no, I suppose that’s not how you see it.
But there’s another factor. Emotional harm is a part of life. We all get hurt. We all have crap experiences. We all get through most or all of them to live the kinds of life we want to live. Part of growing up is going through emotionally painful experiences and figuring out how to navigate them by trial and error. Sexual experiences whether part of committed relationships or not, form key experiences we use in preparing ourselves for marriage and raising families. Sometimes getting hurt is a part of that process. I’ve been through more crap in my life than I’d hope others have to go through but it’s made me a stronger, more confident person. We all get hurt and learn a myriad of lessons from that process.
Far from destroying our societies, in moderation, emotional harm BUILDS life, society, and character. I was severely bullied as a kid, assaulted by a street gang when I was 17, the victim of pervasive and severe domestic violence when I was 22, etc. But against that background I learned what I could survive and that I could thrive anywhere. When I was sexually assaulted by a gay man at one point, I found it traumatic for a few days, but meditated, got over it, and realized it wasn’t even on the top 5 list of bad things that happened to me. Maybe if I hadn’t had those other bad experiences, that would have turned me into a freakin’ jerk. I dunno.
In my view on my religion, I realize that emotional, physical, and spiritual resistance is necessary for us to live life to the fullest. Modest harm provides opportunities for us to get stronger and overcome that harm. By treating all women as delicate little flowers which must be protected at all costs, I think you set up a framework for oppressing them.
July 24, 2010, 1:28 pmAlessandra says:
Chris, are you referring to the Israeli case or not? Do you think this Israeli case is a case of being “open about it?” And what “it” are you referring to?
“But deceit in general is common early in relationships anyway and has always been.People are very careful about image control.”
(deceit can happen at any point of a relationship btw)
But back to your statement. It depends on what you mean. There are different types of deceit (or image control), and there are different degrees.
Perhaps not the best analogy, but one that comes to mind, is about advertising. We do categorize differently legal advertising from fraudulent advertising. Yet both can be misleading or deceitful in different ways and in different degrees.
Furthermore, if there were no laws against fraudulent advertising, it would be a million times more common than it is. And, in that case, you could also claim that since it was very common, it was inevitable or just how things should function in society.
And that would be a sound mistake.
July 24, 2010, 2:31 pmAlessandra says:
There is nothing subjective about the fact that humans have a psychological and emotional structure within them, and without proper functioning it will destroy their lives, consequently society (if affecting a large number of individuals). Just as you can harm or destroy someone’s body, the same applies to their psychological and emotional structure, it’s on this basis that the whole science of psychological torture operates on.
You have to be in a enormous degree of denial to be blind to the above, and to only be able to see the physical structure of human being.
“but real statistics to show that those harms are manifested in this way. We can speculate all day and night about what’s harmful and not, but actual data would go a long ways towards furthering a real discussion. That’s why I don’t want to look at subjective harms.”
Like what actual data can’t you look up by yourself?
Chris:
“Sigh…. Statistics show that crime rates at least in the US have been generally dropping for some time. I suppose that’d be evidence that society is manufacturing fewer violent and exploitative people than it used to per million of us or so. But no, I suppose that’s not how you see it.”
• 33% of men said they would date-rape someone if it could go undetected.
• 57% of those raped happened while on dates
• The Florida Institute of Technology reports that one in four college men admit to the use of sexual aggression with women
• an alarmingly nine out of ten date rapes go unreported.
• 44% of women who were date-raped have considered suicide.
Date rape soaring among teens
etc etc
July 24, 2010, 2:46 pm===================
No, I don’t see a rosy picture above and I find it surreal that you do.
Alessandra says:
Far from destroying our societies, in moderation, emotional harm BUILDS life, society, and character. I was severely bullied as a kid, assaulted by a street gang when I was 17, the victim of pervasive and severe domestic violence when I was 22, etc. But against that background I learned what I could survive and that I could thrive anywhere. When I was sexually assaulted by a gay man at one point, I found it traumatic for a few days, but meditated, got over it, and realized it wasn’t even on the top 5 list of bad things that happened to me. Maybe if I hadn’t had those other bad experiences, that would have turned me into a freakin’ jerk. I dunno.
============
Wow, just wow. Eh voilà, simply surreal. Where to begin?
Don’t go torturing or raping kids to instill character in them, OK? It doesn’t work that way. Doing violence to innocent people is destructive, independently if they survive.
One defense mechanism that is somewhat common in violence survivors is trivialization of their experiences, and the harm it caused. They also rationalize the reason for the violence.
I do agree that evidently, since people come with all kinds of different psychological and emotional structures, violent experiences may affect people quite differently. It doesn’t make it a good thing, independently of the effect on the victim.
“Maybe if I hadn’t had those other bad experiences, that would have turned me into a freakin’ jerk.”
Have you dedicated yourself to working professionally or as a volunteer to reduce violence or destructive behaviors in society?
July 24, 2010, 3:04 pmPiltdown Mann says:
Check the Tennessee “fantasy man” rape by fraud case, State v. Mitchell, 1999 Tenn. App. LEXIS 772.
July 24, 2010, 4:02 pmChris Travers says:
No. I’m responding to your words, about how nobody who is not warped would seek out casual sex. I thought you were talking about personal morality. The Israeli case would never happen in the US because of due process guarantees and vagueness doctrine :-)
Of course not, but I won’t fight my son’s playground fights against bullies either. Instead I’ll treat them as learning experiences for him, ones which are potentially positive in the long run.
And as for statistics, those don’t show rising crime rates of any sort, let alone rape rates. If you look at FBI statistics, you will see that crimes in EVERY category have gone down over the last two decades in absolute numbers, despite an increase in the overall population.
I try to get my statistics from a variety of sources. Unfortunately the methodology of the NCVS has changed slightly on each run making the data somewhat noncomparable across years, so it’s important to try to work on this as best we can with actual, hard data. The disastercenter data seems to look at actual reports. Despite better reporting by most estimates, the rate of rape has gone down significantly over the last two decades.
That’s an interesting case. I think in this case, I think you’d have to look at the fact that the nature of the consent given was specifically to have sex with one individual in particular (whom that person was already in a sexual relationship with), when the actual sexual partner was someone else. That strikes me as being about the nature of the act in context with other relationships in the individual’s life.
But it’s different. In the Israeli case you are allowing people to be prosecuted because they lie about how much they make. Some people, like Joan MacGregor (author of “Is it Rape?”) might like to see us move in that direction but I think that’s very dangerous.
July 24, 2010, 8:03 pmAnatid says:
Alessandra, this blog post is about rape by fraud, not liberals and whatever opinions you seem to attribute to them.
Chris Travers, to try and quantify emotional damage for you, consider this factoid: approximately $200 billion is lost annually from America’s GDP due to stress and stress-induced disorders. If rape isn’t stressful, I can’t imagine what is – PTSD, which occurs in (depending whose measures you use) arguably more than 50% of rape victims, is one of the most severe and debilitating stress disorders.
The physiological wear-and-tear of severe, untreated PTSD does similar things to your cardiovascular function and your lifespan as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. And the quality of life is worse.
To speak of empathizing with those who are different from you, Chris, you sound like the type that we call “resilient.” You have the ability to pull through stressful and potentially-traumatizing circumstances and come out okay. Sadly, not everyone is resilient, and a significant portion of resilience is determined early in life and is, for most individuals, not mutable.
As I’ve mentioned upthread, though, the determination of rape can have very little to do with the extent of trauma the woman experienced. We don’t convict rapists differently depending on whether they raped a high-resilience or low-resilience woman. Why should other characteristics about the woman, such as religious preference, be considering more weighty than resilience?
July 24, 2010, 11:04 pmChris Travers says:
I thought we were talking about emotional harm coming from being dumped after a one-night stand, etc. Alessandra was never limiting emotional harm to rape when looking at casual hookups. She was talking about general harms including lack of willingness to commit after.
Anyway, statistics show forcible rape dropping in the US both in terms of rate AND absolute numbers. So the idea that we are creating lots of violent monsters out there isn’t supported.
July 25, 2010, 12:03 amRaworahi says:
Yes, and it is intended to do so.
Under the Israeli statute, any deception relating to the material or quality of the act is punishable as rape by deception.
July 25, 2010, 2:08 amAnatid says:
Ah, okay. I misunderstood.
July 25, 2010, 2:27 amAlessandra says:
There are a lot of liberal attitudes and behaviors that are central to this “rape by fraud” case. It’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a fact.
Just as I have been pointing out that many of these same attitudes and behaviors are necessary and present in a great number of date rape cases.
July 25, 2010, 2:53 amAlessandra says:
If he has a fair chance at defending himself, otherwise you will just be participating in his bullying, by standing there and watching and completely deluding yourself you’re doing something positive.
July 25, 2010, 2:57 amSammy Finkelman says:
Moslems are also circumcised, although at a later age. Christians are not, but this is not uncommonly done by doctors very soon after birth in many countries.
July 25, 2010, 3:01 pmReaderY says:
The ruling seems to be an example of imposing on human beings wishes about how they ought to behave without regard to how they wish to behave or in fact do behave or limitations on how, at least for the time being, they believe they can behave.
One can do this, and sometimes I’d agree one should. But doing so without the consent and authority of the governed is not merely illegitimate. It can be highly destructive to society.
Imagine if prohibition had been imposed by a judge who simply thought alcohol wrong. Logic is beside the point in these situations. People are not always logical.
July 27, 2010, 2:46 amPiltdown Mann says:
I gave a slightly incorrect cite to the Tennessee “fantasy man” case. It should be State v. Mitchell, 1999 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 772.
In any event, the fantasy man, Mitchell, was convicted not only of rape by fraud, but of attempted rape by fraud. What might attempted rape by fraud be? I tried to get her to have sex with me by lying but it didn’t work?
Lying about one’s marital status, when that makes a difference to the victim, seems very close to the old crime and tort of seduction, which has been abolished by statute in Tennessee.
July 27, 2010, 1:10 pmAlessandra says:
There is nothing subjective about the harms I’ve described. You’ve made a silly strawman distorting what I said, saying that everyone must experience or react the same way to loveless sex. You’re arguing with yourself there.
However, what is a mistake is for you to assume that all these different types of harm that I described don’t happen to countless people, simply because you like to be in denial about emotional harm.
“There are STD issues, pregnancy issues, etc. all of which are objective harms, and most of which can be largely prevented by using a condom (not all STD’s of course, but the most common STDs can be prevented in this way).”
And then there are the different types of emotional harm that you don’t like to face. Which can also very simply be prevented by people not engaging in loveless sex.
July 27, 2010, 1:34 pmAlessandra says:
The other comment I had about your attitude is how insensitive it is. First because the rates for rape haven’t differed much recently, secondly because your comments entail a rationale to always trivialize just how widespread the problem is. So if the US had been committing genocide of millions of people every year, but with a slight decrease, you would say, “What is the problem, actually? It was 6 million people in 2000, then a little less than 6 million in 2005, then…”
July 27, 2010, 1:40 pmAlessandra says:
Although the contexts can vary for loveless sex, the problem is that there are a million such contexts where the very fact that the two people do not love each other, do not care for each other, and do not trust each other entails an exploitative type of dynamics, either by one or by both people.
What is the underlying attitude for a lot of people? I don’t care to talk to you for more than half an hour, I don’t know you and I don’t care to know you, I certainly don’t love you in the least, I don’t care about you as a person, I don’t care about your feelings, I don’t respect you, but I want to have sex right now. It’s not surprising that so many Americans get drunk before having sex (and specially loveless sex). They are so freaking messed up in their emotional and relational attitudes, nothing like alcohol to numb out the reality of it all. Then there are all the cases where someone wants to have loveless sex exactly because they have a really demeaning or exploitative or perverted attitude to sex.
So while the above does not describe every single loveless sex encounter, it certainly does describe a good number of them.
I also think there has been an enormous push from liberals to establish loveless sex as “the” way to behave in personal encounters or as “the” way to start dating, and this is destructive, specially because we see so many problems regarding the relational aspect of relationships.
There has been an enormous amount of normalizing of loveless sex, despite all the problems involved in it. The latter are always ignored.
July 27, 2010, 2:12 pmJohn Herbison says:
The “fantasy man” case is indeed bizarre. A friend and colleague of mine tried that case, and I appeared as counsel of record on Mr. Mitchell’s petition for certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court. (My colleague wrote the petition, but he is not a member of the Supreme Court bar.)
The Court of Criminal Appeals described an incident wherein a telephone caller, who pretended to be the victim’s boyfriend “Chris”, told the victim that he loved her and that he wanted her to do a special favor for him. He stated that he had a special fantasy from the movie, Nine and 1/2 Weeks, and that he wanted her to act out a scene from the movie with him. The fantasy involved the victim traveling to a nearby hotel where she was to check into a room and wait for his arrival. The caller told her to take a blindfold and to place it over her eyes while waiting for him in the room. He told her that when he arrived, they would act out his fantasy and have sexual intercourse at the hotel. According to the C.C.A. opinion:
I surmise that the above-described evidence is what supported the attempt conviction. The woman never admitted the man to her room, so no penetration occurred. I gather that the appellate court regarded the Defendant’s conduct as a “substantial step” toward completion of the intended act, that he entertained the requisite mental state, and that he in fact intended to complete the act.
July 27, 2010, 4:15 pmAnon says:
If she had been a Muslim and he a Jew, she would have done everything to prevent her family from ever finding out about it. Going to the police, and thus making it public, would be effectively informing her family who would probably then murder her. Thus the point is moot.
July 28, 2010, 3:51 pmMenachem Mendel says:
It turns out that the “Rape by fraud” claim was pretty much a fraud. According to recently released court documents, the victim never claimed to be the victim of fraud, she claimed that she was brutally raped. The prosecutors chose the “Rape by fraud” charge for the plea bargain because of problems with her testimony. All of the news reports until now were based upon the version of events that the accused was telling, since the court proceedings were until now sealed. See more here and here.
September 6, 2010, 4:30 pmAlessandra says:
The woman reportedly was raped repeatedly by her father from the age of 6 and forced into prostitution by him. At the time of the rape she was staying in a women’s shelter, according to the article. She was hospitalized after the rape in a government-run psychiatric hospital in a ward for women who were sexually abused.
The woman’s testimony had been classified since it took place in a trial behind closed doors, but was declassified after a request by the newspaper.
================
Just horrible, completely horrible. I hope that she will now get the care that she has so desperately needed before.
September 6, 2010, 5:13 pmAlessandra says:
Also, I agree with “sol:”
September 6, 2010, 5:20 pmthis case sounds like its riddled with inconsistencies.. The woman has had a severely traumatic life, is clearly battling with some form of mental illness and years of abuse from her father and god knows who else… this case doesn’t sound like a typical rape case,
============
We are left wondering who and what to believe. But one thing that I didn’t see mentioned is any investigation of B’s father. If Israeli justice isn’t completely corrupt or negligent, the first thing it would need to do now is to investigate the claim of years of sexual abuse from B’s father, and, if true, put him behind bars.
John Herbison says:
What is reported about this woman’s history is horrendous and despicable.
Did her father perhaps “have a heterosexual problem”?
September 6, 2010, 6:14 pmAlessandra says:
What is a “heterosexual problem?”
September 7, 2010, 2:30 amMaking Sense :: Israel - Still nothing but silence concerning the investigation of alleged Israeli man who abused daughter in horrible ways :: September :: 2010 says:
[...] VC threads on this case here and here. [...]
September 9, 2010, 7:28 am