A mathematically generalized definition of rape

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The definition of, "rape," is different in every jurisdiction in which it is a crime. In point of fact, the definition became so narrow at common law that it became necessary for many governments to create a new crime, sexual assault, to cover the various lacunae that had emerged over time. However, a common denominator in all common law definitions of rape has been the requirement of a sexual purpose in the act.

Second hand smoke is not now, and never has been, by even the loosest standards of interpretation, rape. The correct offence at common law is assault (in the case of a threat to personal integrity) or battery (in the case of unwanted touching).

As for the analogy to momentum, that particular exercise is so clunky as to beggar belief.

It seems to me that some people in this thread believe that rapists and pedophiles
are somehow morally inferior to many, if not all, other aforementioned "bad actors".

If this is true...i'd like to understand the rationale unwriting this belief.


For example...isn't the expectant mother who drinks heavily demonstrating an utter disregard for the health, life and overall well-being of another?

Namely her own child in this case?



A disregard which is no less callous and sociopathic than the disregard of the rapist or pedophile?

Is there some objective measure of damage done to the victim of rape/child which we can compare to an objective measure of damage done to the individual with fetal alcohol syndrome? Unless we are talking about a rape in which the victim suffered significant physical injury or death...the damage done by rape is primarily emotional/mental. The
damage caused by fetal alcohol syndrome is neurological (possibly emotional) and
physical.


Who can ultimately determine if the former damage is more/less hurtful than the latter?

I'd say only the individual victim of rape or victim of a mother who drank heavily during pregnancy can determine that.


I can say this with at least some degree of confidence:

Considering my own neurological problems, I don't think i'd be any more forgiving of my mother if her drinking was responsible for them than I would be of someone who raped me.


Therefore.....I conclude that both rape and things like drinking heavily while one is pregnant has at least the POTENTIAL to cause a roughly equivalent amount of harm to an
individual.

There can be no doubt that we're talking about a different KIND of harm here. But either way, those responsible for either rape or fetal alcohol syndrome (and many other things, including countless things not mentioned in this thread) demonstrate a total lack of regard for the well-being of their victims.



And yet consider the punitive action taken against biological mothers responsible for their child's FAS and that taken against rapists and pedophiles.

I would agree that making any moral comparisons rapists and those who smoke in public is a bit of stretch to say the least.


But this is not the case insofar as other things (like a mother drinking heavily while she is pregnant) mentioned in this thread are concerned.

Giving your child FAS is child abuse, for sure. However, not all child abuse is rape.

I understand that. All i'm saying is that I personally don't see a MORAL distinction between rapists/pedophiles and mothers who give their children FAS.

And what I'm saying is that I have not made a moral distinction. So far, I have not seen anyone do that.

I know YOU haven't. It does SEEM like certain other posters do make said moral distinction though.


I could be very wrong however.



Which is precisely why I wrote the following in a previous post:



"It seems to me that some people in this thread believe that rapists and pedophiles are somehow morally inferior to many, if not all, other aforementioned "bad actors".


"If this is true...i'd like to understand the rationale unwriting this belief".

I seriously doubt that's every happened.

Smoke is annoying. Smoky rooms are annoying. Smoke blowing in my face is annoying. People oblivious to smoke in my face is annoying.

But I've never, ever, ever experience, not witness, someone actually trying to force smoke into someone else's body. In fact, it's, in one sense, precisely the opposite. It's not that they want me to experience their smoke. Rather, they really don't give a s**t whether or not I do.

Just because an action has a certain consequence doesn't mean the person wants that consequence. I'm sure you've done plenty of things that had consequences beyond those that are why you did it. People smoke for their own pleasure. Not so that other people can experience 2nd hand smoke.

The original poster clearly has no concept of rape or the consequences of rape, or how hurtful it is to see the experience of rape trivialized in some pathetic argument.

Yes, that is very obvious. I think someone should report this whole discussion to a moderator.

Nothing here has trivialized rapr in its sexual form. The problem as I see it is that society has trivialized many other horrible crimes that also violate the boundaries of peoples bodies. Think of the rattlesnake that kills a sheep and we are not disputing that the sheep dies a violent death. That I use as my analogy to sexual rape. Now consider the mosquito with malaria. Let us suppose that the bite of one or two mosquitoes is not enough to overpower the immune system like the rare cloud of cigarette smoke will not be likely to to pernanent damage to someone who has to breath it. But mosquitoes come in swarms and over time they keep biting every day and every night for months until the sheep is infected and dies. It is not as dramatic and fear indicing a danger or violence as the rattlesnake, The mosquitoes are easily dismissed as a mere annoyance and thus trivialized. But they are just as dangerous if not more so.

The tobacco industry and its smokers have a history of dismissing the occasional smoker as a trivial nuisance so let that smoker get away with lighting up in a car full of children or while making arguments and excuses as "The government is taking away my freedoms telling me that I can't smoke in a car with my children" or outright lieing about the sciance that warns how dangerous it is. With each little violation a precident is set to secure that inch by which smokers will take a mile. "You let us smoke in the doorway and didn't say anything when I held the cigarette inside the no smoking building so it is unfair that the other smoker gets arrested for walking into the building with her cigarette." It grows and before anyone realizes what has hapened, over half a million non smokers are dieing each year because of chronic exposure to the smoke. To me, 600,000 death a year is not trivial and I consider this form of murder or manslaughter depending on how the law should define it as a form of rape.

This does not give sexual rapists a break. My hero is the lady in South Africa who invented an anti rape appliance that women can wear that leaves broken off steel fish hook barbs in the rapist's organ. I cheer her customers who offend those who think this invention is too harsh by saying, "If I am murdered for doing this to an HIV positive rapist I prefer the more dignified death of a martyr to submission." I take her attitude and extend it to other savage though more subtle violations of bodilt integrity. That is the only way I know how to be on the side of the right not to be raped.

I would also like to see the concept of bad touch as is taught to children to be extended to include cigarette smoke and I would like children to have in their education that the fat and destructive foods of the likes of McDonald's and Hardee's and soft drinks as a very subtle but very real form of bad touch not as a substitute to what we teach but as a supplement to what we teach them. They should regard the playgrounds and toys these fast food giants have to offer the same way they should the man who offers toys to merely fondle children. We have to fight back against all of it and not just some of it. To me the right to keep corporate America's fat out of childrens' bodies is just as sacred as the right of children to take for granted the privacy of having "non violent" sex activities which include pop culture telling teenagers to do sexual things with others while they are still in grade school prohibited.

Does anybody understand?

No, they don't, because your argument is based on the flawed premise that "minor harm over a long time" is equivalent to "major harm over a short time." That is untrue in the context where you are trying to use it.

Let me try to cast it back into mathematics for you: you are supposing that (Harm)*(Duration)=(Damage); this isn't even true for physical damage to the body - which is quite good at dealing with minor injuries over duration, but not so good at dealing with sudden catastrophic damage - but for mental injury you can raise that (Harm) to some large power. In short, we can deal with trivial s**t forever, dealing with major s**t ain't so simple.

I am not convinced that this is always true even though it may be true some of the time. I am concerned that some minor harms will escalate as those who inflict it become more bold as they get away with it. But chronic smoke exposure does accumulate and the main stream medical science community agrees that it slowly kills people. That is why we must have a strict right to limit what society is allowed to do to our bodies. Some women in South Africa prefer to be murdered and get it over with for mutilating the sex organs of their HIV positive rapists and others prefer to survive and live a little longer and die of AIDS slowly and with what they think will be a less dramatic death later. I can not make that decision for others, all I want to to refuse special privileges for one type of violater over another.

I understand perfectly.

I have been exposed to cigarette smoke. I do not have recurrent nightmares for years afterwards that the smoker is masturbating over the memory of watching me breathe his smoke, or around every corner waiting to inflict his smoke on me again.

It is you who does not understand.

Obesity does actually impact a child's ability to learn, though. And proper nutrition is important for cognitive development. (I just took Developmental Psychology in school). Not that it's really related to the topic.

And, to the OP: As a Rape Victim who is still dealing with the resulting PTSD and the exacerbation of my AS symptoms, even 15 years later--Shame. For shame. I get the analogy of person x trying to force "y" on person z. But seriously...I suggest you spend some time with actual trauma survivors before making such a callous argument.

(flame me if you want...)

The question here is not which is worse than which. That depends upon the individual and circumstances. There was a young woman on a television show who had gone from 250 pounds down to 140 pounds and for the first time in her life her body was strikingly beautiful. However she did it by taking recourse to some very dangerous drugs. She said that she would rather have only a year or two of life as a "thin" (actually an ideal weight) person than live another day as a fat person, that she was willing to die rather than let that ugly fat get into her body on public humiliating display for the world to see. To her, obesity was more horrifying than any drug addiction. Certainly for her family to feed her the likes of McDonald's and Coke was a very violent thing to do to her because she would rather be dead than obese. Obesity might have even been more traumatic for her than many kinds of sexual abuse, considering all the ugly things obesity meant to her.
I refuse to tolerate cigarette smoke or to work for anybody who wants me to sell tobacco because I think 600,000 non smoker deaths is a very serious matter even if the rest of society does not care and to me, a slow agonizing death bed because I was forced to live with smoke day oin and day out is as intolerable as sexual rape. I too would also rather be dead than tolerate society installing an extra hundred pounds of McDonald's and Budweiser fat in my body because I cannot live with what such a thing represents, but many people do not feel the same way I do about their weight.
The show ended happily with a follow up story about her abandoning all the drugs and incorporating into her life perminant choices of food and exercise routines that kept the bad fat away and toned her body into something that would help her to find a nice well housebroken (my term for a non smoker) suitor so that she could marry.
What I think is important here is that we have to be very strict in our intolerance for all forms of what I consider rape because if you allow one type of rape you allow the foot in the door to eventually allowing other types of rape and anything could become fair game. It is much like recreational abuse of drugs. Think of the famous cocktail party Nancy Regan hodted in the Whitehouse to celebrate the newest war on drugs. One guest asked if the cocktail party would be smoke free to which he was told that the First Family (Regan was a former model for Camel cigarette commercials) told him that they could not prohibit the guests from smoking. The contradiction made the war on drugs look so ridiculous that all the "Just say no" lost all credibility. Contrast that with someone like the Dalai Lama who neither smokes nor drinks and his authority that he earned by the example he sets makes his advice not to try cocaine is more powerful than some bunch of loser drunk cowboys like the DEA.
That is why I think we should raise our standards of respect for bodily integrity and physical privacy to something higher than only sexual privacy.