While they are certainly not the only contributors to this problem, sadly, the religious do tend to speak with the loudest voices when the chorus of "she had it coming" is cued up for another verse. The duplicity of it, though, is such that when they say it, they speak with the fervor of the gospels, and yet, when I or anyone else points out that they are speaking in complete agreement with at least the christian bible, they deny it.
This is what is summed up in the rape passages described on www.resplect.com -- that we don't understand what "rape" means, it was a different time, those women were ASKING for it.
I suppose one of the things that I consider most offensive about these passages (we're talking specifically about Deuteronomy 22:22-28) is the criterion that they have used to determine which people deserve to die after the crime of rape has been committed, how to determine if it is a rape or not, and, if not death, what punishment should be wrought against victim and aggressor alike.
The passages in Deuteronomy discuss the laws surrounding rape, and those laws are as follows:
1. If a woman who is pledged to be married or is married is raped in town, and she is discovered being raped, then both she and her rapist must be taken outside of town and stoned to death. The woman, because she was in town and people were around and she didn't scream for help, and the man, because he violated another man's property (wife or fiancee.)
2. If a woman who is pledged to be married or who is married is raped outside of town, only the man is to be murdered. This is because she could have screamed as loud as you please, and nobody was around to rescue her.
3. If a woman who is not afianced or married is raped, nobody has to die. The rapist has to pay the victim's father 50 shekels of silver (roughly $264.10 USD) and then he and his victim are forced to marry. They can never be divorced as long as the rapist lives.
There are a few things that the apologist (who really should apologise for his incredible lack of sensitivity surrounding the issue of rape, but that is another matter) over at Resplect has to say about this. One thing, in particular, jumps out.
Now, a casual reading may make this passage seem overly harsh, as though the woman is being stoned merely because she did not make enough noise. In reality, this is given for the purpose of a distinguishing criteria between a rape case and an adultery. The lack of a cry for help is simply a fairly objective indicator of consent.
Honestly, in my opinion, the best way to tell if a woman has been raped or not is to ask her. Studies have shown that in the US there are fewer instances of false rape reports than there are of false auto theft reports. According to a 1997 study done by the FBI, a mere 8% of all rapes reported in the US are "unfounded". That doesn't mean that they are all false, but the reports determined to be false would certainly fall into that category. The NSW Australia Attorney-General's Department Crime Prevention Division date-rape websites estimates the number of false reports somewhere between 2% and 7%. Because it's such a small number, we can reasonably say that a good way to determine if a woman (or man!) is raped is to ask.
Conversely, a terrible way to determine such a thing is to require screaming, crying out for help, or fighting back for it to be considered a "real" rape. Just browsing the internet got me some very poignant examples of why anybody can see this would be a bad method, let alone the divine and infinitely wise, just and caring creator of the universe.
(Warning: some of the stories that I'm going to link to and reference are graphic in nature. Please avoid them if victims accounts of rape, news reports of rape or statistics surrounding rape are triggering for you.)
Why Didn't I Scream?:
Of course I won't scream, I didn't scream then, I won't scream now, certainly not out of fear or the thought of my own pain. I knew that if I were bad, if I revealed my terror, he would kill me.
Here is what shames me to the core: I thought he was going to kill me, but I did not fight him. Why did I not overpower the puny little man, smack that gun out of his paltry, worm-white fingers? I was strong then, probably stronger than he, certainly very strong now. But I was hypnotized into passivity. I had no strength to run, and anyway I did not like the idea of being shot from behind. It seemed easier just to wait until the murder was done with.
I Didn't Have Time To Scream:
Four people raped me.
I didn't have the chance to scream. They covered my mouth.
She Didn't Say Anything At All:
It couldn’t be rape, because it didn’t last very long.
It couldn’t be rape, because no one noticed any visible trauma.
It couldn’t be rape, because she didn’t scream.
It couldn’t be rape, because there were no witnesses.
It couldn’t be rape, because it’s only rape when a victim physically struggles.
I couldn’t possibly be a rapist, because my alleged victim didn’t act how I expect rape victims to act.
It couldn’t be rape, because a rape victim must say “no,” or otherwise consent is present.
And she didn’t say anything at all.
She Didn't Scream or Fight Back, So It Wasn't Rape:
Women may be paralysed with fear - rape is rape, regardless of whether there's a struggle.
Many victims are scared of losing their lives and being hurt even when no weapon or obvious physical force is used.
And oh, so many more. Heartbreaking stories of the savagery with which these victims lost their dignity, their privacy, their self-respect, their sense of safety and fairness in the world. Not every victim screams, but every victim suffers, and it is a cold, uncaring individual who uses that parameter as a "fairly objective indicator of consent". It is not. It is a fairly objective indicator of how numb with pain, paralysed with fear, struck mute with terror or frightened for their lives that victims of rape can be. You would think that the being who created intimately each and every woman in the world would care a little more about them than to use a ridiculous rule like that to weed out the fornicators from the raped.
Our rape apologist at Resplect is willing to compromise, however. He says:
If it could be shown that the woman, despite being desperate to avoid the encounter, would not have been helped in her struggle, then this case would fall under the next scenario in verse 25-26.
Oh, well, doesn't that make it all better? In the world of Bronze-Age desert sheep-herders, for whom women were no more than baby-making factories and rather attractive, breathing possessions, "if it could be shown" indeed. Women were, though this might shock you, not considered equal in this community. If a man says he did not rape her, and the woman says he did, guess who wins? The man. Of course. He has a helpful penis to make him right all the time.
Not only that, but, as was helpfully pointed out to me by a friend, how does Mr. Resplect even KNOW this? My friend said, to quote her directly,
"I assert he just made this up--pulled is right out of his apologist ass. Where in the Bible does it assert that if she can demonstrate it was rape, but did not scream, we go to the next regulation? I don't see the flow chart arrow indicating that--so how does this guy know this?"Let's just say, however, just for the sake of argument, that indeed a woman could have come up with the kind of penis -- I mean, evidence, that would have convinced a group of elder, authoritarian, puritanical and chauvanistic men that she indeed tried her hardest not to get raped, but just wasn't able to do it to the extent that she was rescued.
That is STILL morally repugnant. You can shine and shine and shine and polish and polish and polish and twist and turn all you like, but you still end up with a woman in the position where she must fight back, cry out, do SOMETHING to attempt to stop the scenario for it to "count" as rape. Well, guess what? Rape is determined by CONSENT, not by ANY OTHER FACTOR. She could have been doing a naked can-can, and if she did not give consent, it was rape. Whether she laid silently and submissively and cried and waited for it to be over so that she could crawl into her bed and wish she was dead, or whether she fought with the strength of 10 people and screamed like a banshee changes absolutely nothing, and is not, in fact, something that she should be required to die for.
If this is the perfect and divine law of the being who created morality, why don't we have such a law now, which determines what is rape and what is fornication based on how much you fight back? I submit that we do not have such a law because it is stupid, savage and cruel -- exactly what one would expect from ancient Palestinian desert nomads, but far from what we would get from the loving spiritual father of us all. How is it possible for we lowly humans to be more sympathetic and reasonable than God Himself?
It does actually get worse. Really. It must take some kind of subhuman mind to be able to come up with a "good" reason to force a rape victim to marry her rapist. It obviously can't just be a horrible and disgusting law designed by men who didn't respect or value women as people, because it MUST be the good and just holy laws of an omnibenevolent god for the concept that the entire bible was written (or inspired) by that god and is inerrently true. Ockam's Razor is completely lost on fundamentalist apologists, because in order for their whole world-view to work, they must jam the existing writings into a new-age world. But that's not easy.
And so this prize-winning example of apologist flim-flam goes thus:
Many will stumble at verse 28-29, this seems absolutely horrifying in our society, that a rape victim be forced to marry their assailant. What needs to be firmly grasped is that there is a distinct lack of welfare system in the society of the time. This is actually not a case of the victim being forced to marry the assailant, but the assailant being forced to marry the victim. Virginity being a much bigger deal in that culture, the woman will have been made essentially unmarriageable by the attack. This means that she is in a situation of tremendous adversity, to be without the material support of a husband her whole life. The assailant is forced to marry her (and told that he may never divorce her), to ensure that she is looked after, and not condemned to poverty because of his crime. Again, this is not condoning rape, rather, the penalties for such actions are quite severe.With fury raging inside of me, I will attempt to answer this as clearly as possible.
THIS IS NOT A SEVERE PUNISHMENT FOR A RAPIST.
A "severe" punishment for a rapist might be, oh, having his penis ripped off. Or being torn to pieces by wild boars. Or being thrown, fully conscious, into a vat of acid. Or, without anaesthesia, having each of his organs removed painfully in such a way that he lives as long as possible.
Those are "severe" punishments. Overly severe, actually. Cruel and unusual punishments.
Being forced to marry a woman that you have sexually violated, so that you can do so again and again and again and nobody can say anything about it because she is your wife and therefore your property to do with as you wish, is not even a punishment at all. At that time and place, marital rape was not even considered a possibility. You couldn't "rape" your own wife, it was impossible -- any sex that you had was ordained by God, whether or not she consented to it.
Why am I even saying "at that time and place"? Hell, TODAY in some parts of the world, debate rages on as to whether or not a man can rape his wife. In fact, according to www.survive.co.uk, a British not-for-profit rape survivors resource, up until 1991, there was no such legal thing as marital rape. You honestly think that the primitive peoples that existed during the time of the Old Testament believed in such a thing? The UK Islamic Council only recently made the statement that you can't rape your wife. Austin Cline wrote about it in his atheism blog on About.com:
Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed is the president of the Islamic Sharia Council, Britain's most important Islamic law court. Sayeed has declared that men can't rape their wives -- not that they shouldn't rape their wives, but rather that it's simply not possible for a man to rape his wife. You see, Sayeed believes that once a woman marries, she turns over control of her body to her husband and gives up any right to say "no" to sex. Ever.This exact premise was more than likely believed to the letter by the men who wrote the bible. There was no punishment in the forced marriage -- it was merely a bandaid solution to the problem of what to do with the sullied woman once she had been used and wasn't good to anybody anymore. Her father has the right to be paid for her, since nobody else would ever marry her now that her precious hymen had been broken. It was akin to damaging property -- you break it, you buy it, and it's no good trying to return it later; we all saw you break it.
Mr. Resplect makes the comment that "virginity was much more important in those days". Why isn't virginity still as important to his god that a woman who has "known" a man is virtually unmarriageable trash? Because in our secular society, women are not objects, they are humans, equally as deserving of human experience and love as men are. Because sex, in and of itself, does not make a woman less of herself, less worthy, less intelligent, less happy, less of a potential good wife or partner.
Again, I will make an amateurishly philosophical suggestion: instead of that horrifying "welfare system" to "protect victims" that god devised, why didn't he do this:
And the LORD spoke, saying, "Verily, I say unto you, my beloved people: if one among you should lie with a virgin forcibly, and take her virginity without her consent, then that man is to be exiled. You must cast out the evil among you. The maiden will be treated no differently than any other young virgin among you, for she has my blessing, and her virginity will be returned symbolically by my love, for she did not agree. Any man or woman who shuns this maid is to be punished, for she is a virgin in My Eyes."How fucking hard was that? God says she's still a virgin because she didn't agree to have sex. If she's good enough for God, she's good enough for you. She can still get married, even in a fucked up society which prides virginity over a woman's actual right to choose whether or not to have sex, and nobody has to marry the person who put them through one of the more terrifying and horrible experiences a woman can suffer.
Trying to masquerade these laws as divinely inspired and truly moral is nothing more than misogynistic, ignorant and disgusting. If there was a god, and he designed this system, then, as I feel I have demonstrated, there is not a possible way that he could be considered moral to the millions of women who have been raped, to the millions of men who empathise and suffer with them, hell, to any sane, caring and loving human being. There are many words to describe a god like that, and let me tell you, "Supremely Moral" is not a phrase that comes to mind.
Repugnant, immoral, shameful, disgusting and imaginary...those ones work just fine.
Stay tuned for next time, when we tackle Part IV: Investigating "Numbers 31:15-18 -- Does this passage condone rape?"
