In interviews with rapists, student pursues not-so-simple question: why?
npr.org
npr.org
They state that they believe that this ruins the woman's marital prospects forever, but that didn't stop them from doing it.
Even within their belief system, they are acting monstrously.
Interviewing them is a great idea, but the researchers should be open to the idea that the main problem is the boring, standard idea that violent criminals have little empathy for their victims, and little impulse control.
Our brains are machines that we don't fully understand, it could be useful to discover why rapists rape. If you had lived one of those guys on the bus' life, would you have participated? Or are people like this born broken, never to be fixed, and we may as well throw away the key? It's a bit like Star Trek: Nemesis.
In some future if we could give a convicted rapist a pill that we scientifically know would prevent him from ever having a rape impulse again, would we accept him back into society? What if it was preventative?
Your line of reasoning is totally normal for the human condition and has been used for thousands of years now. Here we are today without any lack of morally reprehensible problems. Don't you think it's time we changed our strategy and rose above this animalistic, purely instinctual nature? It's time we got out of this mess.
The poster's reaction is justified disgust toward someone who is clearly dangerous to his fellow humans.
Why should traditions that have served humanity well be cast aside because it is $CURRENTYEAR? The burden of proof is on those who would do otherwise, not the natural and obvious thing.
I am not looking for such a course for the rapist sake, but to protect any future victims.
[fn:1] Not including, obviously, cases where they were both drunk or where one party later regretted it.
The researchers should be open to the idea that the main problem is the boring, standard idea that violent criminals have little empathy for their victims, and little impulse control.
A programming analogy would be like this is a bug in their code, and our current method of dealing with it is to kill their process or filter their "standard out" to avoid/ignore the unpleasant buggy output. What if instead, we could come to comprehend a deeper architecture problem that we could then prevent or fix by refactoring?
For anyone doubting the 'morality' of this researc or presuming rapists are just vile apathetic scumbags and nothing more, go watch it or better yet read the real life story it's based on. This kind of research has saves hundreds of lives and prevented many men (mostly) from becoming serial killers. Let's hope this new research does the same for rapists.
They selected themselves. Remorseful ones, if any, may have chosen not to participate.
Conceivable, but then why were most of the murderers she interviewed remorseful? Why would remorseful murderers be willing to talk but not remorseful rapists?
In other words maybe "I murdered" is a different remorse (or lack of) than "I raped"?
> Conceivable, but then why were most of the murderers she interviewed remorseful?
Maybe it's easier to become convicted accidental murderer than convicted accidental rapist?
Most people who killed didn't really want to do that. Maybe that's not the case for rapist.
Wiki's got lots of information on the topic if you don't mind seeing how people can turn into animals.
Could you detect empathetic capabilities with fMRI? If deficient, would you mandate treatment? Besides therapy, is there a treatment?
Not by action perhaps, but by inaction certainly. Sadly, there exist women who deny this behaviour or engage in the victim blame. I say this as a woman, I've experienced women saying in private that another woman "deserved" it. It's not a simple issue but I believe it is related to cognitive dissonance and finding a way to justify the prejudice a person has experienced in her or his own life. The patriarchy affects us all.
A male friend-of-a-friend was raped by a woman, when he was in his late teens (he was older than the age of consent) more than 20 years ago. He went to the police station to complain. Walked in, said to the officer behind the desk that he wanted to make a complaint, he'd been raped by a woman.
The cop held his hand up for a high five, and said "Score!"
He reiterated that he wanted to lay a complaint, and the cop seemed surprised that he would want to. Eventually, after trying a few more times the complainant just left without having his complaint taken.
Rape doesn't just involve physical force, it can also be just pressuring the unwilling into sex, or coercing them into a sexual situation they're unwilling to be in - for example, outdoors, anal or period sex. You can see how easily a female could apply emotional pressure to get what she wants when the male is unwilling. Have you ever heard a woman accuse a male of being homosexual simply because he didn't want to do something she did?
I have.
Given that the WaPo article says that many of them had only a third or fourth grade education, this strikes me as possibly just making fun of people with disabilities.
What about this is "making fun"? Did you mean to say that, by mentioning the education level, they're stigmatizing people with disabilities? Because there are millions of people around the world with no cognitive impairment who don't finish elementary school...
> Pandey had a burning need to know what these rapists were thinking. She decided to ask the rapists themselves.
> Their utter lack of remorse came as a surprise to her.
> She saw a pattern of "cognitive distortion" — they had created their own version of the crime that allowed them to justify their actions.
Statements like that imply a certain level of cognitive capacity and agency, which maybe these inmates have, but if so that isn't demonstrated anywhere in the article. All I'm saying is that the implications of the research are very different depending on whether these folks are upper middle class, college educated with normal IQ, EQ, etc., versus if half of them have severe lead poisoning or TBIs or whatever.
From my perspective I have to assume alienation from society allows these men to commit the crimes they do and remain remorseless. If you've lived a tough or unforgiving life in a society that doesn't care if you live or die, you won't necessarily show the same courtesy to anyone else. Why respect the social norms of a society that shows you no respect?
I'm not excusing their behavior either. This alienation is also what I think drives US mass shootings, drug abuse, and other social crimes. That's just my opinion though, I've little other than intuition to back up my stance.
When the topic is rape, you always go into these comments expecting some kind of reflexive criticism or minimisation but this is honestly one of the most bizarre manifestations of that yet.
I'm not familiar with the demographics of prisoners in India, so I'm just going off my knowledge of how the criminal justice system works in the US.
Do you remember some other excuses he suggested in the past?