Sharing The Blame

I was considering the case of gang rape turned aggravated outrage of modesty. Here, a bunch of guys gang raped a girl at a drinking party, but the judge later amended the charge to outrage of modesty. Granted, I do not know the exact facts of the case, so I cannot possibly make a fair alternative judgment, but I do think there is an underlying principle to such cases: sharing the blame.

Now, it seems that the girl has engaged in risky behavior, having gone to a drinking party as the only girl amongst a bunch of guys. Indeed, when people are drunk, they are capable of doing incredibly stupid things, so they are to some extent absolved of being expected to exercise their better judgment. Thus, she is certainly doing something foolish by putting herself at risk.

Yet, there is the niggling doubt here, that justice was not served. The principle is simple, in that a crime is a crime regardless of one's state of mind at the time, and regardless of the risk the victim exposed themselves to. If a man covered in jewelery was silly enough to walk into a lonely dark alley alone, I could reasonably expect that he'd be a target of an opportunistic robber. However, should the robber be caught, I seriously doubt that the robber would be charged with a lesser crime: the robber clearly robbed the man, and would be punished as such. The fact that the man was stupid enough to expose himself to crime is irrelevant in this case. In fact, the man's stupidity was already punished by his being turned into a victim of a crime of opportunity.

Back to the raped girl, my take is that if all involved were drunk and the guys were still sober enough to drag her out to be gang raped for a couple hours, they are certainly sober enough to have a niggling notion of right and wrong. While their state of intoxication can shed doubt on whether consent was given at the time, the fact that they did force themselves on a girl seems to be sufficient grounds to consider the crime a gang rape.

Of course, this assumes that a crime did take place. There is the flip side whereby it could have been that the girl did indeed consent to sex with all of them while she was drunk (or sober) instead of with one of them as claimed. In short, she could have cried rape. Conversely, the guys could simply gang up and claim that she was consenting at the time. It becomes a somewhat tricky call, because all were presumably drunk at the time, while their truthfulness and integrity of memory may be in doubt due to intoxication. Circumstantial evidence may serve to be the objective witness here, though the trustworthiness of the evidence is only as good as its interpretation.

Ultimately, however, I disagree that women should by default avoid such "risky behavior" to evade potential harm. Responsibility for one's actions should fall equally upon everyone. If the girl in question was at risk of being raped, it is the responsibility of those guys nearby to prevent their peers from doing so. To assume otherwise, that the woman is responsible for avoiding harm, is a slippery slope. How far should one go to truly avoid harm? She might as well hide at home wearing a full suit of armor and a chastity belt. Surely such a solution is unsuitable. As I've said before: if men were truly unable to control themselves, they should not be permitted to go out unescorted by a sensible woman. To do otherwise would be irresponsible.

I discussed the case with a friend, and after much discussion of avoiding harm when drinking, we found that there was no real way to avoid harm when drinking and have fun at the same time. If the girl drank alone with guys at someone's house, the girl is understandably at risk. If the girl drank with female friends at a pub, it is still not inconceivable that the lot of them would get stone drunk and carted off somewhere by a gang to be taken advantage of. If they drank with a mix of both genders, it is still possible that the guy friends proceeded to take advantage. The possibility, then, was to not get stone drunk in the first place. Yet, such an approach is still not suitable, since it is a fine line between being drunk and being amnesiac-drunk: One may not know when one will cross the line, depending on health status, drug use, food consumption, etc. The metabolism varies. The final solution is to simply ban alcohol (and other similar substances) to avoid becoming intoxicated at all.

Ultimately, it must be accepted that some risk is always involved when one is going to get intoxicated for recreational purposes. The risk is not the problem. The problem is societal attitudes that someone is disproportionately responsible for their own safety. In a case where everyone is equally responsible, the victim already bore the responsibility from becoming a victim in the first place. What is left is for the perpetrator to pay their dues.